Milanese women are fabulously wedded to their beauty rituals. It’s a wonderful thing. Walk down any of stone-paved street in the heart of the Italian capital and you’ll see it everywhere: fashion women with structured brows and merlot lipstick, sectagenarians with air-tight blow-dries with notes of gardenia and frankincence wafting through the air. 

All of which makes the pervading spring/summer14 trend for a ‘raw’, ‘lived-in’, ‘sporty’ and ‘natural’ approach to catwalk hair and make-up, more poignant and wide-reaching than initially thought. See, New York is known for it’s gallant and reliably natural approach to catwalk beauty, so that was no major shocker, but then London followed suit in some places but also poured out it’s creative juices in others. 

But if Milan, the spiritual home of thick black thatched lashes, confidently arched and defined brows and mega-watt hair, has taken the baton for all things natural, it means one thing: we’re in for a very understated, benign summer.  

At Roberto Cavalli, that bastion of of rock’n’roll soaked, soot-eyed glamour, tales of the natural digressed into ‘sweaty skin’ and ‘a raw sort of beauty’, offered make-up artist, Diane Kendal. In fact Diane’s hire in itself should have given it away, such is her reputation as  a prominent flagbearer of neutral-toned, sculpted skin. 

"The Milan shows point to one thing: we’re in for a very understated, benign summer"

'Even the glamourous designers are pairing their hair down as well,' explained Redken's Guido Palau of his deconstructed, groomed but lank hair creation at Cavalli. 'At the moment it feels right. In a year, our eye may change. Any hair that feels like you've tried at all looks wrong for right now,’ he said, as if sounding the death knell for the blow-dry as we know it.

Marni, the beloved Italian fashion label who brought us a gorgeous, diffused berry lip for autumn/winter13, followed up with a new blueprint for modern facial grooming as designed by the delectably gallic, Tom Pecheux. 'It's natural. But everything has a little twist,’ said Tom of his ‘cloudy eye brows’ which were set with a dusting of grey powder and sprinkled with black glitter shadow. 

Even Charlotte Tilbury - a make-up artist who adores using colour - delivered a look of knowing, ripened innocence at Sportmax, with delicate, raspberry-hued lips and soft, glowing cheeks.

Skin itself was the clear power player yet again in Milan, a signifier of the unstoppable lightening-fast trickle of innovative new foundation formulas, skincare formulas and foundation-skincare hybrids. The textures and ingredients at the disposal of make-up artists today have enabled them to take the skin to places it’s never been before – new levels of biological and super-human perfection. This is their playground. Where once the backstage discussion on skin varied from simply matte, natural or glowing, now there are fifteen, twenty iterations of how the base can be manipulated to tell a different story. 

"Rather than replace the beauty rule book with more rules for spring, the Milan shows have ripped it up altogether and started afresh"

‘Casting’ hair, that (wonderfully do-able) thematic spirit has travelled across oceans to take up residence in Milan too, cropping up at Blumarine, Roberto Cavalli and Sportmax, as did ‘skater, surfer hair’ at Iceberg. 

I’ve thought about this a lot. And though on the surface, it may seem as though there are no new ideas to report on; no new hair parting, no indigo blusher, no sequins stuck on eyelids, no directional lace-front weaves, there is something even more modern whirling underneath. A new type of nakedness in beauty, an entirely new way to look how we dress of our faces each morning. Rather than replace the beauty rule book with more rules for spring, the Milan shows have ripped it up altogether and started afresh.

Save for, of course, Prada, a show which has both the balls to think conceptually with regards to beauty but also to take a giant step outside of the strands of beauty narrative being played out elsewhere and do something that has no interest what the trends are shaping up to be and is merely preoccupied with what Prada is and stands for. And, it wholeheartedly delivered. Josh Wood’s ambitious, impressive, bewildering hair colour transformations – all 47 of them – left me short of breath. And I literally dined out on Pat McGrath’s graffiti eye for days afterwards. 

So, Mrs Prada, we thank you for that. 

Click the gallery for the most significant beauty moments at Milan fashion week S/S14