The NO-MAKEUP MAKEUP Revolution

GLOSSIER may have helped usher in our current "YOU BUT BETTER" era, but the origins of NATURAL-LOOKING MAKEUP go back decades. Here, a brief history of WHO STARTED it, WHO RAN with it, and how it TRANSFORMED the way we THINK ABOUT BEAUTY.

- RACHEL STRUGATZ

In the fall of 2014, on the top floor of a makeshift office space in an old brick building in Manhattan where SoHo melds into Chinatown, Emily Weiss gathered the 12 employees of her then nascent beauty brand, Glossier, in front of a wall of images of glowy, freshfaced, smiling models against a sky-blue backdrop.

She asked her team to put little dots on the images they liked best.

At the time, "Glossier" was just a mysterious Instagram account populated with behind-the-scenes images, cute little stickers, and a distinctive pastel shade that would become known as millennial pink. No one really had a clue what Weiss, already a fixture in the beauty world herself, thanks to the popular four-year-old beauty blog Into the Gloss, was up to, but it didn't matter; whatever Glossier was or wasn't, it piqued readers' interest.

"You don't see any makeup in those pictures," Weiss recalls of Glossier's inaugural campaign. "You see these amazing women who are themselves and very present." She's right; they all look effortlessly beautiful, seemingly makeup free, and "dewy"-the now omnipresent descriptor popularized by Glossier that refers to radiant, luminous, hydrated, and moist but not oily skin. Of course, the models were wearing makeup in this campaign, including Glossier's new pigmented skin tint designed to even out tone but still look like skin. You just wouldn't know it.