Say hello to Unfiltered, a fresh beauty series where you’ll get an exclusive glimpse into the dressed-down beauty routines of our favorite celebrities and content creators. They’ll reveal their guilty-pleasure beauty practices, the five-minute-routine product lineup they can’t live without, the one good-skin tip they’ll be forever thankful for, and so much more. To bring every conversation full circle, we ask each celebrity to send us a selection of self-shot, filter-free photos of their choosing to capture the essence of their Unfiltered beauty philosophy.
Up next, we’re getting to know model Georgia May Jagger, whose skincare brand, May Botanicals, recently launched stateside. Below, she’s answering all of our rapid-fire questions and sharing her five-minute makeup routine, her favorite hair era, her best beauty hacks, and more. Enjoy!
I want to start with your modeling career. Of course, you’re the daughter of legendary supermodel Jerry Hall, but what made you initially want to get into modeling?
I started modeling when I was 14. I got asked to do a job with a photographer who I ended up working with a lot over the years, Matt Irwin. I did a job that was just one photo with him for i-D magazine. I honestly started out thinking it was just going to be that, and it wouldn’t really be a big thing. Now, there’s a lot of shorter models, but I’m 5’7″, so I didn’t really imagine that I would get very far in modeling.
From there, I started to do more and more small jobs, and then by the time I was 17 [I was] doing bigger jobs, like Rimmel and Hudson. So it was kind of accidental, I suppose.
A happy accident! Speaking of Rimmel, I remember those campaigns so vividly, as I’m sure a lot of people do.
Yeah, it was eight years of it!
I mean, iconic. So what was that experience like? And is that what sparked your love for beauty, or was that love already there?
I think that love was already there from my mom and my sister. My sister is eight years older than me, and she’s very into skincare, so she was a big inspiration for me in terms of making my own brand. But I think working with the most amazing people on remote jobs [also inspired me]. I feel like makeup artists and facialists are the most knowledgeable people, and they really helped to inspire me to do new things with makeup but also with skincare.
In those campaigns, I was working with Charlotte Tilbury before she even did her makeup line—I remember her telling me about doing it as well—and Val Garland. So [I was working with] some of the biggest makeup artists, and the skin prep side of it is such a big side that people don’t really see as much. Now they do with TikTok and Instagram, but it definitely inspired me, and it was always something that I was quite focused on. It’s something that’s really important, the prep that you do before a shoot like that.
Would you say prep tips are the best tips that you got while you were on set?
I would definitely say that. And I think just watching people do makeup, seeing what products they use, and their application definitely helped me be able to do my own makeup. Back then, my version of makeup was, like, green inner eyeliner and powder on my face.
My mom is from the era of models when you had to do your own makeup, and there wasn’t any makeup artist. She still does her own makeup most of the time. She’s always been someone who’s done a lot of things herself and doesn’t go for a lot of expensive treatments. [She] does her facials herself and her makeup herself. So she and my sister were huge inspirations.
What would you say your first beauty memory would be, either with your sister or your mom?
When my mom would go out to an event or something, she’d have a big chest of makeup. I would just go in there. She had a really long hair extension wig piece, and I just put it on. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup until I was a teenager, so it felt like a big thing.
I used to go visit my sister in New York, and we eventually lived in the East Village together for a year. When I would first go there, she would take me to a shop called Live Live & Organic, which is still there in the East Village. They’re actually going to stock May [Botanicals]. I used to buy products from there, and they were the first people to stock RMS. This is so long ago, like 12, 14 years ago, and they had RMS. They had other ranges that we didn’t really have in the UK. So I would go in there with my sister, and we would try products and buy things from there. It was really one of the first stores that I knew of like that.
I would bring them back to England, and then my English friends would send me a shopping list of what they wanted me to get when I was next in America. I went recently on my trip to New York, just to bring the guy that owns it a box of stuff, just as a thank-you for introducing me to a lot of products.
So shifting to hair—you are also something of a hair icon, and you’ve had some really fun looks over the years. What has been your favorite way to experiment with your hair?
I also invested in Bleach London like 10 years ago, so Alex Brownsell is my best friend and partner in that. Alex was actually also the hair assistant on that first job I told you about when I was 14 and she was 17. We’ve known each other all this time. She gives the most amazing haircuts. A lot of hairdressers are like, “Okay, we either style or we do color.” She does full transformations, and she’s amazing with that stuff. She did that magenta look on me for the Fashion Awards and made as bright pink as possible. I think that’s the one that I always go back to.
I try to plan my year out so that I can try different Bleach hair looks. They wash out, but in a certain amount of time, so we get a bit strategic about it. When I have a break from modeling for a few weeks, like over Christmas or something, I’ll do a bold color. I’ve done a lot of them, but I think magenta is the one I [love most] because it’s a cool color that looks like it’s got blue tones in it. I feel like it suits me more. But we’ve done a lot of good ones. Actually, I had an orange one, and then it washed out and became this light-orange color. We called it “blorange.” Then she made a color like that so that you could just have that color.
Zooming out, what would you say has been your favorite beauty look of all time?
I think the haircut that Alex gave me because I’ve never had a fringe. They call it a “wolf cut” now, but she gave me that in 2016, and that haircut suited my hair. Before that point, I was incredibly precious about my hair, like only having an inch [cut]. So I think that was a really good one.
And when I first went to the Met Gala, I [wore] not very much makeup. I really liked that look for a red carpet, interestingly. I feel like people always do tons of stuff, and [Mugler] really wanted to do pared-down [makeup]. I actually think that looked really good. Sometimes with a red carpet look, I quite like being a bit underdone in terms of makeup.
