10 Amazing Beauty Tips You Can Only Learn Backstage at Fashion Week

Season after season, we head backstage at New York Fashion Week to chat with the lead makeup, hair and nail artists to learn about the looks at the shows.

While we’re there, we pick up a few of their best tips and tricks (whether it’s seeing them working their magic or they straight up tell us how to actually do something, better).

Keeping their best tips and tricks to ourselves would be just rude, so we’re sharing all of the best backstage beauty tips with you below.

1. Mix orange in with your concealer under the eyes for a more natural color. It corrects color and warms up the skin, because regular concealer typically looks quite white under the eye. When you add in just a pinch of orange color, you buy that finished product as real. It gives you more of a freshness. — Kabuki, Makeup Artist


2. For doing a half moon at a cuticle, get a nail art brush. The brushes in the bottle just don’t bend the right way, but a slimmer brush will give you the precision you need. If the color goes into your cuticle, it’s because you have too much polish on the brush. — Rebecca Isa, Manicurist


3. To look better in pictures, powder just the center of the face for the simplest play on highlight and contour, making the biggest difference. Just that slight technique puts everything into place and has a nice effect without looking like you tried too hard. — Lyne Desnoyes, Makeup Artist


4. To make graphic liner really stay on, powder over liquid liner with a black powder shadow. — Val Garland, Makeup Artist


5. For perfectly dewy skin, mix a pearlized color (like MAC Cosmetics’ creme color base in pearl) with a little bit of lip balm and blend all over the skin to highlight for balmy texture to your skin, and powder in strategic places (like down your nose or side of your face) so it doesn’t look too greasy. – Lucia Pica, Makeup Artist

6. The mistake people make is that they try to paint their opposite, non-dominant hand in the air. What you need to do is brace your non-dominant arm half way up the forearm flat on the table, then brace the hand you’ll paint with by putting the forearm against the table perpendicularly. Also, remember that your fingers rotate, so you can move to give the angle you need. — Deborah Lippmann, Manicurist


7. For getting the perfect sleek braid, use a styling paste and work that into your hair as you go with a braid to catch all of the flyaways. — Mark Hampton, Hairstylist


8. When you need to refresh the front of your hair or bangs in the morning after sleeping on them, use Bumble Prep to wet the hair and restyle it. The chemical makeup is different than water, so it dries faster and it gives you just a little tiny bit of hold. It doesn’t ruin your hairstyle, it just loosens up the hair quickly so you can just style your hair in a second. — Jimmy Paul, Hairstylist


9. When you’re trying to get a perfect line on your nail, hold your polish brush straight over your nail and move your nail (instead of the brush) to apply the line. – Jin Soon Choi, Manicurist


10. To highlight your face and really catch the light with your makeup, add an iridescent illuminating product high on your cheekbone, high on the bridge of your nose, on your cupid’s bow and on the tip of your chin – the sparkle will create lift. – Aaron de Mey, Makeup Artist