Sitting alone in the VIP.

I’m so into meditation right now.

Oh Snap!

Fast becoming my favourite time of year is Glow Up’s Slightly Cringe Tech Week, ushered in by the incredibly ill-advised dip into the MetaVerse that brought this motley crew of self-asphyxiating balloon animals kicking and screaming into the universe

but now that Mark “We’ve got Legs!” Zuckerberg has well and truly salted the poorly rendered earthen texture of the MetaVerse and Glow Up hasn’t found a way to design makeup looks for ChatGPT (yet) we’re back to just having the MUAs creating makeup looks to be turned into AR filters. And because none of them are AR graphic designers, all of them wildly overestimated the capabilities of both the current technology and the SnapChat intern being paid in exposure and Tassimo French vanilla latte capsules who was only given a single afternoon to turn the three winning looks into their digital counterparts.

The inspiration for their filters had to be the MUAs’ Happy Places, which immediately gave Rahual free rein to talk about meditation again

I’ve just finished a year long course of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, I get it King. I have collected breathing exercises like I collected Pokemon cards in 2001. I have all of them but fucked if I know how to use them, but they’re neat!
Leaning into his zen-theme, the centrepiece of Rahual’s look was a lotus flower

the AR element being that he wanted it to pulsate as you breathed in and out. However, SnapChat has like three potential AR triggers: smiling like a maniac, opening your eyes like a maniac or tapping the screen like a maniac your gran trying to write a text message. None of which are exactly conducive with meditation but it did look pretty

Mama, a girl behind you 💜

On top of making their looks, the MUAs also had to pitch the AR elements of their filters which became a real deciding factor with Jake managing to glamour the entire judging panel who spent 90 minutes watching him and complaining that he was doing something too simple

only to then say the word “bioluminescence” and make spaceship noises

which had Kate Mellett, the head of Creative Strategy over at Snapchat, eating out of the palm of his hand

I’m beginning to see why the tech industry is such a disaster – you can get a million dollar investment so long as you can do a passable impression of the DeLorean from Back to the Future. However, I would have probably been entirely glamoured by the fact his model looked incredible in the makeup

but while she may slay, unfortunately the makeup as a filter activated by opening your eyes like you just walked in on your parents banging, less so

why’d they make it so… gloopy looking? *shudders*

But while Jake really impressed with his pitch, there were a few that fell a little short and were not really prepared for questions, most notably Ailish whose grand idea for augmented reality was a life without lashes

followed by pulling this face which suggested she was really fighting against the urge to do jazz hands to make our potentially lashless future sound more impressive

at university I pitched a short film about exploring the spectrum of femininity using dancers and when one of the lecturers asked a question, I think I spent 3 minutes just listing my favourite women which included Frida Kahlo twice. The film got commissioned but then I had a menty B and it never happened, just in case there’s a super wealthy film investor reading this? I’ll make all the voom voom voom voom noises you like!

The inspiration behind Ailish’s look (lashes optional) was her tattoo, which is a very cool tattoo

that does only make the final look that little bit less impressive considering it’s literally just a big ol’ navy blue heart on your face

and she was joined in the bottom by Mia and her fairground facepaint mermaid, who was beginning the wildest narrative arc this show has ever seen

nobody showed more nerve this episode than Mia, who in response to being asked why she went quite minimal, basically told both the head of SnapChat’s filter department and an influencer whose introductory spiel included such nauseating TikTok brainrot content as… this

that she thinks AR lenses are ugly and cringe

you dropped this, queen 👑. SHE’S RIGHT AND SHE SHOULD SAY IT.

Mia’s inspiration for her mermaid was that her happy place is the beach, which was also where Jade was drawing her inspiration from. However, while Mia was perfectly happy to shrug after 30 minutes, take £5 from her model and send them onto the Crazy Wave, Jade took a look around the room after she’d painted on a few blue wiggly worms and had a breakdown in the ergonomically beige Snapchat branded waiting room with Leomie

I believe they had to chain Rahual to his make-up station to prevent him from forcing her to do a breathing exercise. Even without Rahual forcing her to do square breathing, Jade managed to work through it and not give in to the classic Glow Up pitfall of starting all over again and instead worked on making the blue worms into slightly shimmery blue worms

I do believe she was saved entirely by Mia starting a grudge match with an entire social media company and everyone having to spend 5 minutes internally debating whether Ailish’s look infringes on the intellectual property of the dark moon emoji

is it too unhinged to say the dark moon emoji is a “hear me out”?

