Blake Lively Going Makeup-Free vs. Made-Up Has Us Sold on This Gen Z Lip Hack

Ya live, ya learn. Blake Lively, for instance, has learned that having a professional makeup artist use eye shadow to shade around your lips makes them look plumper without you needing to apply hot peppers and cause minor swelling.

The Gossip Girl alum recently attended the 2024 CFDA Fashion Awards in an all-white Michael Kors ensemble, which, combined with her makeup, made her look sun-kissed and glowy. But it’s all smoke and mirrors. Or rather, shadow and gloss.

“When @cgonzalezbeauty does the Gen Z eye shadow lip trick to make your lips look huge…” she wrote on top of a selfie in front of a marble bathtub posted to Instagram Stories. “But then…” she added, continuing on the next slide, in which she appeared makeup free and wrote, “You wash off your makeup and accept that you are a millennial girl who, in high school used to wear lip gloss with alarming amounts of chili peppers inside for a plump because we were THAT committed to bad ideas.”

“Turns out eyeshadows are way less painful than Carolina Reapers,” Lively said, referencing the notoriously spicy pepper variety. She also thanked her makeup artist for not turning her face “into an episode of Hot Ones.”

On her own Instagram page, makeup artist Carolina Gonzalez revealed all of the products she used on Lively, and while the “trick” might have been developed with eye shadow (oh, those crafty Zoomers), it looks like her lips were lined with lipstick. Gonzalez used Armani’s “Lip Power Matte 207” to “softly contour,” per her post.