How Do Breakout-Prone Celebs Prep for the Met Gala? New York City’s Acne Whisperer Breaks It Down (2025)

Everyone’s talking about how Lorde’s teeny-tiny Met Gala top managed to stay up all night, but all I can think about is her skincare and makeup. One thing we know about Lorde is that she’s acne-prone. She’s been vocal in the past about struggling with acne and recently shared a selfie to her IG stories of her broken-out, inflamed cheeks while she was recording her new album, Virgin. In her recent cover story with Document, we got a rare glimpse into her bathroom cabinet, complete with many of our go-to Cosmopolitan Acne Award–winning products. Needless to say, she’s one of us.

But how exactly do you prep for a night where you’ll be covered in foundation, concealer, contour, and the like to hide your acne and skin texture in all the HD photos but also hopefully not break out further in the process? If you’re a star like Lorde, you go to Sofie Pavitt, who’s been dubbed NYC’s acne whisperer for years now.

It all starts in Sophie’s studio space in downtown Manhattan, where she focuses on gentle exfoliation, hydrating, and soothing to curb breakouts. She’s also really mindful of the ingredients that are in the products she uses on her clients, knowing most of them are acne-prone. She exclusively incorporates products that pass her pore-clogging ingredient checker” on her website, meaning they don’t include anything that’s highly likely to cause acne. (FYI: If you’re acne-prone, legit anything could make you break out, even if it’s not a known pore clogger. But it’s still a generally good idea to avoid the common culprits, like shea butter and coconut oil.)

For the Met Gala, her focus with Lorde was “smooth, dewy, and bouncy skin,” Pavitt says in her Instagram caption. She used a gentle enzyme exfoliant to help slough away dead skin cells, which not only can make your skin texture appear smoother but also helps slowly reduce the look of dark spots left over from previous acne. For Pavitt, gentler is better—she’d rather consistently exfoliate with a more mild AHA, like mandelic acid, than go full-steam-ahead one time with something extremely strong. This also helps reduce any further inflammation on Lorde’s skin.

Pavitt paired exfoliation with her two go-to in-office modalities for acne: LED and high-frequency. Red LED can help boost collagen production to make your skin look tighter, firmer, and glowier, as well as potentially calm down inflammation (great for skin that’s dealing with an acne flare-up). Blue LED is thought to help kill acne-causing bacteria on skin (we still need a lot more scientific research to definitively say this is the case, but anecdotally, many have noticed a big difference with continued use). What’s super cool is you can do this at home too with an LED mask—it’s not as powerful but can be repeated more efficiently from the comfort of your bed. Same goes for high-frequency, which creates a small electrical current that creates oxygen in your skin and effectively kills acne-causing bacteria. We’re big fans of at-home high-frequency wands for maintenance, but certainly, nothing beats a facial with Pavitt.

To make sure Lorde’s skin was super glowy and fresh on the night of, Pavitt coated her in a hydrojelly mask to “lock and seal moisture in,” she says. She also likely gave Lorde a generous helping of her Omega Rich Moisturizer all over her face. It’s a luxuriously hydrating cream that’s completely noncomedogenic and free of pore-clogging oils. In fact, it makes a fantastic base for makeup too.