Becoming Halsey

In a business that’s all about standing out, Halsey stands out. After her featured vocals on the Chainsmokers’ 2016 single “Closer” made her a hit with every pool-party household in America, this radically transparent pop star spent last fall touring for her chart-topping album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom. Earlier this year, she delivered a powerful spoken-word performance at the New York City Women’s March, detailing her own experiences with sexual assault. If you haven’t seen it yet: YouTube. “A Story Like Mine.” Go now; we’ll wait. OK, so there you go: Halsey has no use for falsehoods or obfuscations. In honor of a newly minted collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, we asked her to speak her beauty truth and track her evolution from that first major performance to today—with all the victories, blunders, and self-discoveries along the way. Her unfiltered (of course) reflections:

- Brennan Kilbane

Performance and beauty have a long-standing history. Going back to the Greeks and then early theater and Shakespeare, the whole point of using makeup onstage is to amplify your features and make everything more expressive. When I’m performing, I’m mostly wearing a lot of dark makeup—dark lips, dark eyes. What I look like in person is a lot different than how I look onstage.

I’m 23. When I came into the music industry, I had somebody do my makeup, but I flipped out. People forget that a musician and a model are very different. A model’s job is to play a character, but as a musician, I’m just myself every day. I can’t have someone who doesn’t know me coming on board and changing my face. I’m singing songs that are personal, from the bottom of my heart. My fans need to recognize the person singing to them, you know? That’s just how it is for me. So I started doing my makeup myself. I don’t feel like I need to be wearing that much. For me personally, I like to find ways to play up my existing beauty rather than trying to change what my face looks like.

I started playing with makeup when I was 12 years old. I was an art kid, so I’ve painted my whole life. Brushes, and color theory, and understanding highlight and shadow and dimension are stuff I knew innately. I also drew realism, so I painted faces all the time.