Camille Marchetti’s atelier sits behind an unmarked door on a quiet street in the 11th. From the street you would not know it is there. Inside, the room runs long and narrow: a single counter, eight feet of it, with shelves above and a north-facing window behind. The shelves carry jars of pigment, waxes, and oils in unlabeled amber bottles, arranged in a way that probably has a logic to Camille and would be illegible to anyone else.
I arrived at ten. She was already working — twisting off the lid of a small jar, sniffing once, replacing it. The way someone reads the paper.
We talked for two and a half hours. Below is the long version.
LacqueredMag: I want to begin with the counter. You’ve worked at this counter for nineteen years. What is on it today?
Camille Marchetti: Today there are six jars of lipstick base, three of lip balm, two of cheek colour, and one that is an experiment I am not going to tell you about until I have made it a fourth time. There is a small pot of pigment that I bought in 2009 from a man in Marrakesh who has since died; it is no longer made. I will not use it. I only open it sometimes.
LM: Six jars of lipstick base. Six formulations?
CM: I do not count them as six formulations. I count them as one formulation with six temperaments. The base is the same — beeswax, a plant wax, a drop of jojoba, a drop of castor. But the ratio varies, and the pigment load varies, and the way I bring the pigment in varies, and the result is a different mouth feel, which is what I am trying to invent.
LM: How would you describe the difference between two of them, to someone who has never felt it?
CM: I would describe it by what it prevents. The thickest one prevents the lip from moving freely — you feel the lipstick on the lip, all day, the way you feel a well-fitted glove. The thinnest one prevents the colour from being the only thing — you can forget you are wearing anything, the colour is just part of the mouth now. And the four in between are arguments about how much you want the wearer to remember she has put something on.
LM: That is, I think, the question on the cover of the magazine. How much do we want to remember.
CM: Yes. I think the industry has answered it for the consumer, for fifteen years now, in one direction. You should forget as quickly as possible. The most expensive products are the ones that disappear fastest. And I think this is a kind of insult, finally, to the woman who put them on.
LM: Why?
CM: Because she did put them on. She stood in front of a mirror, or she stood in front of a window, and she applied something to her face with her hand. That is not a neutral act. It is a thing a person decided to do, and she should not, by lunchtime, be told that the thing she did was a thing that does not exist. If the answer to the morning’s question what shall I wear is something that hides what you chose, we have not really answered the question.
LM: So the question, in formulation, is what?
CM: The question is: how much of the woman’s decision should survive the morning. My answer is: all of it. Possibly more than that. The lipstick should grow in conviction through the day, not less.
LM: That’s an unfashionable position.
CM: It is the only position I know how to defend with my hands.
LM: Tell me about the pigments. The lipsticks you make are quite saturated, quite committed to the colour they are. The reds are red. The oxblood is oxblood. There is no “your-lips-but-better” in your line.
CM: I do not understand the proposition of a colour that pretends to be your colour. It is not your colour. It is somebody’s colour, manufactured by someone, mixed in a vat in Lyon or in Sens. The woman is wearing it because she decided to wear it; the lipstick should acknowledge this. A red should be visibly a red. A nude should be visibly a nude — that is, a colour that was composed to sit on the lip without disrupting the architecture of the face. Both of these are fine. But neither of them is the lip “but better”. The lip is already the lip. Adding nothing is fine. Adding something visible is fine. The middle move — adding a colour that lies about being absent — is the move I refuse.
LM: I want to ask about the gloss specifically. You’ve made a name by refusing to make the high-shine vanish. Your glosses leave a finish.
CM: They leave a finish because I want them to leave a finish. The polymers and esters that make a gloss disappear faster — they exist, I use them sometimes when a client asks for them — but they are an answer to a question I don’t recognise. The question I recognise is: what does it feel like to wear a lip that catches the light all day? And the answer is: it feels like a small, ongoing confidence. The lip becomes a piece of jewellery you don’t take off.
LM: Is the gloss a luxury?
CM: Everything at this counter is a luxury, because nothing here is cheaper than what you would find at a pharmacy. The luxury is not the price. The luxury is the slowness. The luxury is that the lipstick you buy from me is made by me, in this room, on a morning when I felt like making it. The luxury is that you came here.
LM: Do you take commissions for colours?
CM: I do. They are the most difficult part of the work. Someone comes in and says I want a red that does not exist and you have to believe them, and then you have to make one. The greatest compliment I ever received was a woman who came back a year later and said the colour you made me has become my favourite, and I no longer recognise the woman I was before I wore it. I think about her every time I mix a new red.
LM: What is on the counter tomorrow?
CM: Tomorrow the experiment is back. And I will tell you what it is, when it is finished, if it ever is. If it never becomes anything, that is also an answer. Not every afternoon at this counter makes a product. Most afternoons make a decision about something I will not make next week.
LM: Is that frustrating?
CM: It is the work.
Photographs by Hilda Vienne. The atelier of Camille Marchetti is open by appointment at 16 rue de la Présentation, 75011 Paris. Her work is sold in single-batch releases at the door and at one small stockist in the Sentier.