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When I was fourteen, I found an interview with make‑up artist Charlotte Tilbury in the pages of Vogue. In it, she revealed the inspiration behind the beauty look she crafted for Chloé’s spring/summer 2005 runway, where bronzed supermodels — Daria Werbowy, Gemma Ward — glided along the catwalk in crystal‑flecked silk.
Tilbury said her vision sprang from a summer spent sipping cocktails with Kate Moss and Stella McCartney in Ibiza: lightly toasted skin, freckles, raw terracotta tones. The anecdote was impossibly glamorous, and she’d captured that Balearic afterglow and transposed it onto the fashion-week-ravaged complexions of models who had just stepped off Paris’s wintry streets. Ten years later, I would become a make‑up artist myself (and, a few years after that, a beauty journalist) in pursuit of that same alchemy.
Today, Tilbury sits opposite me at the Park Hyatt, surrounded by lipsticks, powders and a semi‑circle of beauty editors. Her eponymous cosmetics label has taken her from backstage fixture to the helm of an empire with the ambition to be a €1BN brand. So where did her magic touch come from? “My parents were constantly talking about form, colour, lighting,” she says of her childhood, spent between Chelsea in London and Ibiza. Her father, the artist Lance Tilbury, and her mother, a film producer, hosted what she calls “rock stars, hippies and fashion people”.
“I was obsessed with glamour. My mother loved red lipstick, and I’d watch a woman walk into a room and see her power — what made her magnetic?” Tilbury recalls. “Those women may have known how to put on make‑up a bit better, they certainly knew how to work it. And I was fascinated by the psychology of that — why does someone hold that power? Why can’t everyone have it?”
Whether backstage or in a laboratory, Tilbury’s career has hinged on alchemy: distilling memories, people and desires into pigment. “I almost can’t create without a vision in mind,” she says. “I cannot create if I can’t see her.” When she launched her brand in 2013, those visions became the now‑famous ‘look’ wardrobes: archetypes — Golden Goddess, Uptown Girl, Rock Chick — sold as easy, self‑contained kits. Shades were coded against eye colour and skin tone, but her muses weren’t limited to supermodels. “There was a 60 woman in Arkansas who cried in my chair because she’d never realised how green her eyes were,” Tilbury says.
A beauty consumer first and foremost, Tilbury once told Into the Gloss that it was the thrill of her fair lashes turning inky and seductive with mascara that got her hooked on the beauty game. ” When I went to boarding school [in England] at 13, I saw that all of the English girls wore lots of makeup. That’s when I discovered mascara. I had fair eyelashes, and I went from having this ‘piggy’ look on my face to suddenly having these thick, black, long lashes. After three months, I went back to Ibiza on a school break, and I was more popular overnight.”
Her devotion to a bold lash line and kohl hasn’t wavered – she famously told press she often tops up her “bedroom eyes” after washing her face and turning in beside her husband.
It’s that emotional jolt, that burst of feeling and confidence, Tilbury chases for her customers, especially those customers who think make‑up isn’t for them. “I didn’t steal market share, I grew it,” she says, pointing to category‑defining launches such as Hollywood Flawless Filter (half primer, half highlighter) and Unreal Skin Sheer Glow Tint, created “for the Birkenstock‑wearing, green‑juice‑cleansing yoga girl who hates make‑up” and beloved by Kate Moss and Sienna Miller. Viola, the best-selling lipstick and liner in the world. Pillow Talk, the neutral‑pink lip that became a global franchise, was born from what Tilbury calls her “beauty DNA thievery”. “You look at someone’s mouth and think, ‘Why isn’t mine that colour?”
Whether it’s Giselle Bündchen’s glow (“I’d think you really irritate me, you’re from Brazil, you have that glow, you eat lollies all day, and you walk around with a kind of beach light on you…”) or Kate Moss’s ineffable cool, every moment of envy in Tilbury’s world is an opportunity for inspiriaton, and a solution.
