the Flemish face; Forget dark lipstick.

Byline: Gaby Wood

The girl turns to look at you in faint amusement, the trace of a smile on her lips, a diamond-white glint in her iris. She has skin as smooth as alabaster but seemingly twice as warm-as if a doll had come to life and taken a breath of fresh air. She has barely a brow, no visible lashes, and her hair is pulled back into insignificance; it is her face that glows and holds your gaze. And the more you look, the more you are moved by something else-the way the shadow gently cups her chin, graces the side of her neck. The light touches her so intimately that to look feels almost an intrusion.

The makeup artist James Kaliardos recently stood in front of this portrait, Study of a Young Woman, by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was leaving the gala opening of the museum's Costume Institute when he got fortuitously lost in the European Paintings galleries. "The way the light shades the nose and catches in the eye-it's beautiful to see that kind of softness, and to be inspired by it," he said.

Kaliardos is not the only one to have been inspired. The "big story" of the fall collections, as makeup artist Pat McGrath puts it, is what many are calling the Flemish Face. The unmistakably luminous, seemingly makeup-free complexions and clear, bright eyes made famous in the portraits of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, van Eyck, and van der Weyden have been embraced by a number of designers. At shows from Balenciaga and Marc Jacobs to Rochas and Vera Wang, models like Gemma Ward, Lily Donaldson, Lisa Cant, and Lily Cole-delicate beauties who are, perhaps not coincidentally, distinguished by the angelic features that hark back to this period-skipped the smoky eye and painted lip in favor of the clean skin and pearly, crescent-moon eyelids fashionable between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

McGrath describes the look as "painterly." Of the season's new attitude she says, "It's a whole other form of beauty-it's really pared down. Like a fine-art beauty." And though the look may appear to be makeup-free-perfect skin emanating an intangible, soft-focus inner light-McGrath is careful to point out that the bare ...