Cloud Cover

Airy pastel eyes light a way beyond leaden makeup tutorials, and many of us are ready to brighten up

- Arden Fanning Andrews

On a balmy, Thursday night in June, Sophia Jaramillo, a recent Los Angeles transplant to New York City who has quickly found herself among a new wave of street style stars, celebrated her 23rd birthday with a “pastel prom”–themed celebration. Jaramillo decorated her fourth-floor Bushwick walk-up with curtains of holographic tinsel and served a heart-shaped cake bedecked with undulating squiggles of creamy frosting. On her nails she wore a rainbow set of press-ons in hues evocative of a bag of Jelly Bellies—piña colada for the ring finger, cotton candy for the pinkie—and across her eyes, a swipe of sky blue shadow. Jaramillo is into “the Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette aesthetic,” she tells me. “Everyone’s really liking more soft tones. That’s something that’s just kind of naturally happened.”

Of course, nothing is completely organic. Call it a reaction against the ultra-defined, super-prescribed tutorials that have dominated YouTube and TikTok for years, the intensive contouring that turned us into so many topographical maps. We’re all kind of tired, whether from watching horizons turn an apocalyptic shade of wildfire orange or from having a pile of products pushed on us in pursuit of high-def cheekbones. The emergence of blurry-edged, ethereal makeup offers a break from that particular mode of filtered hyperreality. Give us our Monet moment, the soft edges of Seurat.