Paris Jackson on ‘friendship tattoos’, inner beauty and her collaboration with KVD Beauty

The time Paris Jackson feels most empowered is when she’s “performing on stage”. The 24-year-old, whose music career began as one half of musical duo The Soundflowers with ex-boyfriend and musician/singer Gabriel Glenn, recently released her latest solo single, grunge-inspired track lighthouse, earlier this year.

In conversation with GLAMOUR, she tells me she is “very excited” to continue on with her solo music career – which began with with her first studio album, Wilted, in 2020. She has an East Coast USA tour coming up this November where she’ll be performing at locations including South Carolina, Washington DC and New York. “I love experimenting and trying new things. I just love all things music, so I just like creating.”

Paris has added another role to her ‘multi-hyphenate’ portfolio of jobs (impressive, at only 24) she is collaborating with KVD Beauty, a vegan beauty brand. The brand’s focus on high-pigment, high-performance makeup that lends itself perfectly to wearing on stage for hours-long performances is presumably a big driver behind why the musician slash model slash actor chose to work with them.

“As a musician and performer, long-lasting wear is a must,” she says, adding: ‘Makeup has always played a massive part in performing dating back to the days of KISS, or even earlier. You see, you can look at really any music video that’s ever played on MTV and there’s always some kind of unique makeup look going on, regardless of the genre of music.” It’s worth noting that Paris’ father, the late Michael Jackson, was also a pioneer when it came to wearing make-up during performance – not just the white makeup he wore later in his career, but also red lipstick and eyeliner, beginning in the iconic 1982 Thriller video.

As for Paris Jackson’s other career strands: you might recall her flexing her acting muscles in American Horror Stories (she played a character called Maya in three episodes of the hit show released last year), while she’s devoted the past couple of years to releasing solo music. She also signed with leading, global modelling agency, IMG Models, in 2017.

She says, “I like stretching that creative muscle in whatever way that I can, whether it be music or acting or fashion or just anything artsy,” she tells me. When I asked about her impressive roster of different creative roles, she says modestly: “Well, the left part of my brain is pretty nonfunctioning, so kind of all I got working for me is the right side.”