A Chanel Beauty Girl’s Roman Holiday
They say you can’t buy happiness. But you can buy a flight to Rome, and in my experience, that’s basically the same thing. It was a Sunday in June when CHANEL Beauty flew me to Italy, picked me up, and took care of everything else. And just like that, The Spanish Steps, Villa Medici, lots of Tarallinis, and a makeup station that made me question every beauty routine I’d ever had…. my life was divided into two distinct chapters. Before Radio Shine Summer Club. And after.
For the record, I have always been a Chanel girl. I just want to be clear about that.
It all started in Rome, as all great love stories should. We checked into the Orient Express La Minerva. I have watched Sex and the City, and I knew the fantasy, and it materialised on that day. Four barbies. Four protagonists. Four of us walking through the streets at golden hour for the first dinner at Dal Bolognese, dresses and big smiles, and we just looked beautiful. I remember thinking: if this is just the beginning of the trip, what on earth is the rest of the trip going to be like?
Borgo Egnazia arrived after all, and then I understood immediately why Chanel had chosen this corner of Italy. It was, like the house itself, completely without effort and completely without equal. I stood on the terrace of my townhome feeling like the world is mine. It is indeed the world behind the double C. They know how to get beauty done right. Whether it’s the face, the place, the vibes, you name it. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was just there. Fully, completely there. That kind of presence that is very Chanel!
The CHANEL villa days were the kind of experience that ruins you, in the best way, for anything ordinary ever again. I can count the amout of times I said “I love being a girl”. I sat at a makeup station with the most beautiful lineup of products arranged in front of me like a love letter. The Duo de Baumes. The Rouge Coco Hydra Gloss. The beautiful Chanel brushes. The Global Team walked us through everything, and my favourite was that barely there French summer glow: a rosy balm, a touch of something luminous, sheer, glowing, dewy-lipped, like you’ve been living on peaches and apricots and Mediterranean air, and that became my face for the entire trip and I am not going back.
Also, what I wore mattered, and I intuitivenely packed clothes that matched the room. And the Chanel beauty pouch doing more styling work than most bags I own.
We did so much. Lunch at La Calce. Dinner at Il Cortileto. We swam, we lay in the sun, we came back and got ready together in that gorgeous chaotic way that only happens when you’re with the right people. Then came the panel talk with the genius Thomas Du Pre de Saint Maur. He started talking about what makes something truly iconic, that rare, undeniable quality that transcends trends and time. Imagine now this word is forbidden in some spaces.. because the truth is.. it is overly used when nothing is iconic, except for Chanel, of course. That’s what CC iconic is. That image, that moment, so specific and so charged that no other word, no other second would do.
And then came the CHANEL dinner at La Piazza under olive trees with my massive jewelled bow cuff catching the light and red wine in a glass that someone kept refilling before I could notice it was empty, which is my love language, by the way. Long tables dressed in stunning arrangements de flowers. Place cards with my name on them. Romy. I kept looking at it. Thinking, yes! This is right. I am exactly where I am supposed to be. The look on my face, that clean, lit from within, almost like my face is photoshopped… in the best way of course, dewy lip summer face that CHANEL taught me, and that I will be wearing for the rest of my life.
In the end really it isn’t really about the itinerary, the products or even the locations, though all of it was extraordinary. It’s about the the people Chanel gathered in that villa, they were rare. The kind of people you feel like you’ve always known, even when you’ve just met.
There was Dima! The life of the party, the one who makes every room fun, crazy, and loved. Graceful and pretty Tara, who felt so immediately like a sister. And then my actual sister, Stéphanie, glued to me the way we have been since forever, both of us living a pinch-me moment and knowing that we deserved every second of it. Then Sabine, pure main character energy, who makes sure love is always present in the room, whether she means to or not. She was the best dressed and anything she says, is funny. Jacques, our photographer, who somehow manages to look just as good as his work, giving us all the sexy moments and best jokes. And Imti. Imti, who I can only describe as a perfume bottle come to life! The most elegant, romantic, considered person, a true presence! And then there was Michel. He had that thing, polished, unhurried, looks like he walked directly out of a Forbes magazine profile, somehow more Italian than the Italians despite being Lebanese. He is a makeup artist, and for once in my life, I loved another brush on my face more than my own. That, from me, is the highest compliment I know how to give.
They say the lipstick effect kicks in during hard times, that when the world gets heavy, women reach for a new lip colour because some pleasures are non-negotiable. But that trip showed me that the lipstick effect doesn’t actually wait for bad times. It doesn’t need a reason. It simply is. Good times, hard times, complicated times, the lipstick is always the answer. And then you add CHANEL to that equation. I came back from Puglia with more lipsticks than I care to admit. It turns out, when it’s CHANEL, the lipstick effect is exponential.
We are in a romance crisis. Love is complicated and messy and they like to call it these days, sadly, “inconvenient”. But in Puglia I discovered that witnessing real beauty is just as romantic as being in a romantic relationship. Did I secretly want to text him and tell him about all of it? Yes. Did I? No. Because I was too busy being completely, hopelessly distracted by the real thing. And isn’t that what beauty is for? That taking care of how you look on the outside is just taking care of how you feel on the inside. That there is nothing frivolous about that. That it matters.
CHANEL Beauty came at exactly the right time. Not just the right time for a trip, the right time for me. Five days in Italy gave me back something: the feeling of being completely, recklessly in love with my own life. With a group of women who felt like they’d always been mine, all gorgeous, at a long table in Puglia giving me all the feels of “I have nowhere to be, nothing to fix, nothing to chase”. Just the sea and the sun.
With love always,
Romy 🖤
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