On a recent winter morning, Drew Barrymore sweeps into her room at the Crosby Street Hotel. While her daughters are busy playing, she beelines it to the bathroom mirror to switch from her uniform of laid-back mom (bare-faced with her hair in a loose braid, dressed in sweatpants and a vintage powder blue sweatshirt featuring the native fish of Alaska) to powerhouse celebrity, producer, and makeup mogul ahead of a full day of meetings.
“I don’t have a lot of sit-down-at-the-vanity-table, old-fashioned luxury of time,” says the founder of Flower Beauty. “It’s so real for us girls. We really do our makeup on the go.” She’s referring to the regular in-transit routine she calls #commuterbeauty. Years of multitasking makeovers alone could make her an expert in the art of pulling together a camera-ready look in a pinch. But add that to her lifetime of experience working with some of the world’s best makeup artists (she made her big-screen debut at the age of 5) and Barrymore could likely write a textbook on what she knows about the five-minute face.
She dips into her makeup bag, moving deftly and waxing poetic about each makeup category as she buffs and blends. Foundation, she’s found, is best served in a stick for optimal apply-anywhere versatility. Highlighting under the eyebrows “gives the eyes a little lift,” while a quick dusting of contour powder enhances bone structure—“who doesn’t want great cheekbones?” she asks rhetorically. But to achieve an otherworldly glow, she picks up a jar of moisturizer: “I always take some on the go.” With a pea-sized amount tapped onto her skin, she creates the from-within “beyond-makeup glow.”
In terms of lipstick, she’s as particular about pigment as she is about placement. “I really am opposed to any formula that feathers,” she says, so, after creating a barrier of MAC lip liner in Magenta, she employs a bold swath of By Terry lipstick across her mouth before blending a bit onto her cheeks, the tip of the nose, and right under her chin for a “cohesive color look” that will last all day.
As a penultimate step, sun protection is her postpartum essential. “As you get older, you have melasma and babies and you get this kind of crazy pigment,” she explains of the increased need for SPF. Barrymore prefers a powder formula to avoid clogged pores and to reveal any discoloration on her skin that may require an extra dab of concealer.
But her favorite moment of her makeup routine occurs when she pulls out a wand of Diorshow mascara. “In mascara, there is no such thing as too much,” she says, reminiscing about the globs of product that were produced by the Maybelline Dial-A-Lash she used in her youth. “It was like icing.” With two applications she reaches the optimal, bright-eyed “mod ’60s layered-on” look. A shake-out of the hair and a split-second ensemble change later, Barrymore—looking every bit the Hollywood multi-hyphenate—is out the door.
