Fall 2025’s makeup trends marked a decisive shift toward elevated, textured glamour, moving away from the bare-faced simplicity of summer. The season’s essential products focus on creating a refined base with luxurious finishes, bold, impactful eye looks, and lip colors that range from deep, moody shades to velvety nudes. Key new launches emphasize skincare-infused formulas, ensuring that makeup not only looks beautiful but also cares for the skin as the weather cools. This guide highlights the best foundations, eyeshadows, blushes, and lip products chosen to capture the rich, sophisticated spirit of autumn, making them indispensable additions for updating any cosmetic collection.
The Foundation of Fall: Luxurious Finishes and Skincare Hybrids
The foundational trend for Fall 2025 is a base that balances luminosity with comfort, with an emphasis on hybrid formulas that treat the skin while providing coverage.
New foundation releases prioritized serum-like textures that offer medium, buildable coverage with a natural, satin-matte finish—the perfect balance between the dewy look of summer and the flatness of traditional winter mattes. A prominent pick was a new Chanel Sublimage L’Essence de Teint iteration, praised for integrating high-end skincare ingredients that improve skin texture over time. The focus is on a perfected, long-wearing base that feels weightless and shields the skin against the drying effects of early heating systems.
Eyes: Depth, Texture, and the Moody Palette
Eye makeup for the season embraces deep, rich colors and varied textures, allowing for dramatic looks that are still impeccably polished.
Eyeshadow palettes feature warm, earthy tones like burnt oranges, deep mahoganies, and smoky plums, often combined with shimmering gold or copper metallics. The “Smoky Eye” made a decisive return, but modernized with soft edges and dim
ensional finishes rather than hard lines. A standout product was a new Dior 5 Couleurs Couture Palette featuring a mix of velvety mattes and foiled shimmers, making it versatile for both day and night looks. This season encourages playing with texture, layering metallic creams over matte bases to create impactful, multi-faceted depth.
Blush and Sculpt: Sophisticated Flushes
Blush remains a crucial element, but the trend shifts from the sun-kissed brights of summer to sophisticated, subtle flushes that mimic natural cold-weather coloring.
The favored shades are muted and elegant: dusty roses, terracotta browns, and deep mauves. Cream and liquid blush formulas were particularly highlighted for their ability to melt into the skin, avoiding a powdery look. These formulas deliver a healthy, seamless color that appears to come from within. A notable addition was the Rare Beauty Soft Pinch Liquid Blush in a new shade called “Enigma,” a muted plum that provides a perfect, natural-looking flush for autumn complexions. Contouring took a softer approach, using cool-toned bronzers to sculpt lightly rather than heavily define.
The Defining Lip: Velvet Mattes and Deep Pigments
Fall lipstick trends are defined by two dominant, contrasting categories: the comfortable velvet matte and the high-impact dark pigment.
For daytime, the preferred choice is a velvet matte nude—a warm, neutral tone with a soft, diffusing finish that provides fullness without shine. The formula must be highly comfortable and non-drying. For evening and statement looks, the trend embraces deep, moody colors like intense oxblood reds, rich berries, and deep browns, often applied with precision for a striking, vampy effect. The Pat McGrath Labs MatteTrance Lipstick in a new deep berry hue was celebrated for its luxurious feel and exceptional color saturation, making it the must-have lip statement for the season’s most glamorous events.
