Close enough, welcome back Princess Diana.

Sorry this is late, I was busy filling out application forms with the lyrics to The Cheeky Song.

Botanic Panic

Kicking off this week was a true blue beauty industry challenge as the MUAs were tasked with creating looks to feature in the next campaign for the unofficial official sponsor of the show, Beauty Bay and their latest eyeshadow palette, the 42 pan Botanical Palette

and also NikkieTutorials is here because she has a highlighter trio to hawk

every time she appears I am legally obligated to tell anyone within earshot about the time she was BLACKMAILED into outing herself as trans in what might have been the wildest series of events that ever hit the internet? And also that when it happened everyone thought she was coming out as a transman. It was a chaotic moment in time that she handled with far more dignity and grace than I would have been able to. Also, we had to stop talking about really quickly because Tati was busy laying pipe bombs in James Charles’s bathroom and the randomised Sim we call Shane Dawson was struggling to get out of a ladderless pool.

The theme for Beauty Bay’s campaign was Spring, which makes sense because the most notable aspect of the palette is that it’s largely green, a sadly under represented colour in the eyeshadow palette world. Jade however saw all of those beautiful greens, heard the brief for spring, floral, joyful, THE PALETTE IS CALLED BOTANICAL, GIRLYPOP and went with that weird peach colour Beauty Bay puts in literally every single palette for some reason

does her model look beautiful? Yes, of course she does, she’s a model for a reason but this really isn’t selling an eyeshadow palette. It looks like it’s for a Glossier skin product that mostly just spring water in fancy minimalist packaging to sell for £50 to the sort of people that sleep like they’re being prepared for a journey to the land of the dead in Ancient Egypt

the only person to ever look slimier than a face-maxing influencer is perhaps Jamie’s model

he was going for glowy but got a little bit carried away with slathering anything with the word “dewy” on it onto her face and now she doesn’t even just look sweaty, she looks like she’d sound like a slime ASMR video on TikTok if you poked her cheek

Kat also struggled to get to grips with quite what the very mainstream, influencer-friendly brand Beauty Bay wanted because, as Kat will tell you every time you come within 5 feet of her, she’s different, she’s a weirdo, have you seen me without these statement glasses on? That’s weird!

I love Kat’s aesthetic, nothing brings me more joy than when someone finds a sense of style that suits them to an absolute tee and Kat wears goth/grunge perfectly. And there was no way she wasn’t going to bring that influence into the look she created, which admittedly did look really, really cool

is it Beauty Bay? No, not really. Is it giving Colourpop doing the world’s weirdest brand collaboration with The Last of Us? Actually, yes?

in Kat’s defense, fungus is botanical and there is a colour in the palette called “mushroom”

CHECKMATE! My client is innocent! We rest our case.

The yellow blush wasn’t the only questionable colour choice happening as Jake immediately fell for the Looney Tunes style carrot under a box trap as he reached for the Maybelline colour tattoo eyeshadow for a pop of blue

which of course everyone was reacting to as though they were taking 4d8 points of psychic damage

Jake was a little worried about this challenge because he doesn’t do a lot of beauty looks, his street being much more creature-y and fantastical

as opposed to the likes of Cherise, Jade and Mia who he identified as the biggest threats in all of this because “they do beauty”

the only time I’ve ever screamed “JUST DO A FAIRY!” more is while reading A Court of Thorns and Roses. However, Jake ended up going a lot more drag with their bold, graphic eye

which the Beauty Bay representative, Bradley Rooney, really liked and thought would have been a strong contender for the campaign had Jake not committed cosmetic adultery

you cucked Beauty Bay, Jake!

Over with Mia’s brand-loyal fairy, she knocked this challenge out of the park with a truly gorgeous eye look that used both the eyeshadow palette and Nikkie’s highlighter to give it a pink shift on the negative space

it’s just such a clever and interesting makeup to look at that there was absolutely no way she wasn’t winning this, even if Cherise was a very close second with a look that utilised the gold and purple spectrum of the palette

much like the first Creative Brief she did, it’s a masterful representation of a floral motif without being overly literal. The shape and blend of the colours immediately bring to mind a flower petal. However, I think her biggest mistake was not leaning into the greens, which feel like the biggest selling point of the palette.

Lastly we have Josh, who did a really beautiful look that was perhaps a little too safe and just lacked the twist that Mia’s and Cherise’s both had

but it is beautifully done and he did very deservedly land in the top 3 alongside Cherise and Mia. But as I said, there was no way they weren’t blowing up Mia’s to a building-sized poster

so we will be starting a crowdfunder for Josh’s printing expenses

I’ve calculated that we’d need 450 sheets of A4 paper to cover the Elonex electronic billboard in Manchester, which I believe is the one in Mia’s picture. Colour printing at the local library is 30p per sheet, so we need to raise £135.
Sorry to Mr. Raine and Mrs. Hemmingway for ever arguing that I would never need to use maths in the future. I still don’t know what time that train is getting to Darlington though and never talk to me about Pythagoras.