The last of the top three was Jamie whose happy place is ~music~ which is somehow not the must generic homosexual response to this question, I’LL GET TO YOU JOSH. And after talking a big game about listening to Doechii and Beyonce, I did kind of cackle when Dom used his piano key filter and compared himself to Elton John

this was probably filmed too early in 2024 for Dom to namedrop Chappell Roan who is essentially the Elton John of the chronically online (tone indicator: positive.) Speaking of things for chronically online queers:

and dare I say nothing killed Josh’s chances of winning faster than mentioning that the AR element would be his balloons cycling through the more specific Pride flags

The gays get one piece of superficial rainbow capitalism as a treat and you better not mention those pesky transgenders! I hope you’ve all made your pilgrimage to your nearest Lush’s current window display

buying bath bombs can be praxis!

Kat’s AR pitch was potentially the least fully thought through, which is not surprising given it took very little for her to give into the intrusive thought of gluing a rubber duck to her model’s face

so she kid of just thought of a clown and then… did a clown. Now, the idea of the cute clown with everything and kitchen sink glued to its face turning into a scary clown is fine

I’m 90% sure it’s been done, but all online content is reductive. What am I but Monkseal with Groucho Marx glasses on? It would however mean the overworked Snapchat graphic designer having to work doubly hard and they do not have enough Tassimo French Vanilla Latte capsules lying around for that. So Kat can sit with Josh in the Snapchat Sin Bin.

Lastly we have Cherise and her paint pallette look which I think might have been my personal favourite?

it’s clean, it’s comparatively subtle to most of the other options while still being eye-catching. They really lowballed Cherise for some reason.

A SnapChat Filter Ranking:
1. Rahual Is One Meditation Leaflet Away From Starting A Cult
2. Cherise’s Tasteful Palette
3. Twink-ling The Ivories
4. (Vroom Vroom) Beep Beep, So Let’s Snap
5. MOVE, I’M GAY!
6. Quacko The Clown
7. Jade’s 90 Minute Worms
8. Ailish’s Lashless Future
9. Mia’s Facepaint Stand – £5.

BFFR

For their Creative Brief this week the MUAs were having to create a look that embodies their truest sense of self, which all gets loosely connected back to this week’s guest judge, Courtney “Mascara and a bit of lip-gloss” Act

so I’m guessing the drag-specific challenges are still atoning for their sins after this

however, the MUAs were having to incorporate drag makeup techniques such as blocking the brows, contouring and showcasing the crunchiest wig lines you’ve ever seen

THE. WAY. I. GASPED. JADE! GO STRAIGHT TO JAIL. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT £200. The makeup is quite stunning though, if a little bit too glam for a concept that wanted to really show the rebellious nature of her inspiration, Kali the Hindu Goddess commonly depicted thusly

there’s only so much sticking your tongue out and doing the Avril Lavigne fingers can really capture the essence of a Goddess whose most famous legend involves her wearing the skin of a tiger while armed with a noose and catching drops of demon blood rain after which she dances on the bodies of the dead.

You know, just girly things.

Remember how last episode Cherise and Jade ended up doing the same thing for the creative brief and Jade got a little overshadowed? And you know how Jade did a water-inspired makeup look in SnapChat challenge? WELL HERE’S CHERISE WITH A STEEL CHAIR!

we all thought this was said out of concern

Cherise is actually an apex predator and Jade is an unfortunate herbivore. This game of cat and mouse culminating in the first Ding Dong of the series for Cherise

and whichever camera operator made sure to focus in on Josh’s lip quivering, you’re a shady motherfucker and I adore you

you can pinpoint the precise moment his heart broke.

The two red seats were occupied by Mia and Ailish. The latter of which had also opted for a heavily blue look – imaginably inspired by Diva Plavalaguna from The Fifth Element?

but I might just be thinking that because they’re two strangely featureless blue aliens with wacky headpieces. The eye makeup is really cool but it feels very far removed from the very vampiric headpiece and Morticia Addams unit from the Drag Queen Josh’s Hair Rental Van. The person who benefited most from the DQJHRV was Rahual whose original punk wig was apparently this

it’s like a toucan got trapped in a toaster. Rahual is indebted to Josh FOR LIFE by preventing that from being immortalised on TV forever and instead giving him this masterpiece

quite where Rahual “Can I interest you in my Spotify playlist of marine animal noises?” McGlow-Up got the idea for punk rock realness from, I don’t quite know but I appreciated his distinctly 2010 X-Factor’s Rock Week level of method dressing

I got distracted after that joke because I suddenly remembered Lloyd Daniels singing “I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry for Rock Week in 2009

there has been no funnier pay-off in the world than Lloyd coming out as gay. He did not, in fact, like it.

