Charli XCX Gets Her Makeup Perfect by Sleeping in It
The singer sits down with Bazaar to talk about grungy eye makeup, skinny (and bushy) brows, and her new role as a YSL Beauty ambassador
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
There is a certain kind of woman who wakes up the morning after and looks, inexplicably, better. Charli XCX is that woman — and it turns out the secret is embarrassingly simple. She doesn't take her makeup off. "I always think it gives this really good grungy eye," she told Harper's Bazaar. "I've never been that good at taking off my makeup on purpose, because I like the look." Coming from the woman who made Brat the cultural document of 2024 and single-handedly revived party-girl beauty as a legitimate aesthetic, this is less a skincare confession and more a philosophy.
The dark eye has been her signature long before any album cycle demanded it. She traces it back to an Avril Lavigne obsession in her teens — a smudgy, heavy lid that she's since refined not through precision, but through neglect. "Letting makeup be lived in and be kind of imperfect is sort of how you get perfect makeup," she said. It's the kind of logic that sounds lazy until you try it and realize she's completely right.
Enter YSL Beauty
Charli has now officially partnered with YSL Beauty as a brand ambassador, which, for once, feels like a genuinely logical pairing. She'd already been using the products — she's particularly devoted to the matte LoveNude Lip Blusher, describing it as a "blurry" lip that doesn't require a sharp edge — and cites attending Saint Laurent's Paris runway shows as a direct reference point for her beauty thinking. "They really know how to do a bitchy eye and a fierce look," she said. Her creative icons read accordingly: Béatrice Dalle, Monica Bellucci, Nina Hagen for when she wants to go full extremist. Runway over red carpet, always.
For recovery after a long night, she keeps it minimal: a face mask straight from the fridge, ice on the skin, and as little intervention as possible. No ten-step reset, no elaborate wellness ritual. On the skinny brow resurgence, she's diplomatically unbothered — her thick brows have stayed the same forever, she has no plans to change them, but she's not gatekeeping the trend either. "Skinny brows are hot — but so are bushy ones." If she were to name a lipstick, she'd go with Perfect Poison or Blood Red, which honestly, YSL should just go ahead and greenlight immediately.
The throughline across all of it — the smudged liner, the blurry lip, the ice-cold mask, the refusal to be made into someone else — is that Charli XCX's entire beauty identity is built on controlled imperfection, and that's exactly what makes it so hard to replicate.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
