It's very refreshing to go away and take a break, to clear your head, and just get into something else.
Francois Nars
Makeup is about balance. When the eye makes a statement, the lips should be quiet.
True icons are larger than life, unforgettable with an elegance that's mesmerizingly timeless.
Women are very unpredictable.
I like beauty to be a bit edgy, not typical. For me, the only rule is looking good.
We are not afraid to be a bit different, to make shades that are bold.
My interpretation of the word 'ugly'... I like ugly beauty. That can happen. In France, we have phrase 'jolie laide.' We like certain women who are not pretty or cute - it's the opposite in France of pretty. It's more strange and interesting.
My mother never wore much make-up, and she was a kind of natural beauty; she knew just how to enhance what she had.
Find your own way, have an open spirit, and believe in your own beauty.
I like shocking, but I don't like to shock as an automatic process. Sometimes it happens, but it's not my main drive.
A woman who hides behind a mask of makeup is still going to have to take it off at some point... and deal with reality.
I made contours and all that, but in real life, you have to be very careful with that because you can go out in the street and look terrible. All those girls who show how to do contour, they do it quite well, but they're like makeup artists. They're in artificial light.
I think it's important that you know every detail when you open a store, that you pay attention to everything.
I never stop thinking about names of products. It's a process that happens 24 hours a day.
As a make-up artist, you always want to be in a good light, whether you're walking down the street or in a restaurant. It is a very key element to me; you can't apply good make-up in a bad light.
I have always been attracted to faces that are different.
Women have to find their own personality, their own style, and what suits them the best.
You create the color first, and then the name that fits. It depends - there are no rules. You watch a fabulous old movie, and you suddenly get inspired by it to create a lipstick shade, or you walk through a gorgeous garden and find the most beautiful flower shade for an eye shadow, and then you name it.
It's not that I'm easily shocked. It takes a lot to shock me. And wildness I like. But vulgarity shocks me.
Being a studio make-up artist and working on magazines was the only thing I wanted to do.
I would find myself in these photo shoots with models and makeup, and I got swept up in it all.
I think everyone deserves to look better and to look good.
In America, when I first came here, they were used to wearing more make-up - thicker foundation, more Max Factor, that sort of thing. But you have to know who you are and what you look like: if you know yourself a little bit, you don't need to follow trends.
I think there was a freedom in the 1920s and 1930s: a certain liberty and evolution of women.
I didn't want to create a makeup line for one ethnic group; it had to be multi-ethnic. To me, beauty is beauty. It doesn't matter to me what colour the skin is.
In a lot of cases, makeup is a fantastic help, and that's why women love makeup in general. It's a fantastic way to help somebody look great. It's not the only way, of course, but it's a major accessory, along with hair, clothes, lighting, all those things.
I'm always scared of trends. The runways are always so trend-oriented, but I always feel for the women. The real women that buy cosmetics want to see the trends, but they don't necessarily go for them. And I always encourage women to find what looks best on them.
Women are being more experimental with eye color.
I really wanted to have a different approach of beauty because when I came to America, they were still heavily, heavily plastic. The ads were so heavily retouched.
It really has stayed practically the same. It wasn't like I used to do wild punk make-up: no, I always had the same vision.
Wearing colourful eyeliner in a graphic shape is the epitome of make-up as an accessory.
I hate knowing where people go to the bathroom. You follow them going to pee, to eat - I hate everything when it comes to reality shows!
Some people put a lot of fuss around them. I'm not an entertainer. Let's not get things confused.
I met Iman and Jerry Hall and all those girls in the late Seventies right when I started working at the fashion shows in Paris as an assistant.
Makeup can make a woman look more beautiful at every age.
A fresh face with a red lip is timeless. It's supermodern and relaxed but very chic.
From the start, I used a different kind of girl in Nars campaign images. My choice to use models of colour such as Alek Wek, Naomi Campbell and Karen Park Goude was absolutely a deliberate one. I felt that makeup was universal and should apply to everybody.
I was spoiled growing up in the 1970s because magazines were publishing the photographs of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin without compromise. You really felt that sense of freedom through their images.
Transparency is more sexy than a full, pancake finish.
I think if you take good care of your skin, you can achieve better make-up.
I think Edie Sedgwick comes back, too. Every five or six years, there is always something about Edie, because she was so modern and stylish and elegant and hippie-ish, all at the same time. So I think that people will always love her.
I always had a vision about beauty in general, so probably that's what really drove me into that direction of creating a makeup brand.
Makeup is an accessory to fashion. You buy a bag, you buy shoes, you put on eyeliner, you buy a lipstick, makeup compliments the clothes.
My mother and my two grandmothers, I was lucky to have three women around me growing up that were very special, very elegant women, very beautiful women. They were my first step into the beauty world, let's say, and then the fashion world, of course.
You are born with this love; fashion and beauty are a part of who I am.
Sometimes people are very not sure of themselves, so you really have to give them that confidence. Even models - they need to warm up sometimes on photo shoots.
I was a very lucky child because at the age of 16, 17 years old, my parents would buy me clothes from Yves Saint Laurent, which was an incredible luxury at the time, but I was attracted to that whole world. I had a pretty nice little wardrobe by the age of 17.
I never thought make-up was like brain surgery.
I don't think there's a major change between runway and real life anymore.
I'm very nostalgic - and I don't care.
