If the eye is a camera with its shutter open – always recording, turning experience into image – it is Pica’s instinct to train her lens on visions less familiar.

Seeking inspiration for her Spring-Summer 2020 collection, the Chanel global creative make-up and colour designer took a photographic trip to the centre of an ancient desert, an expedition that uncovered a completely new perspective on colour.

Initially drawn to the desert for its famous orange dunes, sacred cave paintings and lunar plains, Pica was soon captivated by the silence of the vast nothingness she found there, its stillness moving her to reappraise the landscape through fresh eyes.

Lucia Pica unearthed a muted palette that is surprising new territory for her

Shifting her gaze towards the quieter hues of the quartzes, basalts and shales scattered across the desert floor and forests bleached by the relentless sun, Pica unearthed a muted palette that was surprising new territory for her.

Using the soft colours of the Chanel Desert Dream Spring-Summer 2020 make-up range brings ‘subtle emotion to the face’.

Desert Dream is characterised by peachy rose tones, cool browns and the undercurrents of mauve whose shimmering, at times metallic, textures echo the desert’s hidden treasures.

“It was beautiful in the desert but quite unexpected,” Pica says. 

“In the desert, there is almost a universe of one single, dominant colour – mauve – which really came to life with the particular photographic process we used.”

Like distant memories, the dreamy Polaroid pictures at the heart of Desert Dream lend their soft focus and painterly abstractions to a make-up collection that is perhaps Pica’s most poetic take on femininity yet.

Using the prints’ soft colours to bring subtle emotion to the face – mysterious, mauve intensity to the eyes, planes of warm light on the high cheeks and red-hot desert heat on the lips – Pica evokes a womanly state of inner calm, self-possession and utter contentment.