Lucia Pieroni (Clé de Peau): It’s a gorgeous, very chic, handsome-beautiful woman, a little bit like a Lee Miller-type woman. You know, those women in the '30s and '40s that just had these beautifully sculpted faces with big eyes. They were a little bit masculine, didn’t realize wear much makeup, and they were just gorgeous. We’re doing a big, strong, slightly masculine eyebrow, a handsome eyebrow, meaning the arch is quite far out, for a straighter look, and then some highlighter in the usual places, the Luminizing Face Enhancer in #11 and #12. I’m doing a little bit of contouring, but not too much because I think when you have this gorgeous profile, contouring too much can make one look quite deathly. Plus, we wanted to reference the women in the '30s and '40s, who didn’t have time for makeup because they were far too intellectual for all of that, so they would just whack on a red lip, or nothing, and go out. Then, we’re using an eye shadow, the Eye Color Quad in #208, and putting it on the lid and underneath the eye so you can just blend it out. It’s not actually about the eye shadow, it’s about giving the eye, itself , a slight shadow. So there’s no kohl, no lashes, and there’s no mascara, so you still retain the fold of your eyelid. When you curl your lashes and add mascara, you lose that area of the eye, and it’s actually quite beautiful, I think. Mascara can be very pretty—it helps make a very doll-like eye—but if you're trying to get a strong message across, and you do strong makeup and then “pretty' eyes, it's not the most powerful thing. On the lips, we’re just using the Extra Rich Lipstick in #101 which is a super-natural nude color, with a little bit of pink showing through. I honestly don’t think it works on everyone, the nude-red, but how you get around that is by adding a little bit of concealer or foundation to your lip, very lightly around the edge, which blocks out the color of your mouth and then you add a little bit of the nude lipstick, and then it works. You have to make sure that you’ve cancelled out the natural pink of your lip, basically. Today, the girl is very beautiful but she’s kind of boyish at the same time.

Eugene Souleiman (Wella): There is this new minimalism happening, in the sense of a 'return of to '90s,' to a pure idea. I would say 'bad hair' is good hair, for sure. It’s not about major glamour—that’s a bit tacky and a bit vulgar. The new look is more personal; it’s about contradiction. Everything is very defined this season. Even if it’s not precise, it’s really defined, so if it’s about messy hair, it’s intentionally fucked up hair. It's not about prettiness; we’re in a time where we want women to look more 'intelligent.' It feels like things have really evolved from that vulgarity of over-accessorizing, lots of gold, hardware, shoes looking like cars, handbags looking like banks. We’ve moved on, but we’re going back to something that’s more human. I want you to look at these girls and think, ‘Oh, yeah, they kind of look like a person. They don’t look like a drag queen.’ That overly done-up look is like a men’s version of what a woman should look like, and women really don’t look like that and they don’t want to look like that.

Today's hair is inspired by a woman named Nicoletta Santoro [a stylist and the International Fashion Director at Large for Vogue China]. She has really curly hair and she likes to get that curl out... She doesn’t get it right all of the time, and it’s probably the only thing in her life that she’s probably never mastered! She’s very precise, very lovely, she’s really intelligent, but she can’t do her hair. She even admits it. She probably doesn’t know that she inspired the hair, though. She’s a really good friend of [Rochas' Creative Director] Marco [Zanini]’s; she’s like his mentor. Anyway, we’re taking her inspiration and turning it up: the hair part is a lot lower, to the point that it's almost like a men’s comb-over. The hair's not shiny; it’s matte. And it’s almost a kind of Michelangelo curl; the wave is very defined...everything about the look is about definition. We’re getting it there by using a product precisely for what it’s not designed for, which I love: Ocean Spritz, which is typically used to create textured, kind of beachy, sexy hair—yet we’ve done flat, very matte hair with it. We just rake it down with a brush.

Photographed by Emily Weiss in Paris on February 27th, 2013.