For anyone who has the faintest inkling of interest into the world of beauty - namely, catwalk make-up, the words 'Pat' and 'McGrath' are enough to stalk a sense of fizzing excitement in the tummy. Pat is the ultimate make-up artist you see, in the truest sense of what the 'artist.' 

So, when she speaks (which at length and relative depth, is pretty rare) the entire beauty industry sits up and listens. And speak, she has - to WWD - about what keeps her motivated, how she balances the creative with the commercial (McGrath is also global cosmetics creative design director for P&G) and just where she gets her ideas that funnel as many 26 catwalk shows per season, after more than two decades in the business.

'I walk into the most incredible fashion houses and see the most incredible things—new technology, new ideas, new music. Incredible lighting, new girls,' she said. 'Maybe it’s a feature on a girl, maybe it’s her mouth, maybe it’s her eyes. It’s like an energy that just happens because of what you’re faced with. It’s almost like a puzzle.'

She then details how she travels from international fashion city to the next, with - and this may sound like the stuff of beauty lore - 50 individual black duffel bags, each categorised and filled with every make-up product, tool and brush and Swarovski crystal she should ever need. One bag is reserved for her many reference books, earmarked with yellow post-it notes. '...Art books, photography books, fashion books. Books on tattoos and books on beauty. There's a book called simply, 'The Eyebrow' and another devoted to the film stars of the 50s,' reports WWD. 

Of her emphatic and notorious commitment to research and referencing, long-time friend and hair styling legend, Guido Palau says; 'She has a huge library, and she instinctively has a great reference of history, film, pictures, theater, characters on the street, club land, every kind of youth cult is in her mind.

'She might pull out a book at a shoot or a show. She’s looking for an eye, a period, a feeling. At a shoot, when she’s talking to the editor, she might pull out the Polaroids of the girl who we’re working with that show the different make-ups she’s done on her over the years or last season. She details everything.'

It's exactly this artist-like approach that has kept McGrath entrenched within the impenetrable inner circles of the most powerful designers and fashion houses of our time. Most notable of these is her long-standing relationship with John Galliano and by extension, Christian Dior. John encouraged McGrath to experiment on a grandiose scale with make-up concepts and push her creativity to it's absolute ends. 

'John and his team really played with makeup. I remember bringing a girl down once, and she had on probably 10 pairs of lashes and three pounds of eye shadow and the hugest, glossiest lips,' McGrath said. 'We brought her into the studio for a make-up test, and John said, ‘We’re not doing a beach story. This is not about a natural look.’ He wanted more.'

And of Pat McGrath, so do we. So do we.