We all know a bold swipe of brightly-coloured lipstick is empowering. But in the hands of French women, it also somehow manages to look effortlessly chic. What is this sorcery and, more to the point, is there a secret French girl lipstick hack we need to know about?

Today, Violette Serrat, better known to most people as Violette_FR, is wearing an eye-popping shade of bright red on her lips. Guerlain’s Rouge G, of course (she is the creative director of makeup for the brand) – and two shades layered on top of each other. “I think people know me as the girl with the lipstick,” Violette laughs.

Despite the bold colour, she looks simultaneously natural and elegant. “In France, we like bold lipstick colours,” she notes. “But it has to look like it took two seconds. And to be honest, we usually only need two seconds. They always say that to look effortless, you have to be effortless – it’s no secret.”

The French make-up artist, who studied art, is a beauty superstar who recently designed 40 new Rouge G lipstick shades.

“I only had two days to decide on the shades,” she says. “Of course, production took much longer. The most time-consuming part was the formulation afterwards. The skin-coloured shades were particularly tricky. My aim is always to challenge the product developers to do things differently than they would otherwise. I basically reset the factory settings and started from scratch with the team.”

In the case of the nude lipsticks, this meant that no white base pigment was used: “Most lipsticks in skin-coloured shades have a white base. This means that they are only wearable, if at all, for very fair-skinned people. To be honest, everyone looks kind of dead with it. And it doesn’t work for an olive complexion like mine or black skin anyway. So I’ve removed the white pigment from the formula. It took us ages to formulate the lipsticks in a way that we were happy with.”

Violette attributes the fact that she approached their production so differently to her background in art, among other things. “You know, I never went to make-up school. So I have no certificate, no proof that I know how to apply make-up properly. The only training I had was in painting.”

Neoclassicism and the Italian Renaissance in particular inspired her and taught her one of her best make-up tricks.

This make-up trick makes lipstick look effortless and natural

“During my time at art school, I was obsessed with how painters managed to imitate the natural blush of lips and cheeks,” she says. “To make lipstick, and blush look natural, it’s basically about layering several transparent shades on top of each other. The natural red of the lips or cheeks never consists of just one monotone shade. When you do it this way, it looks as if the blush is really shimmering through the skin – just like the blood vessels do naturally.”

Violette Serrat is not a fan of lip liner, though. For this reason, she shaped the Rouge G bullet to be tapered on one side, “so that you can apply it as precisely as if you had used both – even without a liner and lip brush.” She also recommends tapping the lipstick in lightly with your finger afterwards.

All of this may not take two seconds for a makeup novice, but it certainly won’t take any longer than two minutes and it’s guaranteed to look très chic.

A version of this article originally appeared on Vogue Germany.