International makeup artist, beauty historian, collector of rare vintage makeup - Erin Parsons ties forgotten techniques, uncompromising creativity, and a deep understanding of the face into one body of work. If you love makeup and want to know why, not just what, this is an account to know.
Watch her explain the technique on YouTube.
Source: Erin Parsons’ official YouTube channel
We follow some makeup artists for the pretty looks. Others teach us technique. Erin Parsons packs an entire world of history, culture, fashion, and art into a sixty-second video.
She isn’t demonstrating this week’s trend with last week’s launch. She researches how women did their makeup decades - centuries - ago, hunts down original products from different eras, studies the techniques of legendary makeup artists, and then translates all of it into a visual language that’s contemporary, clear, and genuinely inspiring.
The result is beauty content you can’t stop watching, and, more to the point, content that changes how you look at makeup.
Who is Erin Parsons?
Erin Parsons is an American makeup artist based in New York. She started her professional career alongside makeup artist Pat McGrath, and went on to become the global makeup artist for Maybelline New York. In that role, she worked on campaigns, fashion shows, and the development of the brand’s artistic language. Over the years she has done makeup for many models and celebrities, and is especially known for her ongoing collaboration with Gigi Hadid.
Her portfolio spans fashion editorials, magazine covers, commercial campaigns, and international fashion-house shows. Her industry profile on Models.com lists hundreds of credits across editorial, advertising, cover, and runway work.
In recent years, though, the wider audience has come to her less for the faces she works on and more for the way she tells the story of makeup itself.
Far more than a celebrity makeup artist
Execution isn’t the differentiator. Plenty of makeup artists can build flawless skin, precise eyeliner, or a perfect lip. Curiosity is the differentiator. She wants to know:
- What products were used in the past?
- What did the original formulas look like?
- What tools did makeup artists have access to?
- How were the looks we’re still trying to recreate actually built?
- And what’s changed between the historical image and its modern interpretation?
She doesn’t squint at an old photo and approximate. She digs up original tutorials, vintage advertisements, professional books, interviews with the makeup artists who built the look, and, when she can, the products themselves.
Take her recreation of the eye makeup associated with Pamela Anderson in the 1990s, done with instructional material and products from makeup artist Alexis Vogel, who created the original look. What came out was far more involved than the shorthand stuck in our collective memory - a layered smoky eye and a multi-step lip, not a brown liner and pink gloss.
A private beauty archive that looks like a museum
Parsons is also a serious collector of historical beauty items. Her collection includes antique lipsticks, perfumes, powders, false lashes, wigs, packaging, and products that once belonged to film stars and recognizable cultural figures.
It started growing after she bought makeup at auction that had belonged to film star Mae West, and it kept going until her apartment turned into a private archive of beauty history.
She’s documented products and objects connected to Marilyn Monroe, perfumes designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, and cosmetics that are decades - sometimes more than a century - old.
None of it is treated as pretty packaging. She’s after the formula, the texture, the mechanism of the case, the marketing that sold it, and how women actually used it in the era it was made.
Look at the collection long enough and the history of makeup stops being a sequence of trends. It’s a record of shifts in women’s social status, technology, film, advertising, fashion, and how each era decided what beauty meant.
Where history meets creativity
The best thing about Parsons’ work is that nostalgia doesn’t own her.
She loves vintage makeup and she isn’t trying to turn every face into a character from another decade. She takes the historical principles - brow shape, blush placement, lash technique, lip construction, the use of color - and tests them on a modern face.
Sometimes the recreation is almost academically faithful. Sometimes it’s a jumping-off point for something else entirely.
That distinction matters. Inspiration isn’t copying. A good makeup artist can find the logic inside a look and decide which parts of it actually serve the face, the shoot, the clothes, and the moment.
She also explains, over and over, how beauty ideals move from era to era. In a Vogue interview about the relationship between facial features and historical periods, she noted that every decade had its own distinct aesthetic - in the features considered desirable and in the makeup used to emphasize them.
Not afraid of makeup that looks like makeup
Most beauty content right now is no-makeup makeup, very even skin, and the same handful of techniques on repeat. Parsons is a reminder that makeup can also be play.
In her work you’ll see:
- Unexpected colors
- Graphic lashes
- Brows that change with the character
- Eyes reshaped entirely
- Heavily emphasized lips
- A combination of technical precision and creative freedom
Her makeup often isn’t trying to look natural, and that’s the point. It’s building a character, calling up an era, exaggerating a feature, or making a visual moment you can’t scroll past.
Even at her most dramatic, the structural understanding is right there. Color and effect aren’t dropped on the face at random - they’re planned against the eye, the brow, the cheekbones, and the proportions of the person in front of the camera.
What makeup artists can learn from her
Go back to the source
Instead of saving another Pinterest photo and trying to copy it, find out where it came from. Who created the look? What era? What was it for - a shoot, the stage, film, real life? Context can completely change how you read the makeup.
Learn the structure, not the steps
Parsons doesn’t just tell you where to put product. She shows you how placement changes the face. Blush high toward the temples does something entirely different from a round blush in the center of the cheek. A straight brow reads differently than an arched one. Lashes only at the outer corner reshape the eye differently than lashes stacked in the middle. Once you understand the effect, you’re no longer locked into one formula.
Use products differently
We tend to lock every product into whatever job the manufacturer assigned it. Parsons is a reminder that you can think about a formula by texture, pigment load, finish, and how it behaves in light instead of by what the box says. This isn’t a case for using a product where it hasn’t been approved - it’s an invitation to know your materials better.
Learn from the past without moving into it
Copy a look from another era wholesale and it reads exaggerated or dated. Take one detail - a lip shade, a lash placement, a liner shape, a skin texture - and fold it into something contemporary, and it works.
Why follow her
Parsons’ account is for anyone who has started to find beauty content repetitive.
Instead of another video with the same three products and a trend you’ve seen dozens of times, you get a combination almost nobody else offers:
- Real experience in the fashion industry
- High-level technique
- Historical research
- An exceptional beauty collection
- The ability to tell a story
- A willingness to experiment and look different
She also doesn’t hand you history as homework. The videos are accessible, curious, and frequently funny. You’ll click on an old compact out of nosiness and leave understanding where a trend you thought started on TikTok actually came from.
The bottom line
Erin Parsons is proof that makeup isn’t a product list or a set of rules. It’s a visual language with a history, a context, and the power to change how a face reads.
She researches the past without ever stepping out of the present, and she connects professional makeup, fashion, film, culture, and collecting in a way almost no other beauty account does.
You may never wear a single one of her looks. You’ll still end up looking at the makeup already in your own kit differently, and that alone is worth the follow.
Instagram: @erinparsonsmakeup
