Jenny Shimizu & Michelle Violy Harper in Helmut Red

A red lipstick that suits every skin tone. Now that is really something, almost genius.

Has the poster child of androgyny gone femme? The answer is No. 

[ photos from intothegloss ]

When I heard that Jenny Shimizu had teamed up with “online concept boutique” House of Exposure and lipstick guru Poppy King to create the perfect red—Helmut Red, an homage to Helmut Newton heroines—I wondered if the poster child of Nineties androgyny (Ck One,remember?) had gone femme. The answer, it turned out, was no. Dressed in a crisp men’s button-down from +J and cuffed linen shorts (also swiped from the men’s section at Uniqlo), Shimizu confirmed my sneaking suspicion about her beauty routine—or lack thereof. “Honestly?” she said, “I don’t wear much makeup…or really any makeup.” On the opposite end of the spectrum is Michelle Violy Harper, fresh off a plane from Paris couture and at Shimizu’s side, who has never met a compact she didn’t like. On this particular afternoon, she’d dipped into a mint-green eye shadow by Shiseido (from the Silky Eye Shadow Quad in Ocean Shimmer) complemented—of course—by a hearty helping of the lipstick du jour. “That’s the thing that I love about this red,” she said. “You can do a weird green eye shadow with a strange teal-black eyeliner… You can pretty much do anything with it because of the blue base underneath. Creating a universal red is really a challenge, but this one looks good on so many different people.” Harper used Shimizu to prove her point, applying several coats of the “glossy, incredibly emollient” formula to her makeup-free companion.

Full story here.