Having announced her pregnancy on the Met Gala red carpet, it was always going to be a poignant night for Adwoa Aboah. What made it doubly special was the fact that her longtime friend and make-up artist, Celia Burton, is also seven months pregnant (Aboah is six) with her first child. “We are really old and dear friends and these Met moments have been huge for both of us in our careers, so it felt really emotional and special to be doing this one together, with our babies in our bellies,” Burton tells Vogue.
In a beautiful red-carpet pregnancy reveal, dressed in a vivid red, custom H&M two-piece, Aboah proved that the pregnancy glow is real. “With such an amazing outfit, the make-up was all about letting her luminosity shine through, and we wanted to incorporate a red element in there somewhere,” Burton says. “We um-ed and ah-ed about doing a full red lip or something a little more graphic, but in the end Adwoa’s boyfriend Daniel suggested a Queen Amidala shape – that’s Natalie Portman’s character in Star Wars.”
While not originally a reference for Aboah’s look, the pair decided to try it, flipping the traditional red lip for something a little cooler. They used Fara Homidi’s lip pencils in Red 1 and Red 2 to define the shape, then filled the heart-shaped look in with Homidi’s Lip Compact. “After that, I used Mehron’s Lipstix Sealer which made sure the look didn’t transfer from one lip to the other,” she says. Paired with a shiny eyelid and fresh complexion – courtesy of Homidi’s Essential Face highlighter – and Aboah was good to go.
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“I know her face so well that I did her make-up in 25 minutes and we both laughed because it looked so epic,” says Burton. “It’s a relatively simple look, but with a definitive shape to turn the whole thing on its head and make it totally unique. I think it worked quite well.”
