Mika Abdalla has spent most of her life watching other people do her makeup. The actor has been working on sets since she was six, which means she has picked up plenty of beauty tricks along the way, but also figured out which ones she would rather ignore. Concealer, for instance, is applied sparingly. “I don’t like to hide my tiredness,” she says while sharing her Beauty Secrets with Vogue, tapping a small amount of CHANEL concealer into her skin with her fingers.
Breakouts don’t particularly unsettle her either. Her on-set makeup artist introduced Abdalla to a more skincare-forward way of dealing with them: under-eye patches, a little Mario Badescu, pimple patches and then makeup straight over the top. “I didn’t know that was an option,” she says.
The first time Abdalla filled in her eyebrows, she used a brow gel pot in high school; a friend immediately noticed something was different. She has stuck to clear brow gel ever since. Around her eyes, she traces brown kohl into the inner corners before extending it outwards, a shape inspired by her nan’s naturally elongated lash line and follows that with brown Ilia tubing mascara.
Abdalla uses the same brush for her Refy bronzer and CHANEL’s blush-and-highlighter duo stick. “No one’s going to like that,” she jokes, but her narrow makeup pouch leaves little room for single-use tools. She prefers her complexion dewy, though warm weather calls for some CHANEL powder. Then comes an unconventional extra step: concealer over the powder, followed by powder again. “I don’t know,” she says. “It does more.”
She overlines her lips with a brown Make Up For Ever lip pencil, smudges the edges and finishes with a reddish Givenchy plumping lip oil. She’s also devoted to Lawless’s plumping lip mask, which she readily hands out to her guy friends.
As Allie Hayes in Off Campus, the actor’s shaggy layers, overgrown fringe and gloriously unruly volume have inspired salon screenshots, online tutorials and a small army of viewers trying to reverse-engineer exactly what is happening on her head. Which makes Abdalla’s own hair history especially funny: until about four years ago, she didn’t even realise she had textured hair. “I just thought it was frizzy,” she says.