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

It is not a unique, or remotely original statement of any kind to declare my love for the work of Tamara de Lempicka. Her idiosyncratic paintbrush style, depicting the lofty social figures – namely women with titles – of the bohemian romp that was 20s Paris has enamoured couturiers, Hollywood starlets and notably, Madonna, for almost a century.

Among her fans, too, is the ultimate arbiter of style, Mrs Muiccia Prada, who cited Lempicka’s work as the inspiration behind the costumes she designed for the Great Gatsby.

One such inspiration, entitled The Straw Hat (1930) was atypical of the clean, elegant lines and vivid, block colours. It’s both innocent and sexually charged, neatly mirroring the voracious sexual appetite for both men and women that Lempicka had been unquietly cultivating.

An upper class Russian refugee and new darling of the Art Deco movement, Lempicka spent much of the 20s, hopping from party to bar to party with Pablo Picasso, John Cocteau and Andre Gide. In fact, so well connected was Lempicka, that it’d be like Jemima Khan deciding to pick up a paintbrush and start doing portraits of her blue-blooded friends. Today, she’d be the most hideously naught Sloane Raver imaginable. Among this set, fabulousness ran through their veins.

"She was the Mert & Marcus of her day, capturing something in these women that no one else did or could; a head tilt, a look in the eyes"

Her style was dubbed ‘soft cubism’, isn’t that just the most perfect phrasing for what the face actually is? The dynamism of lines and edges and corners, the presence of light, contrasting shapes. Her appreciation of light and shade is the stuff of make-up artistry dreams.

Her subjects ranged from her (oft neglected) daughter, Kizette, all manner of aristocrat and landed gentry – and much later, the common and the poor. But it is Lempicka’s depiction of upper crust women in their cloche hats and swathed in silk finery that flood my eyes with splendour. She was the Mert & Marcus of her day, capturing something in these women that no one else did or could; a head tilt, a look in the eyes. If these artworks were made flesh, they’d be Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential or Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde.

It is a make-up for those who value the intellectual promise of make-up. It is statuesque, foreboding, unforgiving and primal. It lends a feeling of tortured solemnity, complicated and anguished depths and spirals of languid sexuality.

The sculpted socket elevates the neon red lip from Lolita into a Kristen Scott Thomas. And yet, in terms of brushwork, it doesn’t require an artist’s skill. I drew an elliptical shape onto my eyelid with a small, flat brush dipped in a putty-toned cream eye base pot and then drew a wider shape on top with a deeper, bronzed cream eye shadow. The effect is more lived in than with using eye shadow powder formulas. Lived in, worn, but charged with a timeless energy. A little bit – hopefully - like the artwork itself.

1. Mac Pro Longwear Paint Pot in Soft Ochre, £15
2. Shiseido Smoothing Lip Pencil in RD305, £18 at Feel Unique
3. Mac Lipstick in Lady Danger, £15
4. Smashbox Halo Long Wear Blush in Passion, £23

Photography: Hugo Yanguela