Designer Bella Freud unveils first beauty collection with Boots
Bella Freud is making her first foray into beauty with a new collection for Boots – bringing the designer’s cult slogans and irreverent approach to fashion to the bathroom cabinet.
The British designer, whose colour-pop slogan jumpers became synonymous with the Primrose Hill set in the Noughties, has created Glamorama, a collection spanning lip oils, hand care, hair accessories, a compact mirror and a ‘mood-enhancing’ fragrance spray.
View this post on Instagram
Launching exclusively at Boots on 15 September, it marks the first time Freud has ventured into beauty during her more than three-decade career.
It follows her first high-street collaboration with Marks & Spencer in 2024, which brought her distinctive knitwear to the masses at a lower price point.
Freud’s original slogan jumpers – emblazoned with phrases including “Je T’aime Jane”, “Ginsberg is God” and “1970” – have been worn by Britain’s best-known It-girls, including Kate Moss and Alexa Chung.
Now, she is applying much of that same thinking to beauty, with her new collection ‘Glamorama’.
The name Glamorama is intended to evoke the idea of putting on your “glamour armour”, before facing the day, Freud says, while her longstanding fascination with language appears across the collection through words and phrases printed on its packaging.
Freud, the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, launched her eponymous fashion label in 1990 and has become known for her playful use of language.
But despite entering an industry preoccupied with perfecting appearances, Freud didn’t want her beauty line to centre on erasing flaws – hence the absence of make-up correctors like concealer or foundation.
She points to the distinctive mole above her lip – something she says she barely notices until other people draw attention to it.
“You know, I like it, and I never notice it, but if it disappeared, I’d be really worried,” she says.
“Once, I had a photograph taken in the Nineties by Steven Meisel, and he airbrushed out my mole. It seemed so peculiar, you know. Normally, I love any airbrushing,” she adds, pulling her neck back, “but I want the flaw to stay because it feels like grit, you know, the thing.”
The products Freud picked to include are tightly linked to her earliest memories of make-up. Her mother, Bernardine Coverley, rarely wore it other than a kohl pencil liner, which led Freud to begin experimenting with while at school – eventually developing a technique she still associates with her younger self.
“My mother never wore any make-up. She did wear kohl, and at school I discovered a way to make an eye pencil with a straight line at the side, [so now] if I make it in this airplane thing, then I remind myself of how I used to feel. It’s all about feeling. I look in the mirror and I see myself as I was when I was going to school, like grumpy,” she laughs.
That idea of beauty as something that can alter – or restore – a mood is central to Glamorama.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given her family history, it is a preoccupation Freud has more recently explored through her podcast Fashion Neurosis, where guests recline on a therapy couch and discuss their lives through the clothes they wear.
Among the products of her new beauty line is ‘Transference’, which Freud calls a “mood spray” and which takes its name from the psychoanalytic term for redirecting feelings about one person on to another.
‘Transference’ is Freud’s fragranced ‘mood spray’ (SLG Brands/PA)
The idea first came to her during lockdown, when Freud began thinking about the moments of self-doubt that can descend while getting ready to go out.
“[Transference] has a fragrance, but it was in lockdown when I was thinking I want to invent something that you reach for when you’re looking in the mirror and you’re, in theory, going out, and you think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go out. I hate the world. I hate myself. Who am I?’ You know, you have this really quick collapse of self-doubt. It really takes over. And I thought, if you could just have something that you spray on, that it’s not really about almost what’s in it, but it’s a gesture, you reach for something, you ask for help in a way just from this little thing, and it reminds you that you you can get yourself out of this place."
Freud’s ‘Bored and Beautiful’ vanity gift set including a lip oil, lip balm and mood spray (SLG Brands/PA)
The scent is inspired by Freud’s childhood, where she spent time in Morocco, and included orange flower because of the effect its smell has had on her since then.
“The scent in there has properties of mood enhancement, and then there’s an orange flower, which always lifts my spirits,” she says. “When I was a child and I lived in Morocco, that scent of orange flower always made me feel lighter.
“I wanted it to have something that meant something to me, rather than just you know an academic experiment.”
For a designer whose most recognisable pieces have long used a few carefully chosen words to give an otherwise simple jumper an identity, the move into beauty takes the same lead.
Glamorama turns a lip oil, mirror or bottle of scent into something intended to affect how its owner feels as much as how they look.
Bella Freud X Boots Glamorama launches exclusively online and in Boots stores on 15 September, with prices starting from £12.
