“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.” Gabrielle Chanel

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE. The changing face of femininity is something that Gabrielle Chanel understood all too well, having done more than most to shape a paradigm shift rom one version of womanliness to another. And so it was in her own story, the ingénue of the convent orphanage has become the worldly Mademoiselle of Rue Cambon.

Letting character dictate what is seen was a touchstone for Chanel – and similarly for Lucia Pica, CHANEL Global and Creative Makeup and Color Designer. In the CANDEUR ET EXPÉRIENCE : ACTE ll collection, Lucia Pica plays with different ideas of character and femininity mainly through the medium of the colour most associated with the gender: pink. Here, the duality of women and femininity is emphasised, from innocence to experience. Pink is subverted, moving from a petulant innocence to provocation and transgression, travelling away from the merely pretty, to be something far more audacious and radical.

Different forms of femininity are evoked; the sensual, voluptuous and passionate woman metamorphoses from the romantic innocent, while witty and mischievous worldliness point the way to audacity. Here, colour connotations shift and change, familiar from the past and yet prescient for today.

This collection takes as its starting point LES 4 OMBRES eyeshadow palette Candeur et Expérience, from the LE ROUGE · COLLECTION N°1 of Fall 2016. Wanting to explore the connotations, concepts and meanings behind the palette further, Lucia Pica builds a whole collection expanding on the themes of this product. From the dewy ingénue pink of the BAUME ESSENTIEL Rosée, to the stark dualities of light and dark femininity in LE VERNIS, the recurring passage from innocence to experience is evoked.

“Really, it’s an inner journey, a journey into the duality of women and femininity.” Lucia Pica

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