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Well before YSL Beauté can officially announce Dua Lipa as the new face of its global cosmetics collection in the spring, everybody has a few things to do, namely a secret photo shoot and a series of interviews in New York City during the final days of fall.
When I arrive just on time for my own slice of face time with Lipa, things are running fashionably late. It’s not a logistical nightmare because nightmares aren’t real. Pulling off a clandestine shoot with one of the world’s most famous women in one of its most densely populated cities for an announcement that will occur months later is more of a logistical bomb cyclone, which is perhaps why the shoot is sheltered in the geometric center of a studio building downtown, away from prying gazes and beyond the light of day. My access to a room labeled “YVES SAINT LAURENT” with paper signage is initially denied, but moments later, the doors open to release an entourage of no less than 10 people, all looking creatively exhausted — at their center is Dua Lipa, dressed in a multitude of distinct shades of black. She does not seem tired.
After being escorted to another, even more private room, Lipa settles onto a couch opposite a shaded window for a series of short interviews with beauty press such as myself; her legs are crossed and her exquisitely tailored wool pants end in pointy patent-leather pumps. “I feel like the Saint Laurent woman walks a fine line between masculine and feminine,” Lipa tells me. “I love a boyish style as well.” She says multiple times that she loves duality. She is stumped only briefly when I ask her who the most beautiful person she’s ever met is. “I meet beautiful people all of the time,” she says to nearby publicists, sounding gently frazzled for lack of an immediate answer.
In the greater context of her career — London teen to cocktail waitress to up-and-coming recording artist to famous musician with a global cosmetics contract — the current moment is a transitional one for Lipa. If earworm hits such as 2017's “New Rules” gained her worldwide recognition, her 2020 album Future Nostalgia solidified her as a figure worth stanning. Her involvement with the Barbie movie (she played a mermaid and contributed a now-hit song) kept her on press tours throughout 2023, which have seamlessly coincided with pre-press for her other new film (a guest role in Argylle) and yet-to-be-announced third album (teased by the disco single “Houdini”).
Lipa is hard at work divesting herself of past aesthetic signatures in preparation for her next era. “When I think about Future Nostalgia, it was very pop and glitter and glamorous in certain ways,” she says. If that album had a color palette, it would be chartreuse and bubbles, club lights on silver sequins, Muglerian neons. If Dua Lipa herself has a color palette, it’s a prismatic assortment of mostly browns. She keeps a single stick of ruddy lipstick on her at all times — YSL Candy Glaze in Scenic Brown, if we are being specific to the current moment — and uses it on her cheeks, eyelids, anywhere. “I just want to wear something that makes me look good,” she says.
Lipa has given few other hints about her new creative direction until last October, when she upended a brief Instagram hiatus with the release of the aforementioned new single, “Houdini,” and the reveal of a new hair color. Fans have called it “Cherry Coke;” Allure’s official swatch was “mulled wine.” It’s a red that is almost certainly also brown. “The idea is very vibrant, but dark,” her hairstylist and colorist, Ben Gregory, tells Allure. The specific shade was a result of Lipa’s own divine inspiration. “It was just me in the studio while I was listening to the music [for the new record], and I feel like I just saw the color red a lot,” Lipa said. “And I wanted to dye my hair and do a little change. And actually going back to that most beautiful person question, I think it's Margot Robbie. Really unbelievably gorgeous. Just like, stunning, beautiful.”
In a moment of pure serendipity, Gregory made his own plans to pitch Lipa on red hair, and he was pleasantly surprised to find she had already been thinking about it. Lipa recalls experimenting with red hair dye during the early days of the pandemic when she was doing press interviews for Future Nostalgia. Back then, she liked how one candy-apple shade of Manic Panic looked with her skin tone but deemed it too vibrant. Last summer, Gregory and a few assistants flew to Ibiza for the original 10 hour-long dye job, which involved lifting the raven black that Gregory had given Lipa for the Met Gala and replacing it with a clownish shade of crimson, then glossed to new depths. (For her most recent press blitz, Gregory had to be on hand for constant touch ups — he jokes that she “kidnapped” him.)
He likes how the shade feels contemporary but also something a ‘90s supermodel would have worn. It wasn’t until after the fact that Lipa recognized the shade from her childhood — she looked just like her mother, Anesa. “I was like, ‘Oh my god,’ I literally got the same color.” She smiles. “I quite like that.” Gregory posted it on his Instagram, “New era - new colour!”
Lately, Lipa finds herself less inspired by the disco dreamscape that informed Future Nostalgia and more by the timeless vibe of dancing all night in London — less highlighter, more sweat soak. “Now I'm much more into, like, dewy skin and clear gel in my brows. I don't feel like I need to get them any darker than they already are.” Lipa’s eyebrows are a wonder of her face up close; each one looks like it weighs at least half a pound. “A woman who owned a brow bar emailed me and said, ‘It looks like you’re not plucking your eyebrows — let me fix them for you.’ And I was like, ‘I don't pluck my eyebrows.’ So you're just saying that my eyebrows are fucked, basically?” Lipa laughs about it now. If she plucks a stray hair in the privacy of her vanity mirror, that’s her business, but beauty professionals and salon proprietors are forbidden from touching them. “I'm gonna stick with them, because this is what I got. These are the cards I got dealt.”
Other cards include: a new movie, a new global cosmetics contract, a new album, which suggests — even declares — a new Dua Lipa? Just as it occurs to me that the only clues I’ve been given are face sweat and Cherry Coke hair, our time is up, and it’s time for the next interviewer. I leave thinking of only eyebrows: Some things are better left alone.
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