Lucia Pica makes ‘crying’ a good look with this Byredo make-up

Lucia Pica is going to make you cry. Or, more precisely, make you look like you're crying and it’s going to look good. 

As one of the industry’s most preeminent make-up artists, Pica has an ingenious ability to cosmetically transform unsettling facial features into points of attraction. Case in point, her popularisation of red eyes during her six-year tenure as Chanel’s global creative make-up and colour director. What is usually a marker of sadness or sickness became, with Pica’s eyeliners, shadows, and mascaras, a provocative way to create contrast with, and hence enliven, your natural eye colour. 

Now, Pica’s brand of sophisticated subversion has found its ideal match in beauty’s enfant terrible, Byredo, founded by Ben Gorham (and which saw the debut of Byredo make-up in 2020, later winning a Wallpaper* Design Award 2022 for Best New Grooming Product). 

Pica’s first launch as the brand’s new make-up partner is Liquid Lipsticks, a range of ten glosses that range from a purely transparent gloss to saturated, earthy shades of muddy pink and terracotta reds. 

The products are designed for lips, but Pica recommends also trying the clear gloss on your eyes: ‘When you put clear gloss on the inner corner of the eye or on top of eyeshadow it makes you look like you’ve been through some intense emotion. I sometimes put a gloss on top of my eyeliner so that you don’t know if I’m super excited or if I’ve been crying.’

As Pica puts it, ‘emotions are allowed’, could easily be the motto of her new collaboration with Byredo. The brand has always been an exercise in ‘evoking a memory or an emotion within a person’ through physical objects. 

‘Ben talks a lot about the past, present and future when it comes to the perfumes and how they are about finding that place where all three happen together,’ says Pica. 

‘After meeting him, it is so obviously clear that the brand is about exploring depths of emotion and personal stories through a transparent medium [ie, perfume].’ With this in mind, Pica decided to make her debut Byredo product a gloss as ‘a way to connect with the transparency and fluidity of Byredo’s perfume’. 

She adds, ‘With Liquid Lipsticks I'm looking at that the power of simplicity and the power of transparency, because I am trying to get in touch with the essence of the Byredo person. That’s why the colours in this collection are very natural and earthy, to start at the beginning with this primordial feeling; and the element of water or fluidity in texture was important as well to make this link with the perfume.’ 

It is an exciting new chapter for both Byredo and Pica. ‘We’re still in the early stages but I am feeling so excited already,’ says the make-up artist. ‘I don’t want to wish my life away, but I can’t wait for next year and everything we have to come.’ 

INFORMATION

byredo.com