Hasta La Ideas

Can’t make it to the Museum at FIT’s brilliant Daphne Guinness exhibition before it closes next Saturday? Peek into the style icon’s colorful imagination with her new limited-edition collection for MAC Cosmetics. Now available nationwide, the 24-piece line includes chilly-toned lipsticks, eye shadow, and nail polish named for some of Guinness’s earthy favorites (Japanese spring, azalea blossom, seasoned plum) and out-of-this-world fascinations (red dwarf, borealis, nebula).

After MAC approached Guinness about a collaboration, she hunkered down with art supplies in her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I had parchment papers spread all over the floor and all sorts of different powders and watercolors that I was mixing together, and my finished pieces were drying on the balcony,” says Guinness, who points to Old Masters such as Titian and Francisco de Zurbarán as a perennial source of inspiration. “And I might say that I’m absolutely fascinated by butterflies and outer space. Blimey, I have pictures from the Hubble space telescope and some of those are just extraordinary, and if you look very closely at a butterfly’s wings or even perhaps a jellyfish, you’ll see there are similarities.” Among her favorite items from the MAC collection is Hyperion, a frosty blue-green nail polish. Explains Guinness, “It resembles this almost grey, steely light that is pure Whistler from the 1890s, when he still had fog in the paintings.”

Looking for even bolder makeup? Next up for MAC is a collection created with rara avis Iris Apfel. Stock up on Toco Toucan (fuschia) nail polish and Early Bird (bright coral) eyeshadow beginning Thursday.

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