Charli xcx’s “Intentional” New Look is Here

Reported by Vogue.

Charli xcx accidentally concussed her husband during a music video shoot, and she's treating it like a footnote. "It literally concussed George," she says of the rogue salt shaker she hurled at The 1975's George Daniel while filming "Rock Music" — adding, dryly, that it's lucky the YSL Candy Glaze Lip Gloss Stick she was holding didn't meet the same fate. "Otherwise it would have been death by beauty."

The chaos is fitting. In the video, Charli smashes guitars, chain-smokes, and shoves a television out a window — fully inhabiting the rock icon caricature she's built for this new era. It's also the backdrop for something more official: her new role as ambassador for YSL Beauty, announced today alongside a campaign she filmed in Brooklyn. According to Vogue, the partnership is a natural extension of a relationship already in motion — she wore Saint Laurent to the Met Gala, sat front row at Paris Fashion Week, and has been orbiting the brand's aesthetic for over a year.

The Eye Has Always Been the Point

What's interesting about Charli's beauty evolution is how deliberately it mirrors wherever she is creatively. Brat was smudged liner and clear skin — intentional minimalism. "Rock Music" goes darker: an oil-slick, glossy black eye she describes as a callback to teenage face paint, except now executed with YSL's Lash Latex Mascara and the brand's new Skin Affair Soft Glow Cushion Foundation. Working with YSL Beauty's global makeup artist Sam Visser, the look lands somewhere between glamour and menace. "We wanted to make sure the makeup gave glamorous, rockstar, daring energy," Visser says. Charli's version: "a heavier, darker eye that's sort of dark and evil and something sexy."

What makes the partnership work, she says, is that no one asked her to sand down the edges. "They let me be me, which is my main thing whenever I'm working with anybody." After The Moment, the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, and Mother Mary, she's returning to pop on her own terms — and apparently, "Rock Music" isn't a genre pivot so much as a mood. (The cigarette mountains in the video were hand-rolled and, she notes, sounded like wind chimes when rubbed together. "Almost sculptural." Of course.)

After the Met Gala, she stayed out until 8 a.m. before a 10 a.m. shoot, arrived with her dramatic cat eye half-dissolved, and didn't particularly care. "If there's bits of makeup remaining on, I like that," she says. The residue is deliberate — a worn-in version of herself she has no interest in erasing before the next thing begins.

When your beauty look is an extension of your creative identity rather than a mask over it, sleeping in your eye makeup isn't laziness — it's a statement.

Read the original at Vogue.