Staying true to your art and pursuing a creative career is not for the faint of heart. As an extension of our Portfolio series, CHANEL Makeup Artist, Julie Cusson and writer, Bianca Sparacino sat down for an insightful conversation to discuss what creative expression means for them.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

There is a question that I have been wanting to ask you from when I first met you. You had so many faces to work on [for the Portoflio shoot], and you were being pulled in every direction, and every single person was like, “Oh, Julie gets to do your makeup today, you are the luckiest person.” It can be a very overwhelming and disorienting experience to not only be barefaced, but to put that comfort into the hands of someone else.

JULIE CUSSON:

Comfort yes, but you need also to trust. It’s difficult sometimes to trust someone that you don’t know.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

It is so much, about technical skill, right? Being able to work on different faces, knowing what textures to bring to a face, what to add, and what to take away, it’s very technical and very artistic. But I think there’s an emotionality to why you are so beloved for what you do and why you are so respected. When I sat in your chair, it was very clear to me that it was an emotional thing. You saw beauty as an art form. When was the first time you saw beauty, not as something that was just physical? When did it start becoming an emotionality to you? When did you see it as an art form?

JULIE CUSSON:

I cannot really remember the moment, but, it’s a journey, you know? I don’t believe in trends, so makeup for me is a creation, but also it’s an extension of when I have someone in my chair, it’s a question of trust. My goal is always to show the person’s inner light. I think everyone has something beautiful, and I love when I’m able to show the person in my chair, “Look at this, look at this light.” In a way it’s a bit like when you’re in your writing process, when I read you poetry, I can feel also that you want to make people embrace who they are, right? To love themselves, and I think in a way, it’s the same thing for me. I want the person to feel confident, I want the person to realize that, she or he or they are beautiful. Tt’s very important for me because everyone has something special. Makeup for me is the tool, to help me to create an art form.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

I remember, you were like ‘the light’, and it’s so interesting to hear you talk about that being a deep inspiration for your work too, because it’s like you don’t just see it in someone’s face, or when they’re in front of you, you’re seeing it in like the buildings, and the way like the light is hitting the water, and that’s inspiration within itself.

JULIE CUSSON:

When you see a masterpiece from the classic, a Venetian era if you pay attention, the way they paint eyes or the way that they put a little white or creamy dust, it just creates something very attractive. Sometimes I do this on the waterline, and I think I did this on you. I put a clear shade just to open the eyes, just to create something mysterious. For me, I’m not attracted to the perfect shade or line, but I love the texture, the light from it. This is what I love about makeup.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

You said something about not necessarily looking to trends or trying to recreate things that are maybe a little more fleeting. I wanted to know how do you handle that in a very external industry?

JULIE CUSSON:

It’s easy in a way, I feel because when I work, I use my instincts. If I’m on set on a fashion-focused shoot and I work with a model, she’s in a way my canvas, and I will create something to compliment the garment. I will have a talk with the photographer about the light and with the stylists about the mood, and it’s the way that I will create something. I don’t really care about trends, it’s really more like a creation moment. And when I work with people, as we did together, my aim is really to create beauty, so if you create beauty, for sure it will be amazing and right at the moment. Also, why I do not believe in trends is that we all have different features. What is great for me, perhaps it’s not good for you, it’s different and so I don’t like when we copy. In a way we are putting a vail or a mask, and I don’t believe in this.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

Something that I loved when you were working on my face is you said, “oh, your nose, I love your nose. We’re not touching your nose.” It’s so interesting because I feel like the thing these days is to make the nose very small and take away all of your little characteristics, and it made me think about the way that I approached my own beauty. I felt like I saw my mom in me, I saw my history, my ancestry and it was something that was actually quite emotional for me and it made me feel beautiful in a way I have never felt beautiful before.

JULIE CUSSON:

Thank you, Bianca. But in a way, don’t you think that, I created a minimalist interpretation of your usual style? The way I create, usually, is to think about the project before. But at the same time, I try to just not prepare too much myself because I want to still be free in the process. But for me, it was clear that I wanted something very luminous but see-through at the same time. I love to feel the natural skin texture. This is really the thing that I feel is important for me.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

The skin prep was amazing. I felt very glowy and as if my inside was being reflected outwardly, which is a huge part of my own creative process. I just felt like you were bringing out that light, and I think that’s something you do very well.

