Quotes from Francois Nars

As a make-up artist, you always want to be in a good light, whether you're walking down the street or in a restaurant. It is a very key element to me; you can't apply good make-up in a bad light.

I met Iman and Jerry Hall and all those girls in the late Seventies right when I started working at the fashion shows in Paris as an assistant.

Women don't want to feel like they're wearing makeup. I hope I was partly responsible for that.

I thought make-up was a very sensual thing.

I launched NARS with 12 shades of lipsticks, and many, many launches later, I'm still most proud of our lipsticks.

I like shocking, but I don't like to shock as an automatic process. Sometimes it happens, but it's not my main drive.

It's more fun to have a name rather than a number. I think this gives our products a personality. I get the names from literature, movies, opera, traveling, nature, poetry, sometimes even the street. I keep a small book that I write in. I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down a name for a lipstick or an eyeshadow.

People have to learn that everybody is the same. If you wake up in the morning, even if you're a movie star, you look like everybody else. The reality is that makeup is there to help. That's what it's for.

We are not afraid to be a bit different, to make shades that are bold.

I always had a vision about beauty in general, so probably that's what really drove me into that direction of creating a makeup brand.

Women have to find their own personality, their own style, and what suits them the best.

When you photograph someone, you have to make them feel good, and you know that they want to look good. It's the same relationship that you have when you apply makeup on somebody. We're almost like shrinks.

It's very hard for me to photograph someone when I'm not attracted by who they are.

I photographed Alek Wek. She was amazing, and nobody knew about her then. It was a really strong photograph of her.

I chose makeup over photography because there was something very sensual about makeup that I loved. But photography was always in the back of my mind. That was always something that I was very connected with: looking at magazines, enjoying photography, and then taking pictures myself when I was a kid.

Having worked with so many of the geniuses, I'd learned so much. It's the best sort of photography school, to work with people like Penn or Avedon or Meisel.

When I was a kid, I loved photography, and I loved makeup.

It was the early Seventies, and I discovered makeup by going through my mother's fashion magazines. I fell in love with the photos, the models, the fashion.

I was a very lucky child because at the age of 16, 17 years old, my parents would buy me clothes from Yves Saint Laurent, which was an incredible luxury at the time, but I was attracted to that whole world. I had a pretty nice little wardrobe by the age of 17.

Sometimes people are very not sure of themselves, so you really have to give them that confidence. Even models - they need to warm up sometimes on photo shoots.

I never thought make-up was like brain surgery.

I'm not so interested in perfect, plastic beauty, and I think it translates in the girls I've shot over the years for Nars, from Guinevere to Iris to Mariacarla. I love those girls. I love the more interesting faces, with maybe a strange nose, not just the Texan blonde. By picking those girls, I think it's changed what I've seen in other campaigns.

I really wanted to have a different approach of beauty because when I came to America, they were still heavily, heavily plastic. The ads were so heavily retouched.

I didn't want to create a makeup line for one ethnic group; it had to be multi-ethnic. To me, beauty is beauty. It doesn't matter to me what colour the skin is.