Arti­cle tak­en from The Face Vol­ume 4 Issue 001. Order your copy here.



“In my head, on my 23rd birthday, I was like: ​‘Am I turning 30 yet?’” Dua Lipa laughs with her distinctive husk.

Right now, make-up free, sleepy-voiced and barefoot next to the pool in her Beverly Hills Airbnb (even stars are skipping hotels these days), she looks her young age, complete with a sprinkling of delicate tattoos and lethal lime-green acrylic nails.

But you can understand how she might feel older, given all she’s packed into the last two years: a platinum-selling debut album, constant touring, collaborations with Calvin Harris, Mark Ronson and Diplo, three BRITs, two Grammys, and streaming figures so massive they simply don’t sound like real numbers.

Back in 2015, she released the breezy and blog-friendly debut track New Love, but it wasn’t until 2017’s instructive anti-fuckboy single New Rules and its pastel-hued video that Lipa truly blew up. It was a perfect storm of self-empowering affirmation, meme and pop chorus, and it gave her a first UK number one and US top ten that summer. Then with One Kiss and the MNEK-co-written IDGAF climbing the Billboard charts in its wake, Lipa was suddenly inescapable.

With the craziness that ensued, spending two weeks in one place is considered ​“down time” for Lipa (even if she’s technically still working out here in Los Angeles, writing and recording her second album). ​“I was writing so much on the road for the first one,” she remembers. ​“I got thrown into this crazy promo schedule, and then I ended up touring for three years.” Does she ever get burnt out? ​“It’s very hard for me to get tired doing things that I love,” she insists. ​“I’m the kind of person that, if I love something, I’ll say yes, even when I have no time, and the darkest eye bags!” She’s tried meditating, she says, but whenever she attempts to clear her mind, she just ends up falling asleep.

It’s hard to imagine most people being able to cope with her schedule, but Lipa gives off an almost preternaturally calm vibe. She’s just bought a house in London, but has barely spent any time there yet. Instead, she’s been in New York, and before that, Glastonbury, where she donned wigs and an enormous black PVC hat to allow her to roll through the Rabbit Hole, Block 9 and South East Corner unhindered.

Her Instagram from the time was full of loved-up photos of her skipping through the festival fields, accompanied by semi-cryptic messages like ​“away with the fairies”, ​“survived another year…” and talk of ​“glasto ptsd”. There are nods to hard partying (“me pointing at my sanity that decided to leave my side at approximately yesterday afternoon. If found…BIG REWARD!”), there are loved-up rainbow, heart and butterfly emojis and a knowing, knitted ​“Ecstasy” jumper. There’s even the appearance of a party alter-ego, ​“Valentina Vicious” who ​“loves mum-dancing to electricity wbu?” If Insta is a window into the soul (she has 32.7 million people peering in), then Lipa’s soul is in good shape. She’s having the time of her life.

But isn’t partying with the festival masses and doing everyday things tricky when you’re famous? Lipa shrugs. ​“I just do it,” she says, adding that she thinks it’s important to ​“defeat the idea” that, as a celebrity, she can’t go out and do normal things. She considers fame to be something that she can simply relax her way out of. ​“In the beginning, I did find it a bit weird [being recognised]. I wouldn’t know how to act or what to say. Now I’m more chilled with it, it’s easier.”

Even though she’s a mainstay of pop, only now does it feel like Lipa is unleashing the full force of her personality on the public. Beyond her engaging socials, compare her 2018 Billboard Music Awards and 2019 American Music Awards performances on YouTube and they seem worlds apart. A stiffer, more self-conscious performer has transformed into a fist-pumping powerhouse. More dramatic yet was her show-stopping, sapphic duet with St Vincent at this year’s Grammys, described as ​“really fucked up and sexy” by the American musician.