Real Beauty

With her first M.A.C make-up line, TV personality, cookbook queen and activist Padma Lakshmi solidifies her status as a beauty icon, too. Mamta Mody talks to the versatile star before the collection’s India release

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Padma Lakshmi has unending reserves of energy and infectious enthusiasm. It comes through even over the phone, after she’s finished 12 hours of press interviews in Hollywood. The author and Top Chef host is warm, attentive and unhurried. She is genuinely excited about her global make-up collection, co-created with M.A.C Cosmetics.

For context, landing a major make-up collaboration at 47 is no easy feat, especially when you haven’t been connected to the fashion or beauty world for a while. But the former model has reinvented the meaning of a modern beauty icon in many ways. Besides playing host, she is also the executive producer of the Emmy-nominated show Top Chef, which is in its 15th season now. Her two cookbooks have been quite popular, just like her much talked-about tell-all memoir, Love, Loss, And What We Ate (Harper Collins, 2016). She is not only co-founder of The Endometriosis Foundation of America, an organisation that raises awareness about endometriosis (a condition she has been suffering from for the last 20 years), but has also been a voice, IRL and online, in the ongoing conversations about body acceptance and female sexuality.