Paying homage to beauty's most iconic looks and the women that created them

Romy Schneider. I was first hit by the juggernaut of her cat-like beauty, captured and framed in brass in the hallway of a childhood friend’s home, at 11 years old. Probably around the age in which all perceptions of beauty are silently formed. Her face has haunted me – in the most welcome sense - ever since. 

Said friend was Austrian, as was Romy, who cut her teeth in 50s German cinema before gaining notoriety for her work in the French New Wave and on the stage.
But it was Inferno, a film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, which had begun in 1964 but was left unfinished, only to be resurrected in a documentary by Serge Bromberg in 2009, that remains the most indelible iteration of Romy, in my mind. 

It was a film that didn’t want to be made. With painful irony, it was the suffocating July heatwave that carbuncled the shooting of Inferno. Film crews wilted and were replaced and replaced again. Even Romy’s co-star, Serge Reggiani fell ill and fled. And then, when Henri-Georges Clouzot himself had a heart attack, filming was abandoned.

For a shoot that survived just three weeks and a film that was never made, it’s done well to superglue itself in the canon of 60s New Wave cinema. Romy played a woman shackled by her own marriage to a husband who eventually drove himself mad with the notion that his young wife had been unfaithful. 

"it is her, blue-lipped, smoking, with her gaze dropped towards the camera, that is the most singular image of Inferno"

Inferno was a psychological study of freedom and control, told through through the lens of a new psychedelia (it was shot in part colour, part black and white) that was only just finding its feet. In one tableau, Romy plays suggestively with a slinky, delicately plucking it up and down her blue nightie like a cat with a ball of wool. She is enthralling, but distant.  

But it is her, blue-lipped, smoking, with her gaze dropped towards the camera, that is the most singular image of Inferno. It’s a face that says there is no beauty without pain. Or, without hope. It’s bonkers. But also weirdly, timeless. 

Of course, in attempting to ape this New Wave beauty statement, all I could comprehend was the glaring dread of blue lipstick. Smiley, happy rave make-up this isn’t. Blue lipstick is like the waltzers. It looks like fun from a distance. But up close, it’s terrifying and has a tendency to make you forget who you are. 

But this was different. With the image of Romy playing back and forth in my mind and great black fins of inky black liner, once I had it on, the blue lipstick felt no more shocking to me than a cerise would have. In fact, less so.

Because this particular blue shade (Lime Crime Lipstick in – fittingly – No She Didn’t, £11.50), is steely, cold and unforgiving. Psychedelic, but sinister. Wearable? Of course not. But the extremity of the black winged eye? Entirely so. In fact, happily, appropriating Romy’s purring, cat-like beauty requires nothing more.

1. Dr Lewinns, Skin Perfect Makeup Brush, £20 at Active Beauty
2. YSL, Touche Eclat Foundation, £29 at Debenhams
3. Nars Eyebrow Pencil in Jodhpur, £16.50
4. Dior Style Liner in 094, £22.50 at Feel Unique
5. Lime Crime Candyfuture Collection Lipstick in No She Didn’t, £11.50 at CutECOsmetics

Photography: Hugo Yanguela