Most children remember the first time they were allowed to hold a lipstick. Kylie Cantrall remembers perfecting a winged liner. She was six years old, standing before a mirror ahead of a dance competition, tracing a red lip and a black flick with the seriousness of someone who already understood that a face could be a form of authorship. Nearly two decades later, as she releases her sophomore EP, Valley Girl Problems, that same instinct animates everything about her, only now the headache-inducing competition bun has given way to chunky red highlights and a glossy lip she can talk about with the fluency of a longtime devotee.
Cantrall, the Venezuelan-American actor who plays Red in Disney’s Descendants franchise, is at a hinge moment. The nine-track Valley Girl Problems, produced by the legendary Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, the mind behind “Umbrella” and “Single Ladies,” arrived on July 24 and follows the single “Carrie Bradshaw.” She calls it the bridge between where she has been and where she is going, a record that stays inside her signature Y2K R&B world while sounding more elevated and more honest about the tumultuous friendships and lingering feelings of a girl in her early twenties. Critics have noticed the shift; one review praised her for putting a fresh spin on the breakup narrative by writing about platonic heartbreak rather than romantic loss, a maturity that mirrors the way her relationship with beauty has quietly deepened over time.
That relationship began as pure joy and, for a stretch, became strategy. Growing up on camera taught Cantrall to contour for the lens and cater to the so-called good side of her face while the rest of her generation was still fumbling with their first eyeliner. What she describes now is a return, a decision to find delight again in every swipe of lipstick rather than fixating on outside noise. She credits her glam team, Robert Bryan and George Cozma, with understanding exactly what makes her feel most like herself, and she believes deeply in manifestation, the idea that visualizing herself on Disney Channel at five, then rehearsing the look of the person she wanted to become, was its own kind of preparation.
Her essentials read like a lineage. The Dr. Jart+ Cicapair moisturizer she calls possibly her favorite skincare product ever, lightweight enough that it never leaves her dry skin greasy before makeup, a discovery she owes entirely to Bryan. The L’Oréal Telescopic mascara has been her constant since she was about eleven, that slim wand catching every lash for length and lift without a hint of clumping, a drugstore classic she keeps returning to after trying countless others. The Rhode Glazing Mist, a birthday gift from her best friend Shar, now lives in her bag as an antidote to dry Los Angeles heat, an instant refresh she insists her fellow L.A. girls need to tap into.
And then the combination she treats as a personal canon event, the discovery every girl chases: Charlotte Tilbury’s Pillow Talk Lip Cheat in Medium layered under Laneige’s Glaze Craze Lip Serum in Cinnamon Sugar. She swears by it. It is a small, precise ritual, and it tells you everything about how Cantrall moves through the world. The manifestation she practiced as a child was never only mental. It showed up on her mouth, at the corner of her eye, in the glossy finish she rehearsed long before anyone was watching. Now the cameras are rolling, the EP is out, and the girl who called her shot at five is still, gloriously, doing her own face.
