‘Make-up is my mask. It’s a safety lanket between the world and me’

Euphoria star Hunter Schafer on her style evolution and learning to feel beautiful

- BY MADDY MUSSEN

Growing up, my beauty icons were from comic books. I always thought the superheroes were gorgeous. I loved Starfire and Raven from Teen Titans. And then in high school, it was Tavi Gevinson. I was obsessed, I loved everything she did.

Make-up is something I started experimenting with in high school. But in between school and starting my role as Jules in Euphoria, I was modelling, and they like you not to wear make-up when you're not on set. So I got really used to not wearing it, and then when Euphoria started, I jumped back into this heavy make-up world. I got to experiment with it on a new level. It felt like a blank canvas, and my approach to it was really playful and illustrative.

In some ways, make-up is my mask. It's about creating a safety blanket between what I give to the world and what I keep for myself. The tools we have to do that — beauty, fashion, fragrance — are all such great things to help bring this person that we have inside of us, outwards. Even with fragrance, where it might not necessarily be visual, it's about a feeling. In the way you might feel when you put a pair of heels on and you feel more powerful, I think fragrance can do the same.