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In a world of impossibly high beauty standards, it is refreshing to talk to a make-up artist who has no interest in perfection. “I don’t wear concealer. I really like my eye bags,” Cécile Paravina tells me. I’m instantly transported to the early 1990s BC (before concealer), when some of my beauty icons — Béatrice Dalle, Tyra Banks — looked all the more gorgeous for their little dark circles. “I want to tell people, ‘Eye bags are OK — and a lot of the time they look cute,’ ” Paravina says.
It’s a radical notion for those of us witnessing our own tired eyes on screen during a Zoom call and can’t quite see the cuteness. But it’s also a soothing one.
Paravina says that we don’t need to overthink experimentation
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Paravina is one of the three young, cool make-up artists who are the creative forces behind Chanel’s new beauty collections. The brand refers to the trio as the Comètes Collective, which could be a chic name for an indie girl band. Together Paravina, Valentina Li and Ammy Drammeh have brought some rather renegade vibes to the label.
Paravina is a fan of bleached eyebrows — a tendency that began long before the present fashion for the style. She dyed hers as a teenager after she saw a look by the British make-up artist Pat McGrath in 2012; it made a punchy statement in the tiny town of Aumetz, northeastern France, where Paravina grew up. Her winter collection for Chanel, Clairvoyance, was inspired by Gabrielle Chanel’s curiosity about intuition and the supernatural: think violet eyeshadow and rust-coloured lips, but more wearable than this sounds.
The cutting edge can become the classic, says Drammeh
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All three artists have gloriously unconventional approaches to make-up. Li is something of a magical thinker, known for creating fantastical looks: bejewelled lips, anime-style eyes, hyper-realistic colour. When I ask why she decided to dye her hair, a sharp little bob, cobalt blue, she says: “I never felt like I belonged to this planet. The sky is blue and the ocean is blue, and we live in between. I just wanted to fit in.” She cites the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch as one of her influences. “I deeply connect to nature and the Earth itself.”
Li grew up in southwestern China, in a small village in Guangxi, where forests and rivers were her playground, so it’s no wonder she is inspired by the natural world. Her first collection for Chanel, in spring, was — surprise — dedicated to blue, with cyan eyeliner and aquamarine eyeshadow. For Christmas Li has created the unapologetically bold Enchanted Night eyeshadow and blush palette of fuchsia, silver, copper and violet-brown shades. “I am so happy to be able to push the boundary a little bit,” she says.
The Comètes all seem to want to nudge us out our colour comfort zones. They may have a point: my cosmetic cornerstone is a brown eyeliner. But Drammeh says it doesn’t take a personality transplant to try an orange liner instead. “Colour should be something that you can incorporate without changing you,” she says.
“I am so happy to be able to push the boundary,” says Li
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As a child she recreated dramatic Kevyn Aucoin looks on her mother. For her summer collection for Chanel, Drammeh, who has Gambian and Spanish heritage, introduced subtle metallic peaches and shimmery tangerines inspired by African and Mediterranean sunsets.
• How to get a flawless complexion — by make-up artist Lisa Eldridge
For those inclined to balk at the rainbow of products from the Comètes, Drammeh points out their work may not seem so “out there” in a few years’ time. True to the spirit of Gabrielle Chanel, she says that the cutting edge can become the classic: “The colours I’ve used are new for Chanel right now. But the Chanel make-up studio has always created shades that were very new for that moment that became, like, ‘a thing’.”
The vampy nail shade Rouge Noir was a punkish statement when it launched 30 years ago — now it’s the classic winter colour. And, as Paravina points out, we don’t need to overthink experimentation. “It’s make-up — it washes off at the end of the day!”
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