Leave it to Gwen Stefani to fix a last minute makeup mishap.
The 52-year-old No Doubt rocker told Glamor that she was forced to do her own glamor for the 2022 Met Gala after the artist she booked had to cancel her appointment.
“I got into a situation at the Met Ball where I was doing a trial with a new person because the makeup artist I wanted to use wasn’t available,” Stefani recalls.
“We did a makeup playdate with this new girl. It was so much fun and they are both super talented and I learned so much. But when it came to the Met Ball, she had an emergency and couldn’t do my makeup.”
Fortunately, the lead singer of “Spiderwebs” came prepared.
“I brought my gear, thank goodness,” she said. “I had to do my makeup.”
Stefani paired her neon two-piece Vera Wang look with products from her own GXVE Beauty line — including Line It Up Clean 24-Hour Gel Pencil Waterproof Eyeliner ($21) in Bathwater, a bold metallic blue shade.
She also swapped out her signature red lip for a nude shade, mixing Original Me Clean High-Performance Matte Lipstick ($26) in Tragic Me with Anaheim Shine Clean High-Performance Satin Lipstick ($26) in Stomp Box.
While most stars don’t dream of doing their own glamour, Stefani has great beauty skills; she worked at a makeup counter in a department store in her native Anaheim, California, in the late 1980s.
“I was a fake makeup artist in the sense that they never trained me and I never reported to anyone,” she told Glamour.
“I could make a perfect red lip in less than a minute. In fact, I’ve never worked with a makeup artist in my entire career, really, except for one here or one there.”
Stefani also recalled a “bad experience” with an artist early in her No Doubt days.
“This man came and did my makeup for the [album] works of art and I remember thinking I looked ugly. I thought, ‘I look prettier when I do my makeup’, but I was too scared to say anything. I’m still looking at those pictures and I’m like, ‘Ugh.’ Then I took it into my own hands.”