The time Paris Jackson feels most empowered is when she’s “performing on stage”. The 24-year-old, whose music career began as one half of musical duo The Soundflowers with ex-boyfriend and musician/singer Gabriel Glenn, recently released her latest solo single, grunge-inspired track lighthouse, earlier this year.
In conversation with GLAMOUR, she tells me she is “very excited” to continue on with her solo music career – which began with with her first studio album, Wilted, in 2020. She has an East Coast USA tour coming up this November where she’ll be performing at locations including South Carolina, Washington DC and New York. “I love experimenting and trying new things. I just love all things music, so I just like creating.”
Paris has added another role to her ‘multi-hyphenate’ portfolio of jobs (impressive, at only 24) she is collaborating with KVD Beauty, a vegan beauty brand. The brand's focus on high-pigment, high-performance makeup that lends itself perfectly to wearing on stage for hours-long performances is presumably a big driver behind why the musician slash model slash actor chose to work with them.
“As a musician and performer, long-lasting wear is a must,” she says, adding: ‘Makeup has always played a massive part in performing dating back to the days of KISS, or even earlier. You see, you can look at really any music video that's ever played on MTV and there's always some kind of unique makeup look going on, regardless of the genre of music." It’s worth noting that Paris’ father, the late Michael Jackson, was also a pioneer when it came to wearing make-up during performance – not just the white makeup he wore later in his career, but also red lipstick and eyeliner, beginning in the iconic 1982 Thriller video.
As for Paris Jackson's other career strands: you might recall her flexing her acting muscles in American Horror Stories (she played a character called Maya in three episodes of the hit show released last year), while she’s devoted the past couple of years to releasing solo music. She also signed with leading, global modelling agency, IMG Models, in 2017.
She says, "I like stretching that creative muscle in whatever way that I can, whether it be music or acting or fashion or just anything artsy," she tells me. When I asked about her impressive roster of different creative roles, she says modestly: “Well, the left part of my brain is pretty nonfunctioning, so kind of all I got working for me is the right side.”
Today, we’re speaking ahead of the announcement that she’s partnering with KVD Beauty for the second time in the year – this time around, collaborating on the launch of the Everlasting Hyperlight Liquid Lipstick product, a matte, long-lasting product that comes in a range of bold colours (including blue and purple – a homage to the brand’s “goth-meets-grunge” DNA). She’s been involved in this new campaign as both a co-creative director and a model, a process she describes as ‘an unforgettable experience’. During the shoot, she was involved in behind-the-scenes artistic decision-making together with fronting the campaign. The result is a “secret garden”-style series of vampy, gothic images shot among using props of thorny red roses.
Paris first partnered on the launch of KVD’s bestselling Tattoo Liner in spring this year – named as such for its long-lasting quality. This was an apt collaboration, given Paris’ famous love of tattoos; she is believed, according to the most recent estimates, to have at least 80 of them. Asked about her demonstrable love of inkings, she tells me: “I don't know. I've always been interested in [tattoos]. I used to get uniform violations in school – I was probably 13 or 14 – because I used to write all over myself with a permanent marker.” What did she write? “Song lyrics and band logos.” Some of her recent inkings include: “A dragon, a koi fish, the sun, the moon, an eyeball,” she tells me.
While Paris insists, during our interview, that her tattoos “don’t mean anything”, I know from my research that several of her tattoos are dedicated to her late father – including a sleeve tattoo she got of Michael Jackson’s 1991 album Dangerous in 2016, when she was 18. She also has a friendship tattoo with her brother, Prince Jackson – respectively, a yin and yang symbols. “I have friendship tattoos with at least 10 people,” she tells me. Another is “the word spit, in my best friend’s handwriting” – and yes, he has a matching one (“It’s just funny, so we got it.”) Will friendship tattoos catch on? “Friendship tattoos have been going on for a very long time.” (Heads up: anyone who hasn’t had mutual inkings with their BFFs is apparently lagging behind).
While Paris is open about her many, many tattoos and her collaboration with KVD, it becomes clear throughout our interview that she has some strict boundaries around discussing more personal details. To give an example, Paris shares with me that “affirmations” are very important to her for self care, but when asked what kind of things she might say, she deems my question “kind of personal” and refuses to answer.
She comes across as guarded, but this is understandable. Famously, Paris, together with her siblings, Prince and Blanket, wore masks as children while out with their father, to protect their identities – a practice that Paris retrospectively “appreciated”, as she has said in subsequent interviews. Nowadays, she has a more complicated relationship with being in the public eye. Asked what she’s looking for in her personal life, Paris responded, “Privacy – having things in my life that are private and not all public knowledge.” Yet she posts regularly on Instagram – sometimes multiple times a day – and has almost four million followers on the platform – is this not a conflict? “No, I'm still very much on social media. It's nice to have a choice though, of what is shared.”
The KVD Everlasting Hyperlight Liquid Lipstick is available to buy via the Boots website from 19 August.