Also going for a look based on a subculture’s aesthetic was Jamie with his skater boy inspired look. But before we get to the makeup, a round of applause for Jamie’s incredible handwriting?

it’s so uniform and precise – my penmanship looks like a chicken writing its own ransom note, I’m just impressed if you can make two letters look the same. And he still has the vulnerability the judges are looking for with a lack of correctly placed apostrophes!
Sadly Jamie’s makeup didn’t wow the judges as much as his moodboard wowed me

if you asked me to explain which subculture this represented, I would have probably guessed the incredibly niche micro-community of geishas that claim to have watched Blade Runner but have only watched the highlight clips uploaded to YouTube by the Movieclips channel. And to them I say, same divas. I winged my way through 3 seminars about Blade Runner in uni without watching it because I fell asleep during the class screening.
As for Jamie’s makeup, I really love the spike details and I thought it was a necessary and clever addition to the look to give it that alternative fashion edge – it just needed to also come through a little more in the eye makeup.

Joining Jamie in Bald Cap Madness was Josh who apparently had so many wigs to spare because he was in fact painting a latex effect cowl onto his model’s head

I do wish the colours were a little more poppy. As is, it’s a little bit “sad remnants of the lemon and raspberry sorbet you ordered and ate a little bit too slowly so now they’re slowly combining into a grey-green sludge” but I love the black, it’s very Evil Queen coded

which I think perfectly captures the soft/hard dichotomy Josh was going for without doing something really obvious. The judges just didn’t respond to the look very warmly because they were very much judging Josh and his carboot wig sale on a higher curve than some of the others because he has drag experience. As does Jake, with his Drag Monster look

and you better believe I’m now making a bimbofied half-orc barbarian for my next session of D&D.
There was a definite Monster High influence in Jake’s look. Which was also a source of inspiration for Mia, or at least that’s what I think she meant. She was only ever allowed to say “monster doll” and I can only assume this is meant to be Legally Distinct Robecca Steam (wild hairline included!)

I keep coming back to this look because it is such an enigma to me. I want a full on hand-held, step-by-step breakdown of what exactly Mia was thinking during these 90 minutes. I feel like she massively overcompensated for the 15 minutes she got deducted for being in the red chair and pared the look back so much she lost the decaying Monster High Doll concept (a wilderness of an idea to begin with) and ended up in… steampunk garden sculpture made by a serial killer? I DON’T KNOW! GIRL, YOU HAD 10 MINUTES OF JUST STANDING THERE

this might be what pushes me over the edge into making an 8 part criminal investigation podcast. Phoebe Judge, I’m coming for your gig.

Lastly we have Kat, who was one of my favourites

it’s such a strong and impactful look – Dom nitpicked over the patchiness of the white foundation. I don’t know if I entirely see that, but I do think the black waves going up the face could have had a little more finesse. She just looks fucking cool though and if you asked me to tell you who amongst the cast did this look, I’d point at Kat immediately which feels like what this task was asking them to do.

A Really Real Realness Look Ranking:
1. Cherise Drowning Jade In The Pool
2. Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way
3. Josh’s Burgeoning Wig Business
4. She-rek
5. I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker With Flowers In My Hair
6. Jade’s Rebellious Tongue
7. He Was A Skate-ish Boy
8. I’m Blue Da ba dee da ba di
9. Mia’s MIA Desire To Put Any Effort In

How Now Brown… Lip?

Neither Mia nor Ailish managed to escape the Face Off as they found themselves facing off over a pair of satin-finish chocolate lips – one of Cadbury’s less popular products

the name of the game being precision and confidence when it came to the lining, which Ailish just ever so slightly lacked with a noticeable smudge on the left side

not a bad effort considering the circumstances, and Mia did get extra bonus points for managing to navigate the whole task with these talons

her model is very relieved it wasn’t a mascara challenge.

So sadly we are saying goodbye to Ailish

I have to admire her a lot for what she did achieve on the show, it may not have been the most stellar run but she’s still so early on in her ~makeup journey~ that I can’t help but feel that with the talent she has now, she’ll go super far in the future.

And so, we’re down to 8!