Beauty lowdown: Chanel 12/13 A/W RTW

Each season I go mad for the new Chanel collection as it’s unveiled, and often even madder for the beauty look that’s been created to go with it!
I love hearing about the inspiration behind it from Creative Director of Chanel Makeup, Peter Philips as well, so when I got the lowdown on the recent Chanel 2012-13 Autumn-Winter RTW show I couldn’t wait to share.
“The inspiration for the makeup look came from a few key words and a sketch that Karl Lagerfeld provided,” he explained, “minerals, shading and eyebrows were the key words and the sketch showed a face with stone-lined eyebrows.”
The focus is on the eyebrows, which led him to interpret Karl's drawing and the "mineral" emphasis by creating straight, graphic eyebrows. He worked with the Maison Lesage to create incredible sets of embroidered eyebrows, with each eyebrow consisting of an anthracite gray sequin and pearl base, embroidered with several sorts and shades of mineral stones and crystals.
For the makeup in general, he says that he wanted a matte finished skin and used Chanel Mat Lumière foundation to bring this to fruition. The shading and sculpting of the face was achieved with Ombre Contraste, a compact created especially for this show. The compact powder is a lavender/taupe coloured shade called ‘Notorious’ that “I applied to the eyelids and then straight down on the side of the face, in a contouring style. The rest of the face I kept nude, so as to keep the focus on the eyebrows.” Even for the lips he just opted for Rouge Coco Baume for a perfectly neutrality.
For the nails he chose a brand new shade of Le Vernis called ‘Frenzy’ (2012 Autumn Collection), which is totally colour coordinated with ‘Notorious’ and is absolutely to die for. The queues for this little pearler will be huge, guaranteed!

* all photos are by Vincent Lappartient*