“If someone had only told me to get rid of the eye makeup sooner!” the late, great Jane Birkin once lamented to Vogue. Birkin was speaking of the Swinging ’60s, when she decamped from her native England and landed in France with exaggerated eye etchings, pastel shadows, and layers of lower-lash mascara—it was all very Mary Quant, very Twiggy, and not yet the full-formed Jane Birkin that would come to captivate the world.
Fast-forward to the following decade, when the gap-toothed gamine abandoned her heavy hand to embrace a more au naturel approach. As she later noted: “It was nice because then you looked like what you looked like in the morning.” It’s this effortless élan, now immortalized on countless Instagram feeds and Pinterest Boards, that has come to symbolize Birkin, defining laissez-faire beauty for a whole new generation of French-girls-in-training.
On screen, she was provocative and risk-taking: Take Je t’Aime Moi Non Plus, for instance, where, alongside Warhol star Joe Dallesandro, Birkin played a truck-stop waitress with bold, boyishly short hair. In Slogan, the satirical rom com in which she starred opposite Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin peers cheekily from under a dense and feathery set of bangs, with hooped eyeliner that hugged her eye-crease to exaggerate the Bambi look. In Riviera romance and cult thriller La Piscine, swathed in Courréges swimwear, her cheeks are rosy and her lips are lush and pouty. A famous scene from 1988 documentary Jane B. par Agnès V, Birkin unceremoniously deposits the contents of her beat-up bag on the ground, the Eiffel Tower behind her: among the notebooks and a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Gamblers, flies out that recognizable pink and green Maybelline mascara tube. Agnès Varda’s film acts as an incisive, tender exploration of the female gaze, one Birkin had, at this time, rarely found herself the subject of.
That same year, Vardas filmed Birkin’s solo concert at The Bataclan in Paris—the first time she had ever sang live and without lip-syncing her then-ex Gainsbourg’s hits. It was a landmark moment for Birkin in embracing her independence, a milestone that she honored with a personal beauty transformation: she impulsively cut herself a pixie cut and slicked on some red lipstick. An explicit act of transcending her girlhood, and welcoming new parts of herself.
“I wasn’t going to swing my hair around like Serge wanted me to or lick my lips, which is what he thought I should do,” Birkin said of the performance back in 2016. “Because that was the person he had known before. Such a Lolita, I didn’t want to do that anymore. It was really something and especially for a pin-up girl like me. I think it changed my life after, too, and proved that I could do very much what I wanted to do.”
No matter whether her long lengths had been haphazardly piled atop her head or shorn short as she stood onstage, the actress, singer, and songwriter long espoused the kind of fresh facade that’s achieved not with a coveted cosmetic but rather, simply, a gap-toothed smile. “It takes 10 years off!” she once famously quipped. Consider it sage advice for the New Year ahead.
In her later years, Birkin would only wear makeup when she was on stage—her favorite foundation was Laura Mercier, in the shade Biscuit, and she would dot rouge across her cheeks and mouth with her fingers. Unlike many in the world of celebritydom, she swerved cosmetic surgery and facelifts.
What Birkin—who sadly passed away in 2023—ultimately did was establish the perfect sartorial symbiosis between Brit-hip and French-chic, and let herself move beyond the beauty binaries, defying expectation always. Below, on what would have been her birthday, a look at Jane Birkin’s best beauty moments.
