Growing up, my beauty icons were from comic books. I always thought the superheroes were gorgeous. I loved Starfire and Raven from Teen Titans. And then in high school, it was Tavi Gevinson. I was obsessed, I loved everything she did.
Make-up is something I started experimenting with in high school. But in between school and starting my role as Jules in Euphoria, I was modelling, and they like you not to wear make-up when you’re not on set. So I got really used to not wearing it, and then when Euphoria started, I jumped back into this heavy make-up world. I got to experiment with it on a new level. It felt like a blank canvas, and my approach to it was really playful and illustrative.
In some ways, make-up is my mask. It’s about creating a safety blanket between what I give to the world and what I keep for myself. The tools we have to do that — beauty, fashion, fragrance — are all such great things to help bring this person that we have inside of us, outwards. Even with fragrance, where it might not necessarily be visual, it’s about a feeling. In the way you might feel when you put a pair of heels on and you feel more powerful, I think fragrance can do the same.
I first started to feel beautiful in my twenties. Everyone deals with insecurities and it’s something I still deal with today. But I’m in my mid-twenties now and I feel like I’ve figured it out on a level that I hadn’t before. Adolescence is about experimenting and trying on different faces. But I think I’ve really come into myself in a way that I feel confident and comfortable about.
I feel like I’ve become a more sophisticated version of myself. My editing eye has come more into play. I think I used to have a very “more is more” approach. You can even see evidence of that with early Jules. Whereas now I like to think that I have a more conservative approach. I’m thinking about how one thing is interacting with another and taking away what isn’t helping the whole look.
My make-up journey has mirrored Jules’s make-up journey in Euphoria. Especially at the beginning, I really felt like Jules was one step away from who I was. And I think that carried over into season two, where I go through waves of really wanting to feel glamorous or pretty or more feminine, and then lean into maybe more masculine or more blasé or carefree parts of myself. It was reflective of what I was feeling beauty wise at the time. We’re filming right now, and I’m definitely feeling a similar sensibility of where I’m at now, many years later, coming across in what we’re creating.
If I had to pick a favourite make-up look from Euphoria… I still love the club sequence look from season one, episode seven. That one’s very near and dear to my heart. I remember feeling very cute.
Am I going to be doing method dressing to promote the Blade Runner 2099 series? I’ve certainly been having conversations with my stylist. Blade Runner is one of my favourite visual worlds in film, so I think it’s going to be such a fun point of reference for the press tour.
If I could attend any past Met Gala… It would be Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, in 2011, because I’m a diehard McQueen fan, or the technology one, Manus x Machina, in 2016, or the Catholicism one, Heavenly Bodies, in 2018.
A beauty hack I swear by is eyebrow maintenance. It feels like this secret that I unlocked once I started paying attention to the way my brows interact with the rest of my face. I started experimenting with finding the right shape and learning how to execute it and maintain it. It made a huge difference.
One of the best parts of being one of Thierry Mugler’s Angels is hearing how many people in my life that I didn’t even know had this relationship with the fragrance. My grandmother loved Mugler Angel back in the day. The history there is so cool. Obviously, my new fragrance is Mugler Angel Stellar (£130 for 100ml, theperfumeshop.com) but there’s this beautiful wide family of Angel fragrances and they’re all based on this one fragrance that I love and have this deep relationship with.
One thing people need to know about celebrity beauty? People need to be reminded that most make-up looks you see on the red carpet have been carefully curated and created by a very talented team whose entire profession is making people look beautiful. It’s not necessarily a normal make-up look.
If I had to be buried in one beauty look, open casket, it would be a fresh face. I think it would be really fierce. I still want to look like me, but fresh, as if I could be alive. And for the outfit, it would have to be something that would look good lying down.
