The smoky eye used to be a forty minute commitment, and one eye always came out darker than the other. Anyone who learnt to do their makeup from YouTube videos knows the feeling.
Then beauty moved on. Skin got sheerer, liner got smaller, and for a few years eye makeup nearly disappeared in favour of brushed-up brows and barely-there everything.
A/W26 has brought it back. Smoky eyes were the focal point at Gucci, and Prada sent out dishevelled ponytails with smudged liner. Vogue’s reports from Milan and Paris both landed on the same idea: eyes that look sooty and sketched.
Worth saying that the runways haven’t agreed on one version. Some of the season’s boldest looks went the other way entirely – holographic silver at Chanel, metallic purple at Carolina Herrera — and plenty of makeup artists are predicting a return to proper gunmetal, charcoal and cool grey, diffused to a cloud-like finish. But the version most people will actually wear is the softer one: tonal, hazy, deliberately undone. Brown instead of black, smudged instead of sharp. Less nightclub circa 2010, more slept-in.
Smoky, but make it soft
The most modern approach is almost the inverse of the old one: start with less, place the deepest colour close to the lashes, then blur outwards until you can’t tell where it ends. The shadow shouldn’t look placed. It genuinely looks better slightly imperfect.
One shade washed across the lid is enough for daytime. At night, add depth into the outer corner and under the lower lashes, then tap something luminous over the centre of the lid.
Chanel Les 9 Ombres in 587 The New Smoky makes the case for the revival better than most. Five richly pigmented base shades sit alongside four shimmery top coats, and the palette skews taupe-mauve and red-brown rather than grey and black. The important thing is not to use everything at once.
Put down the liquid liner
The thing that instantly dates a smoky eye is a perfectly sharp line running through it. Pencil is better here, and brown is better than black because it defines without dominating the face the way a hard jet black can.
Victoria Beckham Beauty Satin Kajal Liner in Cocoa is the obvious one, a matte brown with a smudger built into the opposite end of the pencil, which is exactly the tool this look needs. Run it close to the upper lashes, add a little underneath, then soften it before it sets. Don’t attempt a wing. The messiness around the edges is the aim.
Brown mascara is the quiet fix
Once you’ve spent time softening everything, finishing with a flat black lash can undo the work.
Once you’ve spent time softening everything, finishing with a flat black lash can undo the work. Brown does most of that work for you.
MERIT Clean Volume in Brown gives you more lash than the softer formulas without the harshness of black, which makes it the evening version of this look rather than the daytime one. The tubing formula is a useful quirk here: it wraps each lash rather than coating it, so it holds through the night and comes off with warm water. You want the pencil smudged, not the mascara.
Keep the rest of the face fresh
The heavy base that used to accompany a smoky eye can stay in the past. Rather than full coverage matte, keep the complexion light.
Missha M Perfect Cover Serum BB Cream PRO does that job: enough coverage to even things out, sheer enough that skin still reads as skin. Worth being specific about which one you pick up: the Serum version is the sheer one, while the standard M Perfect Cover BB is medium-to-high coverage and works against everything this look is doing.
Cheeks follow the same rule: enough colour to stop the face looking flat, nothing so sculpted that it competes with the eyes.
MERIT Flush Balm in Archival, a cool mauve, sits well against the browner eye. Dab it on and blend outwards rather than placing it precisely — you want colour coming through the skin, not sitting on top of it. It works on lips too, if you want the whole face in one tone.
Keep the lip quiet but not invisible
The instinct is to reach for the palest nude you own, but understated doesn’t have to mean erased.
Chanel Rouge Coco in 165 Crush comes from the same limited-edition Coco Mademoiselle collection as the Les 9 Ombres palette, which makes it the obvious pairing — a cool mauve that picks up the taupe tones in the eye without competing with them. It’s satin rather than matte, so the lip stays soft where the eye is doing the work. Worth swatching first if your lips run deeply pigmented, as the cool undertone can read grey.
The more interesting route is skipping traditional liner altogether. Sacheu Lip Liner STAY-N in MUAH-ve sets into a stain rather than a drawn line, so you get definition without another hard edge on the face. Fair warning: it needs ten to twenty minutes to dry before you peel the film off, so it’s a get-ready-early product rather than a rushed one.
Wear the stain alone, or add ILIA Overglaze Hydrating Lip Gloss over the top for a bit of shine against the hazier eye. It’s sheer and buildable rather than pigmented, which is what you want when the eye is doing the talking.
