But now Lady Gaga is in the game of making physical beauty things: lip liners, glosses, a shimmery liquid concoction that dries into a powder and glistens like the dorsal fin of a rainbow fish.

“I never felt beautiful, and I still have days that I don’t feel beautiful."

And she wants people from every corner of the planet to buy these things, a lot of them — Amazon is her exclusive retailer. But she’s Lady Gaga, and her ambition runs way deeper than world lip-gloss domination. She also wants this makeup to change your life, like makeup changed hers. “I never felt beautiful, and I still have days that I don’t feel beautiful,” she had told me a few weeks earlier during a phone conversation. “All of the insecurities that I’ve dealt with my whole life from being bullied when I was younger, they come right back up to bite me. Then I put makeup on, and before I know it I feel this superhero within. It gives me those wings to fly.”

When Lady Gaga talks about her products, she talks about them with passion and an understanding of every applicator and shimmer-to-pigment ratio. But she always comes back to emotion. What she said about never feeling beautiful, about insecurity? That was a response to this question: Were any of the formulas inspired by a makeup product that you’ve known and loved but wanted to improve upon?

"Every time I put [my lip liner] on, I have this sigh of giant, artistic, creative release that I just — my heart soars.”

Her answer started with: “First and foremost, I wanted to create the lip pencil of my dreams. I love lip pencil, but for me there always ends up being something wrong with them. It’s either dragging or it’s bleeding. With this formula, I can line my lips beautifully, but most of the time, I wear it all over my mouth. It feels like a lipstick, and it does not transfer. Every time I put it on, I have this sigh of giant, artistic, creative release that I just — my heart soars.”

Then: superheroes, wings to fly.

And then: “When I became Lady Gaga when I was younger, it was because I discovered makeup. It means so much to me on a deep visceral level — the power of makeup to change how you feel when you’re at your lowest.”

At 33, Lady Gaga has reached the highest peaks of fame, wealth, and cultural currency. She is speaking to me now literally perched on top of Los Angeles. But she knows low. She has spoken very openly about being bullied in high school, being sexually assaulted by a music producer at 19, and struggling with the physical pain of fibromyalgia over the past couple of years. And then there’s the unrelenting, sometimes crushing pace.

“When I was doing the Joanne tour [two years ago], I’d been touring since I was 22 years old. I’d just done the Super Bowl show, Coachella, A Star Is Born. I really started to break down,” says Lady Gaga. “I would do the show, then I would get on an airplane, go to another country or state, get off, drive 40 minutes to the hotel, go to sleep, wake up, do another show. I was dizzy.” Makeup was often the only thing that could put a stop to this emotional vertigo, that could put Stefani Germanotta in a mental place where she could walk onto a stage and be Lady Gaga for tens of thousands of people.

Lady Gaga is crying at this point. And apologizing to me.

“Sarah [Tanno, Lady Gaga’s makeup artist] would pick me up off the floor, sit me in a chair, dry my tears, and say, ‘I’m going to put on your face now,’ ” she recalls. “If I cried while she was putting on my makeup, I would apologize, and she would say, ‘It’s okay. I’ve got you.’” Lady Gaga is crying at this point. And apologizing to me.