Wallpaper* has always embraced an unconventional approach to beauty, and 2022 was ripe with exciting and experimental launches, projects, and openings within the industry. Below, beauty & grooming editor Mary Cleary shares her favourites from the past year, including home fragrances designed in a secret Marrakech palace, a trick for creating fake tan lines, the best hair salons from around the world.
TOP 10 BEAUTY MOMENTS OF 2022
1. Favourite debut: Dries Van Noten Beauty
Dries Van Noten’s beauty line is as beguiling and idiosyncratic as its founder’s fashion label, which is exactly what makes it great. So far, the line includes ten genderless scents, each created by a different perfumer and each its own unorthodox interpretation of traditional floral fragrances; as well as 30 lipstick shades that have some of the best colours out there. Personal favourites for the winter season are 'Stanley Orange', a flattering burnt sienna, and the deep purple 'Violet Silk' in matte.
2. Favorite career pivot: Julien d'Ys
This year, iconic hair artist Julien d’Ys announced his transition from the world of fashion to art with a series of surrealist sculptures in our March issue.
To create the pieces, d’Ys walked the streets of Manhattan, from Chinatown to Harlem, sourcing miscellanea from open-air markets and antique shops, finding creative potential in what others, with less of an eye for the miraculousness in the marginal, might simply call junk. He also went back into his extensive archives, pulling out iconic wigs and headpieces that once graced catwalks and magazine pages.
‘My whole life, working for magazines and designers, I’ve created for them,’ he says. ‘Working with Wallpaper*, I was free to do something very personal, to show that my creativity can go very far away and be very extreme.’
3. Perfume launch: Celine’s Rimbaud
Celine’s Rimbaud is a powdery, lavender fragrance with hints of musk and orris butter that make it a delicate scent that maintains the peculiar edge of all Celine’s fragrances.
The fragrance is inspired by the teenage rebel poet who composed his entire oeuvre of dazzling, transgressive verse between 1870 (when he was just 16) and 1875. Slimane remembers lying in the grass with his schoolmates as a young teenager, reading Rimbaud’s poetry and being ‘fascinated by the fragility and grace of the young poet and [feeling] his torments as they were our own’.
It's a gentle fragrance, ideal for spring or summer months especially, but if you are looking for something a little more intense try Bois Dormant (what Slimane himself wears), a woody bergamot scent inspired by the perfect English double-breasted suit; or Nightclubbing, a blend of galbanum, patchouli, and musk that recalls the smell of cigarettes, sweat and perfume of hedonic nights out.
4. Wellness space: Alex Eagle at 180 Health Club
This year Alex Eagle – whose eponymous London shop has served as an oasis of good taste since it opened in 2014 – extended her curatorial acuman to a one-of-a-kind treatment space at the top of 180 The Strand in London. On offer is a vast range of alternative classes and therapies that Eagle herself has discovered throughout her years in fashion and retail, either through her own research or on the recommendations of friends and colleagues.
There are a lot of treatments to choose from but I recommend: facial acupuncture with former beauty journalist Joanna Ellner, CBD Tension Dissolve Massage with Kloris, At Your Beat 'Body Party’ dance-based exercise class, a one-hour nutritional consultation with specialist Olga Hamilton, and a Kundalini Massage with Holly Warren, which aims to cleanse emotional blockages from the subconscious.
5. Home scent: Serge Lutens’ home collection
This year Wallpaper* travelled to Marrakech to visit Serge Lutens’ mysterious ‘foundation', a mind-bogglingly beautiful complex of riads that he has kept largely hidden from the world for nearly 50 years. You can read more about the foundation in our October issue story, which was published in conjunction with the launch of Lutens’ first home fragrance collection.
The five scents are inspired by five different locations – the Moroccan house, Moroccan garden, Japanese house, Scottish house, and a linen cupboard – and are available as a home spray and incense. The 'Pierres sèches, laine et cuir’, evocative of a library in the Scottish Highlands, is a warm and comforting scent that is particularly well-suited to this time of year.
6. Unconventional beauty tip: fake tan lines
In our March Style Issue we embraced the jolie laide appeal of tan lines in this image by photographer Joanna Wzorek. With some creative self-tanner application and a couple of Missoni bathing suits, we created a deliberately botched look that was delightfully cheeky and even surprisingly, subversively sexy. Try it this winter and fool everyone, yourself included, into thinking you've just returned from a beach vacation.
7. Vegan skincare: Hæckles
Margate-based brand Hæckels is behind some of the most innovative beauty launches in recent years, including biocontributing mycelium packaging, prebiotic face masks, and odour-eating mushroom and kelp deodorant. But this year, it unveiled the first part of its most ingenious creation yet. Heackles 2.0 debuted with Hæckels Skin, which took the brand’s signature skincare formulations, made from seaweed harvested on Margate’s beaches, and repackaged them in compostable containers that can even decompose in the ocean without leaving behind any microplastics.
The packaging is great, but what’s best of all is that the products work so well. If you are just starting out with the brand, we recommend trying its Algae Pump Serum, Eco Marine Cream, Marine Facial Cleanser, and Eye Bright Eye Cream.
8. Hair salons: Hershesons, Smiths & Co, and Takamichi
This year we ran a number of stories exploring the best beauty spots in cities around the world, with a particular focus on hair salons. Our investigations yielded a variety of noteworthy spots including Takamichi on New York’s Lower East Side, where founder Takamichi Saeki is as charming as he is talented with a particular knack for sharp cuts that grow out to look as good as they did on day one.
In Milan, newly opened Smiths & Co is a must-visit with interiors designed to feel like a ‘living room for friends’ – think Gio Ponti lights and retro, roomy hairdressing chairs from a 1950s America – with products from organic Italian brand Oway.
And in London, no salon beats Hershesons. In addition to its Fitzrovia flagship, it now has a ‘super salon’ in Belgravia with a nail salon from DryBy nails, brow appointments from Suman Brows, and incredible treatments from Sarah Bradden, whose signature method blends facial acupuncture with reiki, reflexology, massage, and LED light therapy.
Hershesons’ reputation as the best in the business means it has a team of stylists and colourists that can successfully manage any of your transformation desires, whether it be a drastic new hair shade or a straightforwardly flattering cut.
READ MORE: New York
READ MORE: Milan
9. How-to: lucid dreaming
London-based dream guide Tree Carr offered us a step-by-step guide on how to lucid dream (ie, consciously control your dreams while you’re in them). Her six-step routine is an easy way to start the process, which is credited with enhanced creativity, reduced anxiety, and better motor skills.
10. Make-up look: Chanel phosphorescent skin and red lips
We collaborated with photographer Lowri Cooper and make-up artist Ninni Nummela to create seven beauty looks using Chanel Beauty products. One of our favourite looks from the story includes this ethereal blend of blush, red lips and drawn-on eyebrows.
You can learn how to recreate it, and the other looks from the story, in Nummela's how-to guide.
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