A Star Is Born.(Peter Philips)(Interview)

Byline: editor: Sarah Brown

Collaborating with Karl. Dreaming up the next Vamp. Sarah Brown meets the makeup master who nabbed the most coveted job in cosmetics.

W impers ," says Peter Philips, reading the neat capital letters on a large, filled-to-the-brim cardboard box. "That's 'eyelashes' in Flemish. One lash is one wimper . A lot of lashes is a lot of wimpers . It sounds silly when you say it in English." Philips, the Belgian-born makeup artist who never really dreamed of becoming a makeup artist, is thumbing through the floor-to-ceiling shelves in his Lower East Side studio. There are jars of pure powder pigment, the sort a painter might use ("This was for a McQueen show. We did the boys in Yves Klein Blue," he says, producing a container of the deepest lapis); Swarovski glitter that looks destined for the most fantastic birthday cake; bits of couture-issue tulle and lengths of intricate lace from Lesage; a large envelope containing the finest Lemarie feathers; and a half-empty bottle labeled LIQUID TRANSPIRATION. "Fake sweat. You know, for shoots. Steven wants them shiny," he says, referring to the photographer Steven Klein. "Want to see it on?"

This place--full of beautiful distractions, sumptuous scraps, and glamorous bric-a-brac--is where Philips works (and occasionally sleeps) when he is in New York, but in the next few weeks he'll be packing up to leave. He's just been crowned the global creative director for Chanel Makeup, and Karl and company are building him a brand-new studio at the iconic, CC -laden, black-and-white HQ on East Fifty-seventh Street.

Obsessed with fashion and photography from an early age, Philips studied graphic design in Brussels to appease his parents ("They wanted me to get a 'decent' diploma") and then made a beeline for Antwerp's Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts. "It's where all the Belgian designers were: Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela. They did their first shows in Paris then, and the academy sent a bus from Antwerp to Paris, and we went backstage helping dress. When I saw all those hair and makeup teams, I thought, I can do that ."

And he did. Soon Philips was backstage, wielding a makeup brush himself, and in the studio with top fashion photographers like Craig McDean, Irving Penn, Steven Klein, and Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. His workmanship went way beyond traditional foundation, blush, lipstick, and mascara, though. Having mastered "pretty makeup," Philips looked to his design school roots and started incorporating feathers, pearls, and rich fabrics into his work. For fun, he made theatrical masks--ranging from tribal to "Venetian ball" in look, from faultlessly elegant to whimsical to avant-garde--and started gluing intricately cut pieces of embroidered silk tulle on models' faces, arranging them "like a puzzle. It looks like the skin is embroidered," he says. "It's almost like a haute couture show, you know, for the face."

At Chanel, Philips replaces Dominique Moncourtois and Heidi Morawetz, who have jointly run the ...