A Beauty Bay Botanical Look Ranking:
1. Mia Just Absolutely Curb Stomping This Challenge
2. Cherise’s Floral Motif 2: Botanic Boogaloo
3. Josh’s Ink Expenses
4. Jamie’s Slime Tutorial
5. Kat’s Fungal Grunge
6. Jade’s Bit of Chapstick and Some Mascara
7. Jake’s Cosmetic Adultery

Optical Illusions

For their creative brief the MUAs were dabbling in the art of optical illusions as they created distorted makeup looks. The MUAs dealing with the 15 minute time penalty were Kat and Jake, with Jade only escaping by the skin of her illusory teeth

I am so proud of Jade for this look? In fact, I have so much time for how Jade has thrown herself into the Creative Briefs in general. Common narratives on this show are beauty artists who drag their feet when forced to look at a prosthetic or the SFX specialists who have a 90% chance of whipping a bald-cap out of their pocket at any given moment digging their heels in any time they’re instructed to just apply some eyeshadow in a way that doesn’t make someone look like a lizard but Jade has never really let having a preference for beauty makeup hinder her. Her last two Creative Briefs have both been really surprising and showed she has a very diverse skill set. I think I’m on the Jade Hype Train? And if she doesn’t win, she’ll be my Miss Congeniality just for her incredibly dorky laugh when she got Ding Donged

nothing better than a really beautiful woman laughing like a goose trapped in a storm drain. Nothing but respect for MY queen.

With much of an optical illusion relying on light and shadow, this would have been a perfect week for a black and white makeup. However, after last week Kat had been backed into a multi-coloured corner and so was forced to throw kaleidoscopic spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck

her inspiration was the migraines she gets when looking at optical illusions. Which is a really interesting interpretation of the challenge. However, this is Glow Up, a show not famed in dealing with subtext and metaphor so this was a bit too far removed for the judges

and to be fair, there wasn’t really any *makeup technique* that suggested “distortion” which at the end of the day, was the brief. I did roll my eyes at Dom telling her that making the eyebrows frowning would have been enough

You and I both know that’s a bold-faced lie, Dominic. Especially when you all read Jamie to filth for his piece????

they were so harsh on him, I can’t quite make sense of the critiques he got. Is the centre of the top loop a little askew? Yes, and it is INCREDIBLY distracting. BUT, I do not know why they were all so insistent that they couldn’t tell this was a figure of eight?

WHAT ELSE IS IT? And then Nikkie was all “do you mean infinity or a figure of 8?”

I feel like I may have been a little harsh on Jamie in a few of my recaps and perhaps the nuclear weapon’s grade deployment of a woobie face kicked in my rarely sighted maternal extinct

it’s only ok to bully the twink when *I’m* doing it.

I liked your makeup Jamie, I thought the fading ombre you achieved on the lip was really quite amazing and they could have said *one* positive thing other than “You tried really hard”. I really can’t quite believe he ended up in the Face Off when Mia was *right there*

Kat was always going to be in the Face Off the moment this Final Destination premonition scene happened and Death by Beauty Bay was confirmed not even 10 minutes into the episode

this week I found out about the Final Destination expanded universe novels which were surprisingly fun reads until you get to the third one and the main character’s elaborate horror novel death is… contracting HIV??????

I don’t think I have to tell you it was published in 2005.

ANYWAY. Back to Mia’s makeup

I appreciate that she went for something really quite difficult despite it not being particularly within her wheelhouse. I just don’t think it was particularly successful. I find the blue around the eyes to be a slightly odd choice. However, that one eyebrow above the central eye? That’s a good fake eyebrow!

Despite having 15 minutes less than most of the other MUAs, Jake still went for an obscenely big makeup with his shapeshifting demon

which really could only be summed up with this descriptive word salad

the power queer people have to just say nonsense and all of us intrinsically understand *exactly* what was intended is unmatched. And I think my favourite part of the episode was Val complimenting Jake for his use of a metallic paint to give the eyes that glowing effect and Jake got to don a spiritual fedora and “Umm, Actually” her

which Josh watched happen with the sort of enraptured amazement that the Cannes audience has to have when Lars von Trier occasionally takes them hostage

Josh himself had gone for a Picasso inspired piece which, while not wildly original, was at least a very good study of Picasso’s artwork

I feel like when most people do Picasso they push it a little too far and it borders on just being nonsense. I think Josh showed a lot of very intelligent restraint in this makeup.

Lastly we have Cherise who has astonishingly made it to the age of 27 without giving in to the siren song of the washing machine

I just know Cherise was an absolute liability on every single school trip – there’s always one child who disappears for a few hours and shows up with one shoe missing and all their money spent on gift shop sweets.
Cherise was finally realising her latent childhood dream of riding the washing machine into Valhalla with her spin-cycle distortion

it is really beautifully done, if a little too delicate. She needed to go the full Mr. Krabs meme

but at the same time getting told “It just looks like a ripple” as opposed to a full on spin cycle isn’t really much of a critique

because a ripple, being a disturbance and distortion of the water surface, if anything is even more on brief.

An Optical Illusion Makeup Ranking:
1. Jake’s Haute Couture Anime Demon
2. Jade’s Joker Arc
3. Josh’s Art History Degree
4. The Inherent Eroticism Of The Washing Machine
5. Jamie’s Infinity War
6. Kat’s Final Destination
7. The Complete Spectrum of Mia’s Glow Up Journey

Getting The Cut

Jake managed to save themself from the Face Off and was replaced with Jamie for reasons that still slightly mystify me. Sadly Kat wasn’t able to pull off the same feat and the two of them would have a showdown over a high contrast colour cut crease

which is BRAVE considering the last time Dom showcased his crease cutting abilities

sometimes I have to think Glow Up surviving 7 series is something of a miracle and they largely have the personalities of the contestants to thank for the success.

The name of the game was symmetry and replication with one of the eyes having been already done with Kat and Jamie having to perfectly replicate it on the opposite eye

and for what it’s worth, both of them replicated the really quite ugly eye look very well!

and for that Jamie was declared the winner and we’re saying goodbye to Kat, which felt like an unfortunate inevitability given how strong her distinct style was

I’ll miss her, especially because now I’ll never know everything about those statement glasses she wore.

and so, we’re down to 6!