Nadiya Hussain: ‘I didn’t buy my first lipstick until I was 29’

After spending years in search of the right make-up, TV chef Nadiya Hussain wants to inspire a new generation.

T‘My headscarf dictates what I do with the rest of my face. It’s like changing my hair colour daily’

here aren’t many women who would leave the house without a layer of foundation or a swipe of mascara, let alone appear on national TV week after week make-up free, but Nadiya Hussain MBE is one. When she won The Great British Bake Off in 2015 she was completely bare-faced, not a jot of concealer or lipstick in sight. “We weren’t allowed to wear make-up [on the show], not even nail varnish, but I didn’t wear it at that time anyway, so I didn’t even think about it. Although I do look back now and think, ‘Gosh Nadiya, you could have at least moisturised!’”

Fortunately for Hussain, 37, she has been blessed with a clear complexion. “I owe it to my mum and dad and good genetics, but I do drink loads of water and am ritualistic about my skin routine – I always double cleanse and I don’t sleep with my make-up on,” she says.

Despite coming to the world of beauty late, she is well versed in her products. “Skincare, beauty and makeup has been a big part of my life for the past 10 years, but before then, I didn’t bother,” she admits. Although it wasn’t for lack of trying. “God loves a trier and I tried! I’d go into Boots every week thinking, ‘This is the week I’m going to find my foundation’, but a decade later and I still couldn’t find one that worked. They were either too yellow or too pink and after a while I just couldn’t face it any more.”

It can be hard for anyone to find the ideal foundation, even when the available shade range caters for you skin tone, but Hussain, a second-generation British Bangladeshi, born and raised in Luton, had a particular struggle to source her perfect match. Nowadays it’s thankfully a different story, with brands such as Fenty, Morphe, IT Cosmetics and Uoma championing all-inclusive palettes. “Over the past few years there have been big improvements,” she says. “The spectrum is so much wider now in terms of shades. You can find everything from really dark to porcelain.

“The way people use make-up has changed too – they have the confidence to take two products and mix them together until they find a colour that suits them. They use make-up like an artist’s palette.”

Case in point, Hussain’s 12-year-old daughter, Maryam, who has decided she wants to become a prosthetic makeup artist (she has apparently destroyed her mother’s deep-berry blushers on more than one occasion because they are “the right colour for a bruise”). “For her, make-up is an expression of art and whether it’s something conventional, like a winged eyeliner, or something gory, like creating a cut with scar wax and stippling brushes, she looks at it very differently to me.

“We don’t give her any restrictions with it: we draw a line at school, but any other time, when it comes to make-up, she can do what she wants.”

It’s benefiting Hussain, too. So far, her daughter has taught her that she should lift up her eyelids when applying concealer so it gets right into the creases; to brush her brow gel into the hairs and up, so they become loaded with product, and to apply blusher to her temples and cheekbones rather than the middle of her cheeks to stop her face looking “squished”.

Hussain’s rainbow of headscarves has a huge impact on her make-up and she lights up when she talks about them. “My headscarf always comes first because it’s almost like my hair – and I’m lucky because I get to change my hair colour every day of the week if I want to. So if I go for a brown headscarf, I might choose a more muted eyeshadow, but if I go for black, I might do a sparkly eyeshadow and subtle lip. I have this green headscarf that I pair with a beautiful green gel eyeliner by Trish McEvoy – oh yeah, my headscarf totally dictates what I do with the rest of my face.”

The confidence that her headscarves and coloured eyeliner bring her isn’t something she was born with, though. “When I grew up I thought that I couldn’t wear a red lip because only the Marilyn Monroes of the world with blonde hair and blue eyes could wear it. But actually beauty is about breaking those barriers and owning who you are – that’s what beauty is to me today.”

Besides a punchy pout, Hussain likes her base to be more natural. “Yes I love make-up, but I don’t like it to mask my skin: I want my skin to look real and feel real, which is why a CC [colour correcting] cream that protects my skin from UV rays and gives me buildable coverage really works for me.”

It’s also why she agreed to become the face of IT Cosmetics’ CC Cream x Confidence campaign. “I’m really lucky in this job that I get offers to work with lots of brands, but I only do what’s right for me and my family, and I always follow my gut because it’s the only thing that doesn’t lie to me. I had used their products before and they were already part of my make-up bag, so it was a genuine collaboration.

“But the biggest draw for me was that I’ve spent a lifetime feeling excluded or like I don’t belong. By fronting this campaign there will be girls who look at me and think, ‘Wow, if she can do that, I can.’ I hope it will give them the quiet strength that I never had and make people realise they’re part of something bigger. I’m revelling in this moment.”

Baker, author, TV presenter and now brand ambassador, Hussain is someone who on paper fits the juggling mum model like a glove, but in reality she’s quick to dispute it. Crediting her husband, Abdal, and their three children – and her aunt and sister, who both live nearby – she says: “I don’t juggle alone. That’s the point of a family: everybody has to juggle with me.” Her support network mucks in where needed. The children do their own laundry, clean their own rooms and cook when she is busy.

And if all that plate spinning starts to trigger her anxiety, which she has talked about openly in the past, she now has dedicated ways to cope.

The panic attacks she has experienced since she was a teenager, when she was the victim of racist bullying, flared up during the Covid lockdowns when her usual structures and routines fell to the wayside. For someone who likes to keep busy, slowing down occasionally triggered anxiety.

What is different now is that since filming her 2019 BBC documentary Anxiety and Me, where she took part in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) sessions on camera, she knows exactly what to do to alleviate those pangs. “Things like sitting in the bath and reading a book where I can’t be disturbed or going out for walks in the fresh air make me feel better,” she says. “Weirdly, make-up can be a distraction when I’m feeling like that, too: I can just sit down, fill in and shape my brows and it will take my mind elsewhere.”

The only make-up trick she doesn’t use to self-soothe is applying eyeliner. “Once I used traditional kohl that you’re meant to swipe across the gap between your eyelids but when I put it on, it went in my eyeball. I started blinking and it just went black – I thought I’d gone blind. I hadn’t, I’d just covered my eyeball in kohl and I remember my mum having to wash it out. I still don’t apply eyeliner under my eyes unless a make-up artist does it for me!”

Decades later and with her confidence in cosmetics at an all-time high, she is pleased to say that the struggle to find products to complement her complexion is over.

“From someone who didn’t buy her first lipstick until she was 29 and couldn’t find her foundation until she was 30 to now being able to tell people to try this product is amazing. I mean, dreams really do come true.”