Nature is very connected to childhood memories and my own day-to-day experience... From hiking to surfing and cycling, I enjoy being in the outdoors.
Working intuitively is a key part of make-up artist Lucia Pica’s practice. “I’m a romantic person – a dreamer,” she says, calling from her Parisian apartment. “I believe in dreams and I have a really childlike energy towards work. I was so excited on the shoot, you know.” Her energy is palpable down the crackly line, and through her Italian accent – which she has clung on to despite leaving Naples when she was 19, coming to London to have her eyes opened by the freedoms of individualism.
Initially, make-up was just something she loved, and shortly after that move to London, a friend encouraged her to do a month-long course in beauty. Make-up was a ritual, something she’d followed but wasn’t aware that there was a whole industry in it. “After the course I was like, ‘Wow, yes! I am passionate about this!’ And then I realised you can be inspired by art and movies, and I began to introduce all of these other elements. It became about creating a world, another universe. A place to discover,” she laughs.
One of Pica’s big beliefs is that young people should be able to express themselves; uniqueness is something to be celebrated, and conformity isn’t. Working as Byredo’s newly appointed creative director, she’s made it her intention to bring out individuality; it’s something she gravitates towards. “You know, putting on a brown lipliner makes me think of being a girl in the 1990s and being excited about the future,” she says. “When I look at make-up I have flashbacks of an emotion or a period in time and I’m trying to represent that, but what is exciting is that it’s through a mood, rather than an extraction of something.”
Byredo’s founder, Ben Gorham, feels similarly. “ As I started to really look at the beauty world, I found much of it conservative and conventional. I thought we can do this and we can do it differently,” he tells me. The brand was founded on the idea of translating abstract emotions and memories into a product – it was really built to be anything. “We don’t need to conform or be restrained by expectations,” he says. “We always start from emotions or feelings… so that does often relate to something more abstract.”
The brand, known for its earthy, woody smells which are neither masculine nor feminine, takes its cue from Ben’s affinity with nature. “Nature is very connected to childhood memories and my own day-to-day experience living with my family in Sweden. From hiking to surfing and cycling, I enjoy being in the outdoors. For example, the elements of wood we often like to integrate into our store designs come from my childhood, growing up amongst the giant forests in Canada and Sweden,” he says.
Nature inspires Lucia, too, who is famed for her work with colour. “In Naples there are ancient buildings and the port, you’re always in front of the sunrise and the sunset, so colour is in the world, but it’s also in the vibration of the city,” she says. “It’s in the people. It’s in everything.” Training her eye to see the nuances of colours, she understands how to make them harmonise. “I can plan colours, but when I put them on a face, they might change. They have to harmonise but also be wearable and not be alien, they have to be part of the skin.”
For her shoot with More Or Less, Pica used crystal stones, gold wire and some gold leaf to achieve this. “I wanted an early natural feel that harmonised with the creative and free mood of the shoot but also the products I was using, mainly the Byredo Liquid Lipstick,” she explains. “When you play with colour and texture and finishes, you can make something experimental and sophisticated.”
Playing on the idea of “more or less”, each model in the shoot has a natural look and a strong one, which are then played with again through surrealist photographer Jack Davison’s lens. “I chose references that were a bit more abstract,” says Pica, “and those references took me to using stones, so then I researched images with stones. If you give yourself a little bit of space, ideas come.”
Right now the world is out of ideas, and conformity is the norm. “Your nose, your eyes, they are all one way,” Pica says. “But I gravitate to individuality and bringing something out that is amazing in that person. Young people should be able to express themselves.”
Makeup: Lucia Pica. Hair: David Harborow. Photographic assistants: Max Tomlinson, Louise Oates, Tamibe Bourdanne. Make-up assistants: Kate O’Reilly, Naomi Nakamura, Rina Inata. Hair assistant: Muriel Cole. Styling assistant: Yuki Beniya. Models: Chi Lihn, Zoe Head, Charlotte Flatischler, Naja Kirk, Akuac Thiep, Edna Karibwami, Safiye Gray. Casti: Julia Lange Casting