Paying homage to the most iconic moments in beauty and the women who created them 

The swatch of ruched black leather that was the early 80s comes alive here on the cover of Sade’s single, Hang onto Your Love from the 1984 album Diamond Life. Her face, a sports car – a Porsche – with go faster stripes made flesh looks almost super-humanly perfect (this is, in an age before retouching became as ubiquitous as oxygen), like it’s been spray-painted across the side of said Porsche. 

She appears like a CGI confection; all the obligatory biological features are present and correct, but there’s an infallible sense of geometrical precision that tells the brain, this face – this person – isn’t a real thing. 

Of course, we know she’s real. It’s Sade. I know she’s real. My mum played her tapes in our lime green Vauxhall Astra after school in the late Eighties. Despite being five at the time - and later purporting such questionable musical tastes as Phil Collins and MeatLoaf - I knew then Mum was onto something with Sade. Her voice soothed like a pair of fluffy pink ear muffs in a hail storm. Sade, fantastically, sent me to sleep all the time. Now, everyone likes Sade. She is the most successful female, British solo artist in history – not that you'd know, she’s hardly one to shout about it.

"Her face, a sports car – a Porsche – with go faster stripes made flesh looks almost super-humanly perfect"

In a wholly unfair fashion, Sade’s face – a deliciously taupe canvas, exotic yet familiar – was every inch as rich as her musical talents. It’s a make-up artist’s perfect canvas; there’s about four miles of continuous space between her eyes and brows with which to play; a set of vine-ripened lips and pixel-perfect eye shadow sculpting (in a weird, glimmery salmon pink colour that simply doesn’t exist now).

And, as futile as it might be for a pasty girl from Devon to attempt to appropriate a little bit of Sade’s visual charms, I persisted, to the thudding realization that there is rather a lot of make-up involved. It’s a lot of make-up that Sade manages to make appear composed and even-tempered. She looks cool. Maybe it’s the false lashes, admittedly too big here but necessary nonetheless. They sort of crush my eyes down into little black eight balls. I have none of the expanse of Sade’s face to carry it all off. 

For all the 80s pomp and revelry that sits within this image of Sade, there is a deft sense of solemnity to her gaze. And perhaps the subtle whisper of the future that lies ahead of her, in whom she would be repeatedly labeled, ‘famously reclusive’, allergic to whatever ‘celebrity’ means then or now. 

Likewise, it’s only through observing the detachment behind her eyes that it seems in any way possible that her real name is the relatively staid, Helen Folasade Adu. She may live quietly in the countryside, but to me, Sade she will always be.

1. Topshop Eye Duo in Harlow Sunset, £8
2. Bobbi Brown Long-Wear Gel Eyeliner, £17.50  at House of Fraser
3. Eyelure Naturalites in 140, £5.45 at Superdrug
4. Nars Blush in Gilda, £21.50 at House of Fraser
5. MAC Lipstick in Russian Red, £14

Photography: Hugo Yanguela