Paris Menswear SS27: Beauty Direction

Paris Menswear SS27 Beauty Direction

Skin reads as the primary statement this season, with grooming stripped back to expose texture, tone, and surface rather than conceal them. Beauty teams should treat this as a recalibration toward raw material, where the face itself is the finish.

Skin and Grooming

Base work sits at near-zero coverage across the majority of shows, allowing natural skin texture, pores, and uneven tone to read openly under runway light. The dominant finish splits between two poles: a dry, matte, almost powderless surface seen on the darker-skinned models at 424 (Photo 1), Hed Mayner (Photo 6), Issey Miyake (Photo 7), and Kiko Kostadinov (Photo 12), and a saturated, water-drenched gloss at Dries Van Dries van Noten, where gel and product residue visibly track down the face (Photos 8, 18). Kiko Kostadinov applies grey-toned paint or pigment directly to cheekbones and temples in a flat, almost chalky application, treating skin as a canvas for mark-making rather than a surface to perfect (Photos 12, 17). Facial hair vanishes entirely across all twenty images, reinforcing the clean-surfaced, graphic quality of the skin direction.