On Lorde’s debut album Pure Heroine, we met the glossy idiot princess of adolescence – beauty that was over-the-top and luxurious. The then 16-year-old pop saviour sang about “white teeth teens” and “beauty queens in tears,” as she built up a teenage mausoleum that framed beauty through the glowing lens of teenage aspiration. 

By Melodrama, she’s tearing that world down. The album opens with, “I do my make-up in somebody else’s car,” setting the tone for a relentless grappling with self-love that plays out across mascara-stained pillows, smeared lipstick marks, and tangled sheets in the tracks. Come Solar Power, and Lorde’s looking outward. The album takes a satirical swipe at wellness culture and the endless search for external fixes, as the singer turns to meditation, burning sage, crystals, multivitamins and astrology in search of a remedy.

And now, on Virgin, released earlier this year, she’s giving us her most candid take yet: as she gets real about her struggle with an eating disorder, expanding her gender identity, and the real route to real self-love (which she spoiler: hasn’t quite figured out yet). The AW25 cover star sat down with Dazed, and these are the beauty confessionals she shared.

CHERRY BLACK LIPSTICK

A relic of Lorde’s adolescence, the cherry-black lip became shorthand for both her and the Tumblr era that crowned her. So iconic was the look that MAC collaborated with her in 2014 to release the Pure Heroine lipstick. “You would not catch me without my deep purple lip that was almost always matte, stuck on tattooed on to my mouth,” she tells Dazed. “I would wake up and it would still be on my lips… I felt naked without it.”

The lipstick vanished around 2017, unacknowledged until the release of Solar Power in 2021, where in the track “Oceanic Feeling” she slipped in a farewell: “Now the cherry-black lipstick’s gathering dust in a drawer. I don’t need her anymore cause I got this power.” It’s a sentiment anyone can recognise, holding on to the beauty product that once defined a version of yourself you’ve since outgrown.

ACNE

Rising to fame as a teenager meant early-morning TV slots and the glare of paparazzi lenses – a level of visibility most would shrink from, especially during the raw, exposed years of adolescence. Since her Pure Heroine era, Lorde has been candid about acne: calling out airbrushed, glossy edits online, lamenting the endless cycle of unsolicited advice, and sending fans her own encouragement. The subject even surfaced in her 2013 smash hit “Team”, “Now bring my boys in, their skin in craters like the moon.”

Now in adulthood, she’s just as unflinchingly open. Speaking to Dazed, Lorde recalled her first breakout on her 10th birthday, which sparked “one of the most formative relationships of my life.” She explains: “I decided I was going to find myself beautiful and interesting with acne and make it part of what makes me special, not this thing that I need to solve.” As she tells us, “I’m super scarred and I will be forever probably, but I think of it as marking that speaks to a life of a lot of texture.”

If you have acne I think you’re cool and hot and I think it’s sexy to be honest – Lorde

BODY IMAGE

Body image is a theme at the heart of the sardonically upbeat track “Broken Glass”, where Lorde recalls a summer “sucked in by arithmetic.” With lines like “Did I cry myself to sleep about that? Cheat about that? Rot teeth about that?” she alludes to her time in the depths of an eating disorder. Body image also surfaced in her standout verse on Charli xcx’s “Girl, So Confusing” remix, where she admitted she was “at war with her body.”

While making Virgin, she revealed earlier this year that she covered every mirror in her house as she wrestled with that relationship. Speaking to Dazed, she expands on this: “I found swimming in the ladies’ pond did something very healing to me. Something about being in this crowd of bodies and seeing all these girls eating – every girl’s got a bag from [British bakery chain] Gail’s – and being held in the water.”

GENDER EXPRESSION

Lorde has been vocal about her expanding relationship with gender, a theme central to her track “Man of the Year”. In the song, she grapples with the freedoms afforded to male expressions of gender, singing: “Now I go ’bout my day, riding it like a wave. Playing it any way I want. Swish mouthwash, jerk off.”

She has expressed this outwardly as well, with her chest bound in a single strip of silver tape in both the music video and her Met Gala-inspired look. Speaking to Dazed, she reflects on how this manifests within beauty. “Right now, it feels as it should. But some days, I can’t wear women’s clothes. I’ve had to figure out how to have my make-up done in a way that doesn’t make me feel trapped or tight or like the wrong thing. Now I just tell people, ‘Treat it like male grooming.’”

BIRTH CONTROL

Earlier this year, Lorde described coming off birth control as “one of the best drugs I’ve ever done.” In her Dazed interview, she elaborates, saying the decision “changed the game.” Soon after, she was diagnosed with PMDD, which she began treating with microdoses of Prozac.

“There was a puberty-type feeling to it, something quite unregulated,” she tells us, adding that every song on record Virgin was written at the end of 2023, after she had quit the birth control.