Mermaid Makeup Grew Up: Watery Shimmer Without the Costume

Mermaidcore has been threatening to happen since 2023, when the live-action Little Mermaid press tour put pearl-strewn waves and lilac chrome on every red carpet. It never quite stuck, because the version on offer was a costume. Scale stencils, chunky teal glitter, shell-shaped highlighter. Fun for a festival, useless on a Tuesday.

The version that finally landed this summer is different, and it’s worth taking seriously, because it solves a real problem: how to wear color in the hottest months without fighting your own skin.

The trend, minus the seashells

Marie Claire’s summer trend report calls the season’s mood “ethereal mermaid energy,” and the operative word is ethereal, not mermaid. The look as it’s actually being worn breaks into three parts. Luminous, almost wet-looking skin. A soft, sun-flushed cheek. And one, exactly one, aquatic accent: a teal liner flick, a wash of seafoam over the lid, a pearlescent lavender at the inner corner.

Marie Claire’s separate deep-dive on the mermaid trend draws the line cleanly: no seashell bras, no chunky glitter, nothing theatrical. Watery shimmer and pops of aquatic color that feel whimsical without crossing into costume territory. Iconic London’s take on what they call mermaid skin is even more reductive, treating the whole thing as a complexion finish, shimmer-laced and dewy, with the color story almost optional.

That restraint is what separates this cycle from 2023. It also makes the trend essentially a coat of paint on the season’s real shift, which is the move from glowy skin to genuinely glossy skin. The wet-look complexion was already happening. The ocean palette just gives it a direction.

Building it: skin first, color last

The base is the pearl skin formula that K-beauty has been refining for two years: hydrated, light-reflective, with shine that sits on the high points instead of everywhere. A dewy tint, cream highlighter on cheekbones and down the nose bridge, and no powder except where things actually move. The dolphin skin approach, named for exactly this just-surfaced sheen, gets you the same finish with a liquid illuminator mixed into base.

Cheeks go warm and flushed rather than pink. The sunburnt-blush placement, across the cheekbones and lightly over the nose, keeps the look beachy instead of doll-like.

Then the single aquatic gesture. The palette runs from deep teal through seafoam to the pale end, periwinkle, lilac, pearl, the bioluminescent shades Makeup.com’s mermaidcore guide leans on. Duochromes do the most work per gram here: a teal-to-lavender shifting shadow pressed on the center lid reads watery and dimensional with one finger swipe. ColourPop’s spring Little Mermaid collaboration was built on exactly these shifts, and half of TikTok’s mermaid content this spring used one duochrome and nothing else.

If liner is more your speed, a teal or deep-sea blue flick on an otherwise bare eye is the most office-safe version of the trend in circulation.

The product math

You don’t need a themed collection to build this. The skin layer is whatever dewy tint you already own plus one liquid highlighter; Rare Beauty’s Positive Light and Saie’s Glowy Super Gel are the two most copied formulas in the wet-skin category, and either one mixed into base reads as finish rather than product. For the flush, a cream bronzer-blush hybrid swept high across both cheekbones and the nose does the sunburnt placement in one pass.

The aquatic accent is where one smart purchase covers the whole season. A single duochrome shadow with a teal-lavender or seafoam-pearl shift works as eyeshadow, inner-corner light, and pressed over a black liner as instant mermaid liner. Multichrome specialists like Clionadh and Terra Moons built cult followings on exactly these shifts long before the trend had a name, and ColourPop’s Super Shock formula in the shifting shades runs under $10. On the liner side, a waterproof gel pencil in deep teal, blue-green pearl, or gunmetal does the flick without the precision demands of liquid.

One texture note: pearl, not glitter. The difference is particle size. Pearl pigments are fine enough to read as a surface from conversational distance; glitter reads as dots. Every editorial version of this trend is built on the first and ruined by the second.

What to skip

Glitter density is the costume line. Once particles are large enough to see individually at arm’s length, you’ve left makeup and entered festival territory, which is a fine place to be on purpose at a festival and nowhere else. Same for layering: aqua eyes plus iridescent cheeks plus a glossy blue-toned lip is three trends stacked into a Halloween entry. The editorial versions all hold one element and let skin do the rest.

The other thing to skip is fighting humidity with powder. The entire point of the wet-finish trend is that it cooperates with a sweating face. A matte full-coverage base under teal shimmer looks wrong by noon in a way that has nothing to do with the color.

Why it’s landing now

Trend forecasting is mostly pattern matching, and the pattern here is legible. Cool tones have been creeping back for two seasons, frosted blues and silvery pearls riding the Y2K nostalgia wave. Glossy, hydrated finishes took over from flat mattes as formulas caught up, with ultra-fine silica and reflective pigments doing shine control that used to require powder. And summer always pulls makeup toward water, toward things that look like they survive a swim.

Mermaid is just where those three currents meet. It will pass, trends do, but the skin underneath it, glossy, flushed, lit from the high points, is the same finish that’s been gaining ground for two years and shows no sign of retreating. Learn the base, borrow the teal flick while it’s in season, and you’ve spent your effort on the part that lasts.