Cameron Russell on becoming a beauty ambassador for her voice, as much as her face – harpersbazaar.com

Supermodel and activist Cameron Russell has long used her influence to address injustices, not least as a leader of the fashion industry’s Me Too movement. Having shared anonymous stories of sexual harassment within the modelling industry on her Instagram account in the wake of the Weinstein allegations, she spearheaded change and continues to expose power abuses in a forthcoming book investigating the fashion business. Meanwhile, between campaigning for causes from deforestation to abortion rights (as amplified on Instagram), the 32-year-old mother of two has been signed by beauty giant Max Factor – not solely as their ‘face’, but as an ambassador. There’s a difference, she tells Bazaar, that says as much about the brand as her.

“I’ve been in this job now [as a model] for such a long time and I’m also very outspoken, so to have a big brand like Max Factor want to work with me, not just because of how I look but also my voice, is an honour to me, but also makes me feel like it’s a brand that’s thinking about women in all that they can be,” she explains, adding that being chosen felt like a real vote of confidence in what she’s putting out there. “It makes me feel like they’re thinking about their customer in a more progressive way than perhaps in the past. They’re thinking about who women want to be and what voice they want to have.”

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Russell’s Instagram reveal of her new role sits between posts calling for a more holistic sustainability movement in fashion, and a celebration of female leadership in the industry. She tells us beauty is an important place for people to practice self-care and self-love, and “the world needs that right now”.

She explains: “There’s something about beauty that I think returns us to our instincts and our intuition – we feel it before we can describe it, and that feels very important to me today, when we’re consuming so many things through our screens and our devices.” Beauty, in all its guises, can bring you back to the present moment. “We’re reading and seeing things before experiencing them, and so in that context I think that beauty is this very grounding thing – it makes you look up.”

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Recently Russell has been working with esteemed make-up artist Wendy Rowe, Max Factor’s creative director who regularly has A-listers in her chair – from Sienna Miller to Victoria Beckham. “On the very first shoot, Wendy said to me ‘above all else, make-up is emotional,’ and that was such an insightful, sensitive thing to say,” the model tells us.

Indeed, make-up changes how you feel just as much as how you look. “Wendy would finish a look and ask, ‘do you like it?’, which to me is really unusual, especially for someone with so much experience,” Russell recalls. “She wanted to ensure that I was going to be confident.” Essentially that’s something they’re trying to sell, “making the people who use those products feel confident, which is a really beautiful philosophy,” she notes.

This chimes with the model and campaigner’s conviction that the fashion and beauty worlds represent much more than consumerism and vanity. “I think sometimes it can be characterised as superficial or frivolous, but I don’t feel it’s that way at all.” They also have the power to present diversity –the lack thereof being something Russell’s working hard to address.

“We work in image space and it feels very, very obvious what’s missing”

“We work in an image space and it feels very, very obvious what’s missing,” she says of the lack of real representation in the industry. “There’s work to be done… but another way to see it is that there’s work to be done in every sector. One of the things we get to do when we work in an image space is really make that change being at the forefront of imagination. Yes, there are deep changes that need to take place throughout our society but working in images we get to make that dream visible and real in this moment. We have an incredible opportunity to lead.”

Cameron wears Ralph Lauren Collection dress and Cartier jewellery, photographed by Will Davidson and styled by Miranda Almond

In 2012 Russell gave a TED Talk which went viral and to date is ranked one of the 20 most-viewed TED Talks of all time. In ‘Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model’, she exposed such flaws of the fashion industry. Does she think we’ve come a long way in addressing representation since then? “You don’t kind of solve that history overnight, but we have made a ton of progress,” she tells us. “Two years ago, I helped bring the Me Too movement to fashion and one of the responses that I have been working on with others is changing not only who’s in front of the camera but who’s behind the camera.”

After learning that only three per cent of agency-represented photographers were women, “making sure that women are behind the camera is a big piece of transformation that we are seeing now”. Pleasantly surprising to Russell, she walked in to find an all-female team shooting her Max Factor campaign. “I had not experienced that on a huge campaign before in this way. Everybody was an industry veteran and were all women.” And that wasn’t her doing, she tells us; “I just walked into this beautiful team.”

“To me beauty feels like such a smaller footprint: one shade of lipstick can change your whole outfit.”

The industry has also made strides in addressing sustainability issues, and it’s also for this reason that Russell feels happy to promote make-up. “To me it feels like such a smaller footprint: one shade of lipstick can change your whole outfit,” she explains. “Part of my work is about selling as many looks as possible and I think that make-up is a nice intervention in that it can really transform your wardrobe. What you wear to the office or at home can easily carry you over to a party with a change of make-up – or you can wear the same shirt in 10 different ways when you change your make-up,” she adds. “That is a beautiful, sustainable way to enjoy this industry without having to consume as much.”

Russell is an advocate of consuming customisable products; using something in multiple ways so you can make the most out of it. “Wendy and I connected on how there are all these ‘rules’ around make-up, like how you have to use a lip pencil only on your lips, but these rules are all made to be broken.” Rowe used a lip colour on Russell’s cheeks and eyelids, and an eyebrow pencil on her lips. “She felt very creative and free with the products, the way I do at home, and I thought, ‘I should never tell anyone that I’m walking around with a lip pencil making up this whole look!’, but that’s reflective of how make-up is actually used.”

She admits, “I do not have super-expensive taste, I like things that are functional and look good”. Her two holy grails are organic shea butter (“It’s all-purpose, I use it for everything”) and Suave haircare (“It’s the cheapest on the shelf!”).

It speaks to why Russell wanted to work with Max Factor. “They believe we all want to feel like the most beautiful version of ourselves, not someone else’s vision of beauty,” she says. The supermodel may have won “a genetic lottery”, as she put it in her TED Talk, but that’s not why she’s a beauty role model.

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