Isabelle Huppert paints the town red with Byredo

The French actress brings her taste for transformation to a beauty story where red lipstick becomes another way to inhabit a character.

Isabelle Huppert has made a career out of transformation. Now, the French actress brings that ability to Byredo, photographed by Ferry van der Nat with a clean complexion and lips shifting between precise contours, softened edges and lacquered red.

From Werner Schroeter’s ‘Malina’ (1991) to Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Elle’ (2016), Huppert has created some of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive characters. ‘Iconic Lips’ plays with that idea through makeup. The campaign introduces Lip Pencil, available in Brown, Pink, Rosewood and Red, and Red Light, a new saturated red shade of Liquid Lipstick Vinyl with a mirror-like finish. The campaign also features ‘Fire & Rain’, an existing shade of Byredo Lipstick.

There is an almost perfect cinematic epilogue. Huppert now stars as Erzsébet Báthory in Ulrike Ottinger’s ‘The Blood Countess’ (2026), a vampire fantasy in which the legendary countess awakens in Vienna searching for the red elixir of life. Perhaps Huppert has finally found it. This time, it comes in a Byredo tube and is called Red Light.