All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.
What defines luxury beauty? Everyone has their individual checklist. Formula savants might look to the staying power of a mirror-finish gloss or the pigment load of a velvety eye shadow. For the design fetishists, it’s all about the architecture of a compact, the seduction of a lipstick’s soft magnetic closure. There are clean ingredients to consider; refillable packaging, too. And what about the sheer fantasy of it all—photography that inspires a flight of transformation, urging us to shake loose the strictures of the past year?
Zara Beauty, a sweeping new makeup line arriving May 12, seems to tick all those boxes, except one—the price point that usually accompanies the word luxury. (Everything in the range falls between $8 and $26.) “The huge message is inclusivity,” said Diane Kendal, the influential makeup artist who serves as creative director, speaking via Zoom on a recent afternoon from a photo studio in New York. “We wanted the line to be for everyone—very democratic,” she added. “No one beauty, but beauties.”
That sentiment—a cornerstone of the brand’s messaging—feels apt for a makeup proposition that arrives in the waning months of the pandemic. “At this point, we really are looking for colors and happiness and joy,” said Eva Lopez-Lopez, who heads Zara Beauty. Beamed in from Spain, she was seated within a mock store display, surrounded by more than 100 products arranged in elegant curves and lines: translucent lip oils, slender blush compacts, nail polishes in three-dozen shades, a classic black liquid liner. The unmarked white packaging, created by Fabien Baron, would have seemed at home in 2001: A Space Odyssey, were it not for the vibrant jolts of pigment peeking out from lipstick tubes and shadow palettes. “Our ambition was to create a truly inclusive collection that anyone, regardless of skin color, gender, age, or personal style, would want to use,” Lopez-Lopez continued.
Kendal—a soft-spoken force in the fashion industry, from Italian Vogue shoots to Marc Jacobs runway shows—is a particularly inspired choice to lead the brand. Originally from Wokingham, west of London, she came of age in the ’80s, as the Blitz Kids were shaping the style agenda. “That was a real period of people experimenting with different looks,” she said, recalling her own spell with bright-red hair (“backcombed, it was, like, two feet tall”) paired with a heavy sweep of red eye shadow. In her early 20s, she met Guido Palau, then a budding hairstylist, and the two friends rose to become a formidable duo on set, alongside photographers like David Sims. The idea that Kendal, now at the top of her field, would know her way around lipstick formulas and powder blushes was a given—even if testing lab samples in the midst of a global lockdown had its challenges. But more than that, she brings a spirit of reinvention and refined play to Zara, along with her easy-going warmth.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the eye-candy portfolios created for Zara Beauty’s debut. The makeup artist tapped nine different photographers—as far apart stylistically as Marilyn Minter (oozing with glittery sensuality), Steven Meisel (glamorously stylized, with hair by Palau), and Zoë Ghertner (spare and natural, as seen on the model Binx Walton). Taken together, the campaign is a testament to Kendal’s mesmerizing hand, capable of coaxing out moods through humidity-soaked skin or painterly strokes of pigment. It’s also a tangible representation of that something-for-everyone vision.
Along with high-performance products, Lopez-Lopez’s team kept a focus on sustainability. (Nearly all the formulas are vegan as well.) The bronzer, for instance, comes loose with a gentle tug on an unseen magnet, to allow for easy replacement. The same goes for the refillable lipstick tubes, which stand winsomely off-kilter, like futuristic Towers of Pisa. “Fabien came up with the idea of doing everything on a slant, to reflect the Z for Zara,” said Kendal.
But Zara’s wisest move has been to let Kendal lead the way. After the makeup artist created a mismatched eye shadow look on a model for the Oliver Hadlee Pearch portfolio, Lopez-Lopez proposed a fresh take on the two-tone compact—not following prescribed rules for a smoky eye. Instead, Zara pits flame orange with teal; lemon with vivid green; brick red and cinnamon (so you, too, can layer up like young Kendal, as if you’re headed to the Mudd Club or Heaven).
It’s all enough to warrant marking your calendar for May 12, when you can shop for fuchsia matte lipstick and copper multi-use pigments with the help of virtual try-on technology. “Zara, as a brand, they didn’t want to put any limits on anything,” said Kendal, reflecting on the freedom of the campaign portfolio—but she could have been speaking for the free-wheeling approach to makeup as a whole. “They were just, like, ‘Yes, go and create and have fun. Let’s play with it.’”
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
— Royal Family Cold War: Will Harry and William Make Up?
— Lourdes Leon Is Ready to Express Herself
— All the Looks From the 2021 Oscars Red Carpet
— The Doomed, Would-Be Celebrity Paradise That Still Haunts Myrtle Beach
— How Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton Carry on Princess Diana’s Fashion Legacy
— The Making and Unmaking of Chet Hanks’s “White Boy Summer”
— The 16 Best Mascaras in 2021, According to Sam Visser, Ego Nwodim, and More
— From the Archive: Diana and the Press
— Sign up for the Royal Watch newsletter to receive all the chatter from Kensington Palace and beyond.
