“I’m definitely getting experimental with color and doing more with my eyes,” she promises. “She’s a role model for women around the world,” says Peter Philips, creative and image director for Dior Makeup, who has already begun working closely with Smith to expand her face-painting repertoire. Everyone is beautiful,” she explains, nodding to a long-overdue, industry- wide pivot toward broader representation that makes her more than just an ambassador for primers and foundation. “Everything is being celebrated-different looks, hair, and bodies. “There’s something new that’s happening now,” Smith continues of the cultural landscape. And Drake, who reached out to Smith on Instagram two years ago to ask her to be a part of his More Life mixtape. “At school, the majority of the girls were white and slim with long hair, so that’s what I wanted to look like.” Learning to embrace her hourglass figure and pillowy pout, however-while nurturing a raw talent that saw her write her first song when she was just 11 years old-has helped the London-based singer earn international attention not just from designers such as Maria Grazia Chiuri, who designed three custom Dior gowns with Smith for her performance at the Guggenheim International Gala, but from Kendrick Lamar. “I didn’t ever think I’d be the face of anything,” says the 22-year-old, who grew up in Walsall, West Midlands, with a British mother and a father of Jamaican descent. “My relationship to beauty has always been aīit confused,” admits the new Dior makeup ambassador. Congestion and all, her complexion remains inconceivably poreless.

Smith unleashes her lush, velvety vocals, seamlessly crooning the songs on her debut album, Lost & Found (2018)-including “Blue Lights,” the politically charged single that launched her career.įorty-eight hours later and Smith is still in the throes of the bug, she says, intermittently humming along to Frank Ocean’s breezy “Pink + White,” which is playing in the background of a cavernous Brooklyn photo studio.

But a summer cold is no match for the celestial falsetto of the Grammy- nominated R&B star, who has taken to the stage in a burnt-orange leather crop top and metallic trousers, with coral-tinted eyelids to match. “I thought I was going to be OK, so I apologize,” she laments to the crowd at this year’s Governors Ball Music Festival inside Randall’s Island Park. Jorja Smith is feeling a bit under the weather.

Jorja smith daily