Such original and personal inspiration was nurtured over three decades of working with famous faces, and the uniquely original products that have resulted have naturally attracted imitators. The rise of “dupes” still bemuses her. “They’re make‑up criminals — they should all be locked up, and I mean that with love,” she laughs. Duping, she insists, isn’t mere copying: “It’s claiming that with one circle and a line on the packaging, you have exactly the same thing.” Given that some Tilbury formulas take years of R&D, the claim is dubious, and consumers who fall for it still pay for a product that isn’t Charlotte Tilbury and possibly doesn’t work.
But, she prefers to look forward. The latest launch, Unreal Blush Healthy Glow Stick, has brought her away from the red carpet and beauty retail wars and back to Ibiza. “There’s a sunset there, golden hour with pink and lilac streaks,” she recalls. “When that light drips down your face, it’s like someone flicking on the most flattering spotlights. I wanted to capture and bottle it.”
Tilbury smiles, tapping the blush tube that promises sun-burnished cheeks in the depths of Australian winter. “We’re selling pots of dreams,” she says, and for a moment the room feels drenched in that Balearic light.
Charlotte Tilbury’s Makeup Tips
1. Think Pink:
“Shirley MacLaine liked to walk around with a pink light. Basically, everyone looks pretty in pink. In old Hollywood, they would sometimes paint walls in a soft pink — Marilyn Monroe was said to have loved that. Pink is so dreamy, it’s universally flattering. Pillow Talk lipstick was all about this. I invented the shade because I was looking at the pigment in people’s lips and trying to bottle it. The pinky tone… I studied different skin tones and we democratised Pillow Talk for everyone as well. The lip liner and lipstick make your lips look hot, really. We joke that you get what you want when you’re wearing Pillow Talk.”
2. The J.Lo “Sandwich” Setting Hack:
Charlotte Tilbury’s line is loved by the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders because her products last on the skin, particularly her setting spray, Airbrush Flawless Setting Spray. But many consumers aren’t using the “airbrush” line to its full Hollywood potential.
“It’s a system. You wear the foundation, the powder, and the setting spray. On the red carpet, they spray with the setting spray, they’ll take the airbrush powder, and as it’s setting, they put the powder on, spray, and then apply more powder. This powder is the number one powder for a reason.”
3. Magic Cream: Instant Canvas
“Magic Cream was made for all the fabulous models doing New York, London, Paris and Milan who were working all day and all night, out until 5 a.m., big make-up, baby wipes, exhausted, stressed out, living life at the speed of light. Skin barriers weren’t a thing back then, but still their skin barriers were so damaged.
“Magic Cream gives you gorgeous, glowing skin in 28 seconds. I made it for those moments but it’s unbelievable under any make-up. It smooths, it blurs, it repairs, it hydrates. It’s magic.”
4. Unreal Skin: Effortless Filter
What does a yoga teacher who wears Birkenstocks, hates makeup, and loves green juices have in common with Kate Moss and Sienna Miller? A love of this no-makeup-makeup product. Tilbury describes the smoothing, hydrating, colour-correcting glow stick as like an Instagram Paris filter in a bottle.
“Unreal Skin Sheer Glow Foundation Stick looks like a light filter, and it’s quick. It only takes a few seconds. It’s a favourite of Kate Moss and Sienna Miller… they love it because they’re no-make-up make-up girls. They’re fresh — they don’t want to look like there’s been a piece of foundation near their skin. They can scribble it on, and it’s done.”
Products:
Charlotte Tilbury, Unreal Blush Healthy Glow Stick
Charlotte Tilbury, Unreal Skin Sheer Glow Tint Hydrating Foundation Stick
Charlotte Tilbury, Airbrush Flawless Setting Spray
Charlotte Tilbury, Airbrush Brightening Flawless Finish Powder
The post Pink Lights And Pillow Talk: Charlotte Tilbury Shares Her Can’t-Skip Beauty Tips With ELLE appeared first on ELLE.
