Since founding her label Comme des Garçons over 40 years ago, Rei Kawakubo has never shied away from extreme beauty. From the ghostly brides who walked the runway for AW05 to the Virginia Woolf-inspired Marcel-waved bobs Julien d’Ys created for the Homme Plus SS20 show, Kawakubo’s art-first approach to beauty has always been exciting and boundary-pushing. So it only makes sense that when it came time to branch out into make-up, the designer would team up with a brand just as dedicated to radical beauty – MAC Cosmetics.
Inspired by Kawakubo’s long-time fascination with tattooing, MAC and Comme des Garçons are presenting a special limited edition collection which pays tribute to the transformative power of tattoos. Inviting you to create your own temporary tattoos, the seven-piece kit includes two liquid liners designed for crisp fine strokes and geometric details; a jet black gel liner for painterly shading and large-scale creations; three pencils for colour; and a translucent powder to keep everything firmly in place.
The products come in reusable, vacuum-sealed packaging that matches the fabric from the label’s AW19 collection and are designed to mimic real tattooed skin. “One of the greatest shades of black is the one that we can see in tattooed skin: black ink in faded tattoos tends to turn into a cloudy warm blue, defining and shadowing its contours,” says MAC’s director of make1up artistry Baltasar Gonzalez Pinel. “That precise quality of blue-black enhances the dimension and placement of the designs and transforms the deeply personal act of tattooing... it becomes ‘body literature’ instead of just ‘body paint.’”
The collection is very exclusive and only available to those lucky people who find themselves in Paris this week where it will retail for €225 at the new Dover Street Parfums Market until October 13.
