Cameron Russell Speaks Her Mind, Lensed by Yumma Al-Arashi for Telegraph UK

Top model, new mom and activist Cameron Russell is styled by Rachel Wang in Yumna Al-Arashi’s fashion editorial for Telegraph UK’s magazine. / Hair by Yukiko Tajima; makeup by Allie Smith

In her interview, Cameron tells readers that her outspoken activism has caused her more than one fashion shoot over the years. Conversely, she believes that her commitment to holistic sustainability in fashion and everyday life, coupled with her celebration of female leadership in the industry, is a key driver behind her new Max Factor beauty contract. Not all of Russell’s actions around #MeToo won her love in the fashion industry.

The life background details of Russell’s Telegraph interview are covered in-depth in her Fall 2018 Harper’s UK interview. You sign your life away at this point to read even one article on the Telegraph and we don’t put readers through that invasion of privacy.

Cameron Russell was born speaking her mind — with parents who encouraged her to follow in the family’s progressive footsteps. Announcing her new Mac Factor contract, Cameron sees progress in the beauty industry, at least in her case.

“I’ve been in this job now [as a model] for such a long time and I’m also very outspoken, so to have a big brand like Max Factor want to work with me, not just because of how I look but also my voice, is an honour to me, but also makes me feel like it’s a brand that’s thinking about women in all that they can be,” she explains, adding that being chosen felt like a real vote of confidence in what she’s putting out there. “It makes me feel like they’re thinking about their customer in a more progressive way than perhaps in the past. They’re thinking about who women want to be and what voice they want to have,” Russell told Harper’s UK in mid-August.

She explains: “There’s something about beauty that I think returns us to our instincts and our intuition – we feel it before we can describe it, and that feels very important to me today, when we’re consuming so many things through our screens and our devices.” Beauty, in all its guises, can bring you back to the present moment. “We’re reading and seeing things before experiencing them, and so in that context I think that beauty is this very grounding thing – it makes you look up.”

Very committed to diversity in every aspect of the fashion industry, with an equally passionate commitment to women photographers, Cameron Russell and AOC are on the same page. Sharing details of her first major Max Factor shoot, Russell was delighted at the changes .

After learning that only three per cent of agency-represented photographers were women, “making sure that women are behind the camera is a big piece of transformation that we are seeing now”. Pleasantly surprising to Russell, she walked in to find an all-female team shooting her Max Factor campaign. “I had not experienced that on a huge campaign before in this way. Everybody was an industry veteran and were all women.” And that wasn’t her doing, she tells us; “I just walked into this beautiful team.”

Cameron Russell is best known for her now famous 2013 TED Talk. If you haven’t watched it, take a look.

In a twist of thinking that we haven’t considered, Cameron Russell challenges women to consider the significantly smaller ecological footprint of makeup, compared to clothes. If the choice is between a new lipstick and a pair of jeans, the sexy brainiac model suggests that we think carefully before making the decision. Id sustainability and the environment are on your mind, that’s an idea worth considering.