The idea for Beauty Papers came together on a train from Paris to London. Maxine Leonard, a makeup artist who had started her career at Shu Uemura's counter at Liberty and gone on to work for The Face, i-D, and a four-year stint as beauty director at Wonderland, was frustrated. The beauty industry she had built her career in had become, in her view, homogenous, commercially driven, and creatively suffocating. The digital age had made everything more certain — art directors could see every shot instantly, clients wanted ever more control, and the space for genuine creative freedom had all but disappeared. Sitting across from her was Valerie Wickes, a graphic designer who had studied at Central Saint Martins, founded the Paris-based creative agency View Creative in 2003, and built a client list that included Bulgari. They shared the same frustrations. By the time the train pulled into St Pancras, they had the beginning of a magazine.
The first issue of Beauty Papers launched in June 2015, and the premise was simple but radical: treat beauty as a cultural practice rather than a commercial category. The magazine carries no advertising — Leonard and Wickes instead fund the editorial through their creative agency, Beauty Papers Creates Consults, which designs campaigns for brands like Byredo, Nars, Mac Cosmetics, and Jo Malone. This separation of church and state gives each issue an editorial independence that is vanishingly rare in beauty media. The shoots are not designed to solve marketing problems or sell products. They are collaborations between the magazine and commissioned artists, driven by creative expression rather than commercial objectives.
The covers alone tell the story of the magazine's ambition. South African artist and queer rights activist Zanele Muholi. Seventy-seven-year-old British painter Maggi Hambling. Hermaphrodite twins Eva and Adele. Shirin Neshat in a controversial take on Muslim representation that got the magazine shadow-banned by Instagram and pulled from several retailers' shelves. And then there was the Harry Styles issue — the former boy-band star photographed by Casper Sejersen in fishnet tights — which sold out immediately and, for every copy sold, donated a percentage to Haircuts4Homeless, a UK charity where hairstylists give rough sleepers a wash and cut. In 2023, the magazine unveiled previously unseen photographs of Andy Warhol in drag, shot by former Factory assistant Ronnie Cutrone, launched in collaboration with Iconic Images Gallery during Frieze London.
Beauty Papers was named to the BoF 500, the Business of Fashion's annual index of the people shaping the global fashion industry. It is a recognition that would have seemed unlikely for an ad-free biannual that insists beauty is political, philosophical, and personal before it is commercial. But Leonard and Wickes understood something the mainstream beauty press missed: the most interesting conversations about beauty are the ones that have nothing to do with products. The magazine has been having those conversations for a decade now, and showing no signs of running out of things to say.
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