Beauty: Your complete makeup kit for party season

’Tis the season of dinners, drinks parties and family gatherings: Christmas calls for a capsule makeup kit to take you from night to day with minimum fuss and maximum impact. Alice Ryan packs her festive beauty bag

Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Flawless Filter, 12 shades, £39, Space NK, Trinity Street, Cambridge and spacenk.com
If you’re knackered and your skin knows it, wave this little cushion-tipped wand at your face. Famously inspired by artful Hollywood lighting, it’s the real-life version of a flattering phone filter: super-fine powders, plumping oils, smoothing polymers and brightening porcelain flower extract combine to both blur imperfections and give glow. Apply wherever you need it, either solo or under your foundation. It works absolute wonders on pores.

Sisley-Paris Phyto-Noir Mascara in 2: Deep Brown, £44.80, John Lewis & Partners, Grand Arcade, Cambridge and johnlewis.com
Applied with a curvaceous hourglass brush, which manages to grip, coat, lift and curl every single lash, this mascara is a doozy. The formula is silky to apply, rich with pigment and builds brilliantly, no clumping. As you’d expect from Sisley, known for its hybrid products, it not only makes your lashes look good, it does them good too: vitamin-infused peptides promise to stimulate growth, with length and fullness visibly boosted from four weeks. I love this dark brown shade; eye-opening and defining but slightly gentler than a trad black.

CODE8 Iconoclast Eyeshadow Palette in Velvet Chrome, £47, codeeight.com
Streamlining makeup routines with products that do the hard work for you, the Iconoclast six-pan eyeshadow palette is a calling card for London-born brand CODE8. Pairing a great primer with five versatile matte and shimmer shades - a day-friendly nude, a party pink and blue and a pair of sultry smokes - this iteration is perfect for the festive season. Infused with sweet almond and evening primrose oils for ease of application and dewiness of finish, all the shadows are buttery, blendable and can be used either wet or dry.

et al. Complexion Glow in Blush Glow, £50 with refillable palette, etalbeautycollective.co.uk
This is a new-to-me product and I’m smitten. Combining an ombre of blush shades (which produce a delicious flush of colour) with a multi-tasking highlighter (swish it in with the blush for all-over glow or apply solo to bounce light), it comes in a planet-friendly refillable compact and, if you buy the Christmas gifting version, you get a brush and cotton pouch too (£52). Founded by a scientist and a makeup artist, all et al. products come with skincare benefits: Complexion Glow contains aloe vera and Vitamin E to hydrate, soothe and smooth.

Stila Stay All Day Waterproof Liquid Eye Liner in Intense Black, £21, gloriousbeauty.co.uk
Having tried pretty much every liquid liner known to man, take it from me: Stay All Day is right up there with liners that retail at twice, even thrice, the price. Packed with pigment and smooth to apply, no snagging even on my wrinkly old lids, the marker-like tip lends itself to precision application, whether you’re looking for a classic flick or fancy linework. It dries quickly - great if your lids are prone to transfer - and is impressively long-lasting too, all of which makes it a shoo-in for party season.

Trinny London Lip2Cheek in Rossy, £26, trinnylondon.com
Lip2Cheek is a bestseller for Trinny Woodall’s cult beauty brand for good reason. Its creamy texture allows it to be applied effortlessly, with either the tap of a fingertip or the swoosh of a brush, and the colour is genuinely buildable, allowing you to go for subtle or striking, depending on your mood and/or destination. While peachy Lady J is my day-to-day for both lips and cheeks - I keep a pot both in the bathroom and in my handbag - lush poppy red Rossy is crying out to be worn as lippy at Christmas.

Jo Malone London Fir & Artemisia Cologne, from £58 for 30ml, Jo Malone London, Rose Crescent, Cambridge and jomalone.co.uk
Billed as bottled ‘comfort and joy’, this winter’s limited edition cologne from Jo Malone London is exactly that. Layering aromatic artemisia with woody fir and warm leather, it’s bright yet cosseting too; not just for Christmas, you’ll want to wear it all winter through.

Pictured: Anna-Taylor Joy wears the New York city-inspired T by Tiffany collection, shot by Carljin Jacobs for the jewellery brand’s 2024 holiday campaign: With love, Since 1837. See tiffany.com