JULIE CUSSON:

You have amazing skin, really. For me, that day was working the finish of the complexion, something very light, but with some luminosity, but not too much. I worked with Les Beige, the water fresh tint on your skin, because it’s just water with pigment.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

I feel like when we were talking the other day over dinner about how long you’ve worked with CHANEL and what you love about it, you said, “Everything is pared down in a way that feels very honest and anchored in simplicity and effortless.” There’s an elegance to being able to do that properly, and to walk off set and to feel like my skin.

JULIE CUSSON:

That’s nice. In a way, your beauty was able to breathe, you know?

BIANCA SPARACINO:

Oh, I love that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that’s exactly how it felt, it felt very honest.

JULIE CUSSON:

I remember that that was something that I wanted really to do with you, and the eyes too, because your eyes are..

BIANCA SPARACINO:

You left them bare. You said, “This is new, and it was just this simple wash of colour and a little bit of a smoked liner.” And I was like, “My eyes look so much larger than they normally do.”

JULIE CUSSON:

This is my favourite colour for brown eyes, because in brown, you have yellow in the composition of the colour. Anything that has red pigments, so plum, eggplant, push the eye colour. I remember I showed you how to do instead of using liquid eyeliner, to use the eye shadow and just to smudge in a tiny, refined way for a cat eye. It’s never my intention when I do the makeup on someone to change the person. It’s more to create an extension of what this person is and to just to show where we can go. But I remember I had so much fun on that day the connection that we had together.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

That’s something that I believe in so deeply with my own writing, if my writing doesn’t feel honest, it’s because it’s not close to my inner world. So if I can, shorten the gap between my inner world and what I’m doing externally, that’s when I know everything that comes out of that channel is gonna be honest and rooted in who I am, right?

JULIE CUSSON:

I’m so happy that you loved the experience. You mentioned something as an author, because it’s very important for you to be very honest about your art and the way that you write, were you like this from the beginning or is it something that that happened with time in your writing? Did you censor yourself at the beginning?

BIANCA SPARACINO:

For me, I do feel like I, with age and with growing up and with putting my work out into the world, at first, I thought I had so much to prove, especially just the way that I grew up. I studied neuroscience in school and I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to work with my hands, I wanted to use my brain. I was the first one in my family to have ever gone to university. As encouraging as my parents where I always felt like I had to do something very measured and very neatly organized. I remember being in a lab with someone, and we were doing something with a microscope and I was kind of bored, but I was very good at it, it was very easy for me. She just looked at me, and she was like, “Isn’t it so cool that we get to do this for the rest of our lives?” I genuinely had to excuse myself because I started having a panic attack. I think it just clicked in my brain where I was like, “You’re not living honestly. You’re shutting down a very, very, alive part of yourself. You’re trying to quiet it and silence it.” I decided then and there that I wouldn’t pursue medicine anymore. I wouldn’t pursue medical school. And I told myself, I’m going to give myself a year to just like try and try and lean into what is asking to be felt inside of me. Like, what do I actually want?

JULIE CUSSON:

You were very courageous.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, especially rooted in like all of the expectation. Like, what if this doesn’t work out and everyone is like, “I got into this school. Oh, my gosh, I’m gonna be a heart surgeon.” And I’m like, “I’m working at a bar in Toronto and I, I have three roommates, and oh, my God, what am I doing? Oh, my God.”

JULIE CUSSON:

Were you writing at that moment?

BIANCA SPARACINO:

It was pouring out of me, and I was submitting it to my now publisher, they were rejecting everything. I was trying so hard to create and fit what they wanted and to be measure, curated, and to do things that I thought other people wanted, and it wasn’t honest. There was a very big gap between my internal world and external art. Very serendipitously, I met someone who lived in London and I ended up visiting this person. You know, when you’re young, you’re like, “I love him!” Oh, my gosh, I’ve never felt this way before.” I had an amazing time in London. I visited him. He was in medical school at Oxford, and I felt such a deep connection, I felt very cracked open. I was on the plane home, and I couldn’t stop crying. I’m not the person who cries in public, but I was fully flayed open for the world to see me. I pulled out a piece of paper and I just started like writing furiously. I ended up reading it to my roommate when I got home, and she was like, “You have to try one more time to submit this. I know you’re discouraged.” She was so encouraging I could cry. So I’m like, you know what? Why not? It ended up getting accepted. It was called “How to Ruin Your Life Without Even Realizing That You Are”, and it was basically about how you can have the perfect job, you can be in the long term relationship, you can say yes and yes, and you can still end up unhappy or disconnected from yourself. So, the article was like a call to action for people to think deeper about what their checklist in life is and how they’re living, and if it’s honest and if it’s true. It went viral overnight, it’s one of the most popular articles to this day. Everyone can relate to that feeling of “what am I doing and how am I doing it?”. I got my book deal from that article. I got my freelance writing projects from that, and I started posting my work on Instagram and very organically, it has become what it has become.

