Shunning colour, glitz or texture of any kind, Tom Pecheux, on make-up honours for MAC at Balmain, worked instead on prepping and plumping models’ skin before the show with a deep facial massage (I’ve been trying to do this on my own fashion week face sag, to no avail) and moisturiser. 

The scrubbed clean skin, combined with the magnetic charge that only comes with the Balmain show, inferred the sort of girl who traverses the streets of Paris on a scooter and has a sex life which is far too active to bother with make-up in the morning. Especially mascara. Poor old mascara, it’s really having a time of it at the shows. If it’s there, it’s only there on paper, rather than visible and perky-looking. Or, it’s stuffed down onto the base of the lashes, to intensify the eyes themselves rather than draw any sort of attention to the lashes.  

And yet, it’s the first time this season that an extremely restrained hand of make-up has looked so brimming with sex appeal. Though of course, that may well have been the sterling casting; Rosie Huntingdon Whiteley (LA sexy), Saskia de Brauw (boyish sexy), Cat McNeil (grungey sexy) and Georgia May Jagger (hereditarily sexy). Sam McKnight, backstage hair oracle, followed suit with delicately done but undone lengths that appeared to have been air-dried and flipped around suggestively by each model in question. 

If the no mascara thing is just too preposterous to contemplate, then it’s worth remembering that this – and all show looks - is a merely a statement, a catwalk beauty mood; there for us all to pluck bits out of and put them back together in a way we adore for ourselves. So, of this, think of that moment on a Sunday evening, when you’ve just whipped off a face mask and your skin is gleaming with health, and you’ve got it. Now, to find a scooter. 

Click through the gallery above to see our favourite moments from backstage.