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CHANEL Beauty's limited Denim collection, created by Valentina Li of the Cometes Collective, turns washed blue, indigo and the casual ease of the 1990s into a vocabulary for eyes, lips, nails and skin.
BEAUTY
Denim is never a single blue. It fades, deepens and catches the light differently with every wash, and that is the quality CHANEL Beauty has chosen to translate. The house’s limited Denim collection does not imitate a pair of jeans. It borrows the fabric’s range of blues and turns it into finishes for the face.
The collection was created by Valentina Li of the Cometes Collective, the group of artists who develop CHANEL’s makeup, and the campaign stars the house ambassador Lily-Rose Depp. Its reference point is the 1990s, a decade of naturalness and unstudied attitude, revisited here with contemporary precision.
Denim began as a utilitarian cloth and became the most universal garment in fashion. CHANEL’s approach is the one the house has always applied to everyday materials: take something casual and treat it with refinement. Blue is also one of the most demanding colours in makeup, usually confined to the eye and easily excessive. Here it moves across the whole face, in formulas that favour transparency, light and restraint.
For the eyes, two new Les 4 Ombres palettes take different directions. Coco Jean pairs a shimmering azure blue and a silver anthracite with a gold beige and a satin taupe brown, the contrast between the fabric and the warm tones that usually accompany it. Denim Dream is softer: a platinum pearly highlighter, a matte dusty pink, a satin baby blue and a shimmering blue anthracite. In both, the warm shades are structural. They give the blue something to meet.
Two Stylo Yeux Waterproof liners, Bleu Twill and Bleu Métal, draw the edge; Noir Allure mascara in indigo brings colour to the lashes. A line, a wash, a reflection: three different operations that all begin with blue.
The same reference, at three scales: a line around the eye, a wash across the lid, a reflection on the skin.
The Rouge Coco Flash balms return to the colours that once sat beside denim. Baby Blue leaves a translucent, pearly veil with an almost imperceptible blue reflection, letting the natural colour of the lips show through. Washed Beige, a caramel, Faded Orange and Raw Brown recall the earthy, neutral lips of the decade. The idea is not to reproduce the past, but to reread it with a lighter hand.
The Coco Denim highlighter, an exclusive creation, is a pearly powder with blue and pink reflections inspired by washed denim, working through light rather than coverage. Le Vernis in 419 Légende, a deep metallic blue, completes the colour story on the nails. And beyond makeup, a special edition of La Crème Main arrives in a denim pouch, where the fabric that began as a reference for colour becomes, once again, something to hold.
Like denim itself, which crosses decades and styles without losing relevance, CHANEL’s blue works best when it stops being a single statement. Fabric becomes colour, colour becomes light, and the reference ends where it began: in the hand.
Details and further reading: CHANEL Denim is a limited-edition collection, available at CHANEL Beauty counters and on chanel.com. Harrods: inside the collection
Instagram: @chanel.beauty
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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