YSL Beauty
In the music video for her latest single “Rock Music,” Charli xcx is all rock ‘n’ roll antics: shoving a TV out a window, smashing a guitar, smoking a dozen cigarettes at once. She snags a YSL Candy Glaze Lip Gloss Stick and deftly paints her lips while her husband, George Daniel of The 1975, smokes in the background. It’s nearly time for the show (and a new album era).
“Luckily, I didn’t pick up that product and throw it,” Charli says casually, sitting in a studio space in Brooklyn where she’s filming the campaign to announce her new role as ambassador for YSL Beauty. The same can’t be said for a rogue salt shaker she tossed behind her while stomping around in that scene. “It literally concussed my husband…I had the worst aim of all time. I couldn’t believe that I mindlessly threw the salt shaker and it bumped him on the head, but luckily that didn’t happen with the Candy Glaze, otherwise it would have been death by beauty for George.”
Charli’s beauty looks have always been an integral—if underrated—part of her visual identity. She has long gravitated toward a big smoky eye, with brief interludes to experiment with a statement lip or an ombre bob. Brat was awash in black eyeliner and clear skin, but “Rock Music” ups the intensity as she transforms into a music icon caricature. There is something of her teenage self in the look, she says.
“Makeup has always been a part of what I do, even if it’s really minimal; that’s always intentional,” Charli tells Vogue. “But with this new video I put out, I’ve gone for this really big glossy black eye, very sort of oil slick, messy, which I feel like that kind of makeup was the makeup I used to do when I was way, way, way, way younger. Except when I was younger, I would do it with face paint. Now it’s like with YSL,” she laughs, “which is an upgrade to say the least.”
Her partnership with YSL Beauty is a continuation of her evolving relationship with the brand over the past year; she wore Saint Laurent (and YSL Beauty) to the Met Gala and sat front row at Paris Fashion Week last fall. For this new beauty campaign, out today, she recreates the GRWM process before a show, pairing the brand’s new Skin Affair Soft Glow Cushion Foundation (out May 29) with the Gloss Stick spotted in her music video and the inky-black Lash Latex Mascara.
Working with Sam Visser, YSL Beauty’s global makeup artist, Charli is embracing a new look that still feels very true to all past versions of herself: sheer, plump skin and lips, with the eyes as a focal point. “They’re not afraid to play with the exact things that I gravitate towards,” she says, “which is like a heavier, darker eye that’s sort of dark and evil and something sexy. I feel they let me be me, which is my main thing whenever I’m working with anybody.” Adds Visser, “We have a similar idea of makeup. We wanted to make sure the makeup gave glamorous, rockstar, daring energy.”
The look is, perhaps, a physical embodiment of where she is now, bold and wholly in control (or at least appearing to be). After three cinematic projects—her autofiction music biopic The Moment, plus the soundtracks for Wuthering Heights and Mother Mary—she’s taking a minute to return to pop music (yes, even if it’s called “Rock Music”) after the eternal Brat summer. This Charli, like the iterations of the past, is mainly focused on making things. It’s when she feels most herself. It’s why she can take pleasure in the littlest details of a song or a music video, like the cigarette mountains in “Rock Music,” which she notes were hand-rolled and made their own kind of music. (“They were almost sculptural. When you rubbed them all together, they sounded nautical, like a wind chime.”) Like the beauty looks she loves the most, “Rock Music” era Charli xcx feels both fresh and lived-in, somehow the natural next move for an artist who traverses pop as if it’s a playground.
After the Met Gala, Charli stayed out until eight in the morning despite having a shoot at 10 a.m. that day. After 12-plus hours, that dramatic cat eye shadow had morphed into something else. But she doesn’t care too much about scrubbing off the old versions of herself. “If there’s bits of makeup remaining on, I like that,” she says. The grunge is kind of the point. The next day has already arrived. “I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s a little bit on. I’ll just sleep on it.’”
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
