An Indie Beauty Brand Looks Southwest for Summer Bronzer Inspiration

Take us to the desert.
By Lyndsay Green

From top: Make Bronzing Brick in Taos, Marfa, and Joshua Tree ($30 each)

"While the pigments emulate the dry desert,
each formula is enriched with a blend of hydrating and skin-nourishing ingredients
like vitamins C and E."

Make Bronzing Brick in Taos

As soon as summer rolls around, one cosmetics staple becomes essential to every woman’s beauty routine: bronzer. Used to enhance the natural effects brought by the resurgence of the sun, bronzer is most commonly applied to achieve a golden, dewy, lit-from-within glow. Independent beauty brand, Make, however, has other intentions this season.

For its latest collection of Bronzing Bricks ($30 each), Make abandons the ubiquitous dewy skin-flushed cheeks trend, instead looking to create a more rustic finish that channels elemental pigments found in the American Southwest.

Each shade of the collection adopts the name of the city it is inspired by. Joshua Tree, a dusty rose, embodies the scorched ground in the High Desert. Marfa, the burnt orange hue intended for olive and medium skin tones, is reminiscent of the Texas city’s skyline at sundown. And Taos, a reddish-brown shade most appropriate for deep skin tones (or, as an alternative for contouring), nods to the terracotta edifices that bake in the New Mexico sun.

Terms like “burnished,” “baked,” even “rust,” come to mind at first glimpse of the bronzer trio. And while the pigments emulate the dry desert, each formula is enriched with a blend of hydrating and skin-nourishing ingredients like vitamins C and E. As with all Make products, the bronzers are free of parabens, never tested on animals, and 10% of proceeds benefit the We See Beauty Foundation, a nonprofit that supports female entrepreneurs.

If a trip southwest is not in the foreseeable future, recreate the effect of a day under the Texan (or Californian or New Mexican) sun with one of Make’s Bronzing Bricks and lock in the look with a spritz of the brand’s Succulent Mist ($25), infused with cactus, aloe, and marigold extracts, for a dually desert-inspired regimen.