Stage presence

Musicians Halsey, Staz Lindes and home-grown up-andcomer Celia Pavey of Vera Blue use their voices and their beauty hauls as instruments of self-expression.

HALSEY

Since she shot to fame with the 2016 hit Closer, Halsey’s refreshingly honest approach to music (and life) has seen her become a household name and land a Yves Saint Laurent beauty contract to boot. Here, she charts her beauty evolution.

The whole point of using make-up on stage is to amplify your features and make everything more expressive. When I’m performing, I’m mostly wearing a lot of dark make-up – dark lips, dark eyes. What I look like in person is a lot different than how I look on stage.

“I’m 23. When I came into the music industry I had somebody do my make-up, but I flipped out. People forget that a musician and a model are very different. A model’s job is to play a character, but as a musician I’m just myself every day. I can’t have someone who doesn’t know me coming on board and changing my face. I’m singing songs that are personal, from the bottom of my heart. My fans need to recognise the person singing to them. That’s just how it is for me. So I started doing my make-up myself. I don’t feel like I need to be wearing that much. I like to find ways to play up my existing beauty rather than trying to change what my face looks like.

“I didn’t get super-good at figuring out what kind of make-up was best for stage until I played my first headlining show. I was at Troubadour in Los Angeles and I definitely fucked it up bad. I just wanted to do something different and I was still finding myself then. I had bright, bright, bright blue hair and I cut up a bunch of flash tattoos and layered them across my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose so that from far away they’d look like a really, really intense highlight. Reflecting gold. Up close, I looked like a mermaid with scales.

“I’m pretty freestyle when it comes to beauty. I’ve been known to disappear upstairs to get ready to go out and come down with a different hair colour or with my head shaved. And everybody’s like: ‘You’ve been gone for 30 minutes, what happened?’ I’m known to be kind of reckless with my beauty decisions. I have to force myself to not be so impulsive. I can’t go on stage late because my make-up is done poorly. And I need to build confidence when I get out there.

“Obviously I love Yves Saint Laurent products, and that’s why I’ve been working with them – I’m adamant about not working with brands I don’t actually use in real life. I’m not a very good liar. YSL’s Touche Éclat All-in-One Glow is similar to a BB cream, and on days when I want to have a light look, that works out for me really well. Brow gel is a must-have for big, dark eyebrows. I guess among my fans I’m known for my highlight and getting it requires a bunch of different products: a priming highlighter, a wet highlighter, a powder highlighter and a different glitter highlighter over the top. If I ever made any kind of product, it would have to be a highlighter. That’s the thing most people ask me about. And my eyelashes – I wear fake lashes almost every single day. Ardell Wispies are an old faithful. I probably have a box the size of a bathtub at my house.

“I never have any reasoning for why I do anything with my hair. I usually wake up one day and decide I want a change, and then I do whatever is easiest and the most fun and different. I decided on the short blonde style when I was shooting looks for my album cycle – I needed something I could commit to because I would have to keep it when I shot the videos. It’s been the easiest style and the best one for me. There’s something cool about short blonde hair, because you can do anything with it. You can colour it, you can add a wig over the top – I like that kind of blank slate.

“I like to believe that women are constantly evolving. Some days I am that woman who wakes up and wants to wear full glam with eyelashes and a highlight. Other days I wake up and I’m like: ‘Nah.’ I put on some ChapStick and leave the house. If you met one of those versions of me and made assumptions about me, you wouldn’t know about the other version of me. To me, the root of feminism is about letting women do whatever the fuck they want to do. If that means buying make-up, it means buying make-up. If that means getting plastic surgery, it means getting plastic surgery. The point is to let me make those decisions. Let me decide if I want to be one or the other.” As told to Brennan Kilbane.