JULIE CUSSON:

Do you see yourself as an author or as a poet? Is there a difference for you?

BIANCA SPARACINO:

Julie, why you got to do me like this? That’s such a hard question. I’ve never connected fully to the term poet. I think that in the way that I speak, people are always very surprised. They’re like, “You sound the way that you write. You’re not edited and your writing, it’s very just lyrical and rhythmic and in a very genuine way.” I get a lot of messages from people saying, “When I met you and then I read your writing, I can just hear you speaking, it’s the same tone.” When I think of poetry, I think of stanzas, but I think there also is a lot of poetry and emotionality and connection, like shared humanity. There’s something lyrical about it to begin with. I always say it feels like a dance and I feel like I don’t connect it directly to that word, but perhaps that’s why so many people say, like, no, this is poetry.

JULIE CUSSON:

I mean, you’re the only person that can respond to this question. I mean, of course, it’s your art, but, I mean, when I read your poetry, It’s how I feel about your writing.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

It’s meant to just flow. I never really edit it down or try to make it sound a certain way. I like things to just be very liberated because I feel like that’s when we connect the most. In the same way you aren’t going onto set and saying, “Well, it has to be exactly like this.” Maybe you do have an idea in your head or like a concept of what you want to convey, but then you look at your canvas, or you hear someone talk about what makes them feel confident or seen and witnessed, and you’re like, “Oh, no, we’re gonna do this. It’s not constricted. It’s very, it’s very free. And I think that’s why we get along very well.

JULIE CUSSON:

I think it’s the way that you see your creative process, right? No, I get it too. I mean, it’s why I said, I see a lot of similarities between your work and my work, we do different things, but the same thing is the freedom to say, no, let’s go there, you know?

BIANCA SPARACINO:

I love that you talk about energy so much because I really do believe that you can’t create something real and honest from a place of being constricted around what needs to be done or what should be done, or what, even thinking about where it’s going to go. So, I always say I’m writing for an audience of one person, and it’s just me, like, what am I channeling, what am I feeling. I can’t think about, “Well, I need to change lives today. I need someone to read this and cry.” I can’t, it can’t be like that cause then it just gets so rooted and angular and it loses its shape. it just, it needs to be a channel. It needs to be honest and open. It needs to be able to breathe…. and I did feel that in your chair. That’s what made me feel so comfortable. How did you even start working with CHANEL?

JULIE CUSSON:

It was a natural fit, I never, like, changed myself, you know? I, as you said, we should never do this, you know? Trying, like to fit like in in a niche. So it was very natural, and when CHANEL approached me to be part of the team, I think it’s because, I mean, of course, the exposure of my work, I think talks by itself, so I think also for CHANEL, they liked what I was doing, it was just a good fit, so it was very natural.

BIANCA SPARACINO:

It feels very natural, it makes sense, and I mean, we’ve maybe spent, like, four hours together max. This just feels very honest, like a real channel of your artistry. I think that we do have to be careful as artists not to feel boxed in… or to feel constricted in our professional lives. To be able to say no, to be able to say yes, we have to be so protective of what we’re trying to channel and what’s being asked of us in our art, right? S o it’s beautiful that you found a place where you can kind of like, breathe within that, where that is like a very living, real thing, something that’s like, can be felt and turned over and championed. So, it’s just this constructive, beautiful thing. That’s deeply felt when someone is in your chair, I can speak to that personally. Even on set, it’s just, it made sense. It’s like you were you fit into the puzzle and you made it something beautiful.

Photography and Videography by Sloane Bartley
Fashion Direction by Haley Dach and Sahar Nooraei
Makeup by Julie Cusson for CHANEL Beauty
Hair by Justin German (P1M Agency)
Prop Stylist: Chiara Purdy (Cadre Artists)
Fashion Assistant: Christal Williams
Hair and Makeup Assistant: Paolo Manigat
Photo Assistant: Isaias Souvervielle
Shot on location at Neighbourhood Studios
Model: Bianca Sparacino

Feature image: