"To do something of this scale, it’s like going to university and doing a master’s degree. Everything is about colour making, formulation.” The Chanel Cometes Collective – Ammy Drammeh, Valentina Li and Cécile Paravina – on the transformative power of colour, their work process and how makeup in itself is “essentially a massive collective project"
Making something timeless out of the ephemeral is an art that the house of Chanel has perfected, from runway to ASMR-inducing clicks of interlocking C lipsticks. Since the launch of Gabrielle Chanel’s first makeup line 100 years ago (celebrated with next month’s book release of Chanel: The Allure of Makeup, a tour de force of Chanel’s beauty history and campaigns by Natasha A Fraser), the brand has conjured of-the-moment blockbuster colours turned ageless classics.
Now the pigment magic lies in the hands of the Chanel Cometes Collective: new generation makeup artist powerhouses Ammy Drammeh, Valentina Li and Cécile Paravina. Brought on to detonate the colour palette in the best way, the makeup studio’s new multi-voice structure speaks to the nuances of its founder. As Li points out, “there are so many different Chanels within [Gabrielle Chanel].” A woman of both extreme singularity and huge complexity, Mademoiselle Chanel fully understood the power of colour and believed that makeup is, at its core, the art of being yourself.
The Cometes Collective’s beauty vision is all about this. With an intuitive and emotional approach to colour, their makeup language is considered but unrestrained, mixing paradoxical colours that capture that quintessential Chanel word: allure. So, why are we drawn to some colours more than others? To Paravina, it’s largely an unconscious thing. She traces her AW24 Clairvoyance collection’s use of green, her favourite colour, to her French upbringing near green glass makers Lalique and Baccarat, and a teenage obsession with Matthew Barney and his “sickly” pastels.
Right now, Drammeh is all about magenta for its nuances of red, pink and purple. “It can be quite youthful; it could be quite punk. I think it’s mega versatile,” she says. Blue-haired Li is forever a blue girl. “It’s the colour of the sky and of the ocean. I want to feel like I belong to this planet.” On the job, she gravitates towards red, “the colour of life. When I work, I’m the fire. When I’m alone, I’m the water. It’s a little bit yin-yang,” she notes before Paravina adds: “Colour is just you and your instinct.”
How do you approach a task like revolutionising the colours of Chanel while keeping it Chanel?
Cécile Paravina: Well, Chanel is a very specific house that has a very specific ethos and a very strong foundation already, so the way that I see it, we’re just adding a couple of little bricks on top of an already gorgeous mansion. The common goal of working for a brand helps us work smoothly as a collective because we leave our ego outside of the office and work in the same direction. Now we also work on collections together – we can’t say too much, but some projects are going to come up in the future – the three of us together in the same room, brainstorming, creating colour. It’s not just any house, it’s Gabrielle Chanel’s house. We do connect a lot with her history and relate to some of her approach towards design and lifestyle, which feeds our work and enables us to belong in this house.
Valentina Li: I’ll say that in the very beginning, I wasn’t so sure [Laughs]. Chanel is just a classic, timeless, legendary brand and in the beginning I didn’t see classic in me, I saw the avantgarde side more. And then we got to visit her apartment, learn more about the history of the house and see more sides of [Gabrielle Chanel]. The more I saw, the more I found the connection between us and Chanel. Seeing how she invented something when nobody was doing that. She was always trying to do the new thing and kept pushing the boundaries, being different. That’s in us. I feel more like I belong.
We recently did a big piece on the V&A’s Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto exhibition and Amanda Harlech told me that one of the words she would have put in Chanel’s manifesto if she could would be ‘punk’. I thought that was brilliant.
Ammy Drammeh: I agree. And I think when the makeup studio started to look for new people to join I’m sure that was in their minds. To have a group of people that aren’t going to feed what’s already there. They needed a different point of view and have three different points of view.
There’s also another collective element to this because you do a product that is interpreted by millions of people.
CP: Yeah, essentially we are just creating tools for people to use. It’s not like fashion or accessories where you create a piece and the person wears the piece. Yeah, they can style it in different ways but there isn’t as much leeway. If you create a lipstick and you give the same colour to ten people, they will do something completely different and it will look very different depending on their skin tone, their hair, etc. Essentially it’s a massive collective project but it feels good to be three to address such as massive audience.
You’ve added colours that feel really new to Chanel. I never knew I needed a red mascara until now! I’d love to hear about your colour work process?
AD: To do something of this scale, it’s like going to university and doing a master’s degree. Everything is about colour making, formulation.
CP: They give us these charts where the quads are empty and colourless so you have to come up with your own colours.
AD: For me [the approach] really depends on the project. Things that will stay in range like foundation, blushes and lipsticks have a more technical aspect that is neat. What can we offer that is not there yet? That side of the story is very mathematical and precise. It’s a lot of adjustments, testing, having a hundred women try colours. Our individual collections are something that’s not going to stay in range; limited editions you can be a bit more playful with. Colour approach and inspiration comes from a very different side – a play that you’ve seen, a woman you’ve seen in the street.
VL: For my holiday collection which is out right now, the theme is winter tales. A lot of people, when they speak of winter they think about white because snow. But where you can find colour in winter is with the help of the light. I went to see the Northern Lights – I’ve always wanted to see them because wow, there’s a colour show in the sky – which a lot of people associate with the colour green, but actually there’s a lot of pink and really deep purple and slightly orange. I’m a very sensitive person and it’s like a puzzle or a mystery, you know.
CP: When I was assigned with designing the AW 2024 collection I went to the Patrimony building where historians work to collect and keep all the history of Chanel. I found out that she was super into divinatory arts – astrology, even palmistry – and I wanted to honour that side of her personality. I was like, what is the most spiritual colour that evokes most this aspect of her. To me it’s purple, but it’s very personal. Clerical suits, things that make me think of the divine, divination and mysteriousness and esoterism.
Do you think the role of the makeup artist has changed?
AD: Yeah, massively. Some of the things that have changed I don’t like.
CP: If I think of makeup artists in the past I think of maybe Marilyn Monroe’s makeup artist behind the scenes doing incredible things. She was very close to him because he brought her not only a service but her face for camera, her work tool, it’s everything. And now when I think of a makeup artist I just think of someone who has 500 different jobs like a videographer for their Instagram. The profession has changed so much. Now you’re not so much backstage. Social media has enabled all this BTS content. ‘How was this movie made? Oh, I can see it on social media’. It’s tricky because I love learning, I love nerding out, but it’s dangerous because it can remove a bit of the dreaminess. You become very aware of how something was made. You just see the lining. The sleeves inside out.
AD: Yeah, it’s like seeing a house being made. Do you really want to see the pipes? Like you say, I think it’s good for learning, but the whole point of creating art is that you don’t have to explain what it means. Each person can make up their own mind. When you start explaining what it means and how it was made then it kind of loses its charm.
