Well this is certainly exciting! Apparently, the new thing is to wear warm AND cool tones of makeup together, all at once. Are you down?

So here’s the thing. I’m a big fan—big, BIG fan!—of the tone-on-tone look for hair. Yep, I’m happiest when the base colour and the highlight colour(s) get to play happy families because they are from the same family, with only the slightest variation between them. It’s simply more on trend, and also more natural-looking. And you will notice that it tends to fool people, especially men, into thinking that you were born with your artificial hue of choice. See here, and here and here if you have not yet embraced this.

HOWEVER. You maybe should forget everything I just said when it comes to the subject of makeup.

That’s right! The NEW thing is, apparently, to mix your warms with your cools. Not literally—that would just create some vile brownish greenish grey—but as in wearing makeup in both tones at once, on different areas of your face, at the same time. YSL’s official makeup artist told me so this morning, so it must be true.

Let me explain.

So it used to be that you were a “warm” or a “cool,” and that was that. (Yes, we’ve talked about this lots before, most recently in this post about how there are no more colour rules… which fits in nicely with today’s theory.)

Anyway, the old way of thinking was that you had to stick with makeup in the same colour family as your skin tone. Broad generalization alert! This basically meant that warm types had to get cozy with browns and bronzes and peaches… and cool types were saddled with pastel pinks and blues and lavenders.

Now, I’m not saying that can’t work. I think we all know how ace someone like Jennifer Lopez is at the glowy, golden, tone-on-tone thing. Here she is earlier this week:

And then there are cool-toned chicks like Heather Graham, who last week looked ravishing in a cool (well, technically “hot”) pink lip and icy, shimmery shadow:

I love both of these looks, I really do. But if you want to be just slightly ahead of the game—and remember, you heard it here first—the cool kids are pairing warm WITH cool.

The best examples I can give you come from YSL’s campaign shots. At the top of this post is the spring collection visual, which I’ll repeat again here:

You can see how the cool pink on the eyes and the lips is paired with a very peachy blush. Because more pink would’ve been overkill, obvs.

And along the same lines, here’s a first look at the fall collection campaign (the prodz aren’t out until September), which is pretty much all about cool blues and greens and purples on the eyes, and purple-ish lips…but again, a peachy cheek.

It’s interesting, non? (I couldn’t find any YSL pics of a pinky cheek with cool eyes/lips, but theoretically you could do that as well.)

BUT WAIT! THERE IS MORE

The other tidbit I gleaned today (which you can use even if you’re not planning on stepping out of the house with YSL-style fuchsia or teal eyeshadow) is that you can use your EYE COLOUR to guide you on your CHEEK COLOUR.

Yes. I know there are tons of mascaras and eyeshadow kits out there designed to enhance your eye colour by pairing it with the opposite shade, but personally, I’ve never really dug their colour palettes or even felt like they made much of a difference. YSL suggests this instead.

If your eyes are more of a cool tone—blue, grey, deep brown, black—then it’s way more interesting to wear the opposite colour of blush, i.e. a warm peach or coral, and go for cooler tones everywhere else. Witness how doing this makes Alexis Bledel’s eyes stand out even more than usual:

But if you have warm eyes—green, golden brown, hazel—then you can shake things up by wearing a cool, pinky blush and going warm everywhere else. You know who is a master at doing this constrast thing? Eva Mendes:

So tell me:

Do you stick with your prescribed warm or cool colours all ovah?
What do you think of this new mixing ‘n matching micro-trend?
Have you tried these blushes yet? Because you really, really should. (I alternate between the pink and the peach, and I use ‘em every single day.)