Mullets and Marie Antoinette, enter the world of make-up artist Alice Dodds
This is A HOT MINUTE WITH, a quick-fire interview series championing all the rising talent catapulting into fashion, art and music’s fickle stratosphere. From pinch-me moments to bad dates and even worse chat-up lines, think of it as an overindulgent conversation – like the ones you have in sticky club toilets at 4.A.M. Except these guests don’t regret the overshare…
Courtesy of @alicedoddsmakeup
NAME ALICE ELIZABETH DODDS
AGE 23
LOCATION Peckham, London
STAR SIGN Leo
PET PEEVE Rooms without symmetry.
Alice Dodds doesn’t paint within the lines. Inspired by her teenage obsession with surrealism, her 16-year-old inner self is the reason for her much-lauded anti-conformist artistry. “If you looked back on the paintings I did when I was [younger], they’d look a lot like the make-up I do now,” she reflects. Fast forward a few years, past the golden era of talented yet sometimes (often) problematic make-up stars on YouTube (drama, drama, drama!), Dodds emerges onto London’s creative scene, re-sculpting the make-up rules much like the faces she paints – with the dab-hand of Picasso and a shit tonne of Gorilla glue.
With less than two years under her belt, half of which has been spent in perpetual quarantine, the make-up artist already counts several publications and fashion designer, ADAM JONES, as her clients. “When lockdown started, I hadn’t been doing make-up professionally for that long, so I had so many ideas I hadn’t had a chance to get out.” Thank God then that she was trapped in a house with photographer and go-to collaborator VERITY SMILEY-JONES. Their latest endeavor births the vision of Dirty Harry, a pastel-puke princess who screams F-U in the face of gender stereotypes and bares it all while they’re at it. Think Marie Antoinette...if she’d had a drunken love affair with John Waters’ Divine, that is.
With freedom just on the horizon, Dodds has a slew of collaborations and some major (top secret) plans for the year ahead. As for now…she just wants to go to a club.
Ella Aldersey-Williams: Who are your three biggest inspirations?
Alice Dodds: Pat McGrath, my friends, and Queer people everywhere.
EAW: Name a pinch me moment in your career?
AD: The Summer of 2020. I met the lead singer of an emo band I was obsessed with when I was younger and worked on a video for his new band. I was so gassed that a dream I used to have just to meet this guy had come true! I knew I was where I should be.
EAW: Who’s your dream face to paint?
AD: Harry Godfrey, my muse.
EAW: First make-up product you owned?
AD: It was Maybelline dream matte mouse, yikes!
EAW: You can only take 1 make-up product into the after-life… what are you taking?
AD: Gorilla glue.
EAW: Worst beauty trend you participated in?
AD: Those thick as hell Anastasia Beverly Hills eyebrows.
EAW: Where’s the first place you’re going post-lockdown?
AD: Berlin. Or back home to Norwich.
Courtesy of @alicedoddsmakeup
EAW: Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK or US?
AD: Drag Race UK, hun!
EAW: What’s a fashion trend you’ll never stop loving?
AD: Lesbians in white vests.
EAW: Best biscuit?
AD: Those Foxes Cream Ginger Nut ones dipped in tea.
EAW: Worst biscuit?
AD: Never had a biscuit I didn’t love.
EAW: Most OMG awkward moment while working as a make-up artist?
AD: I was once supposed to assist someone; I got the date wrong and on the morning of the shoot she messaged me. I had one of the worst panic attacks of my life because I thought I had fucked up my whole career. I told her I couldn’t go and she blocked me. If you’re reading this, sorry babes…
EAW: Manifestations for 2021?
AD: To see my whole family together, see my work in print, have a perfect mullet, swim in a lake, be very happy.