Victoria Beckham’s New Knockout Makeup Line Is About to Take Over Your Vanity

Model, pop star, celebrity wife, mother, designer . . . Victoria Beckham excels at them all. Her latest move? A capsule makeup collection honed by her years in the spotlight. (Spoiler alert: It’s also great.)

Victoria Beckham has been obsessed with beauty since she was a little girl and a friend of her mother’s gave her a collection of empty fragrance bottles. Beckham gleefully used them to glamorize her childhood dressing table—dreaming, perhaps, of the day when she might replace them with bottles that actually contained perfume. That day came soon enough when, as one-fifth of the epoch-defining Spice Girls, she helped teach a generation of impressionable young women about self-empowerment and channeled her creativity into her own evolving image. In this she has been aided and abetted by “the best makeup artists and stylists and photographers since I was eighteen years old.” Along the way, she has taken careful note of “all the little tricks” she has learned from beauty-industry titans—Pat McGrath, Val Garland, and Charlotte Tilbury among them. Now Beckham is ready to share these tips—such as how lining the inner rim of your eyelids with a beige pencil can open them up and wipe away the exhaustion of a long-haul flight—like the perfect girlfriend she is, one who is “hilarious and sweet and nice and terribly inspiring,” as Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet, who has known her for two decades, avers.

From the beginnings of Beckham’s namesake fashion brand, when her “sucky sucky” fabrics had just enough stretch in them to mold and flatter in all the right places, she has always been driven by the needs of her customer—“to make women feel like the best version of themselves.” Along the way, she has triumphed over fashion’s naysayers and through unrelenting hard work emerged as a credible design force, with a string of awards and a devoted clientele to prove it. Beckham’s may be one of the most remarkable style reinventions of the twenty-first century.

Small wonder, then, that for her first foray into makeup she has partnered with Estée Lauder, whose legendary and equally indefatigable founder built a world-class business (and a fortune) on the life-enhancing mantra that “every woman can be beautiful.”

As it happens, the 42-year-old Beckham has been hoarding the makeup she has loved since the age of eighteen—methodically, in small plastic boxes. “Tiny, tiny little worn-down samples, and little eye shadows I’d mixed myself,” she says. When the Lauder development team came to visit Beckham in her stately London home, they were astonished to find a dining table groaning under a trove of these long-cherished makeup relics. The resulting fourteen-piece capsule collection was built around the different images that Beckham projects in four of the cities that resonate with her: London, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. “I’m a bit of a chameleon,” she confides. “I do change my look—not just my fashion—depending on where I am in the world and how I’m dressing.”

Ever the pragmatist, she tested the products until she got just what she wanted. “It was really about not compromising,” she explains, “and creating pieces that I wanted to wear myself.” In a lipstick, for instance, “I don’t want a red-red,” she says, so she looked instead to a matte, orange-based tone that she feels is “a bit younger, a bit fresher, more modern.” Her eye shadows, from a shimmering volcanic black and a sparkling nude to a beetle’s-wing emerald, include formulas that can be applied dry, or wet for a smoldering effect.

Her own morning beauty routine, meanwhile, has been to cleanse, tone, and moisturize with a tinted lotion to which she adds a couple of drops of hydrating face oil. Her Estée Lauder illuminating primer—which comes in a fifties fluted bottle sourced from the Lauder archive and reimagined in Beckham’s signature blonde gold—premixes many of these elements together.“I want to make it really, really easy to get this look,” Beckham says. “If I can do it as a busy working mom with four children, anybody can. You don’t have to be a professional makeup artist. This doesn’t have to take up huge amounts of time.” To take the guesswork out of the process, Beckham has assembled groupings of up to eight products representing the four cities, which can easily fit in a limited-edition box with “professional makeup lighting” inside it, to counter the uneven conditions that Beckham always finds herself up against on her global travels.“When I was in L.A., I did wear less makeup,” she says of the place she considers “my second home,” describing those glowing offerings as reflecting the “strong, youthful, and fresh” SoCal energy. London, meanwhile, is “a bit edgy, a little bit rock-’n’-roll, a little sweaty,” while glossy New York is all about statement color: “Let’s not be too polite about it!” Beckham says with a laugh, citing her striking cobalt and vivid saffron hues. Paris, quite simply, is “fashion,” she says, “the sophisticated style on the street”­—which translates into a vivid crimson lip, and a feline flick of car-paint green.

“She has such a high standard for herself,” says Massenet. “The thing you learn from Victoria is that there are no shortcuts.”

Hair: Jimmy Paul for Bumble and Bumble; Makeup: Fulvia Farolfi
Fashion Editor: Phyllis Posnick
Set Design: Theresa Rivera for Mary Howard Studio

 

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Victoria Beckham’s five-minute face:

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