Halsey says applying her own make-up before shows helped her deal with her "really ugly" breakup from G-Eazy.
Halsey
The 'you should be sad' singer - who dated the 31-year-old rapper for a year before their 2018 split - has just unveiled her debut make-up brand, about-face, and opened up about how she stopped herself from crying before going on stage following the end of her romance by "going to war" with her glam.
She explained: “I was on tour and I had just gone through a really ugly and public breakup. I was crying and crying and crying. I was really embarrassed to have to go onstage and be sexy, and cool, and empowering, knowing that every single person in the audience had probably just read some gossip tabloid about me.
“I just f*****' took a big breath and just looked at myself and got ready - like I was going to war. And by the time I had my make-up on, I wasn’t crying anymore.”
Halsey - who does her own make-up and loves cosplay - admitted she always tried to make herself "look different", but through creating her own brand of make-up, she has learned to embrace her natural beauty.
She explained: "I think so much of make-up these days is about changing what you look like, or correcting things.
“Look, I love make-up as an art as much as the next person. I admire the tremendous amount of skill that it takes to do colour correction, but as someone who has spent a really long time trying to look different than I do, it was really relieving for me to be able to look at myself and go, hey, that's your face. There's nothing you can do about it. So you better love it, because that's the one you got.”
For her own line, Halsey was inspired by the "MySpace scene" era of the early 2000s and the "dirty" grunge looks of the 1990s.
The 26-year-old singer added to Byrdie.com: “I feel like I never really see make-up anymore that's about being f***** up and dirty and grungy and just wrong, and so much make-up used to be about that.
“I'm just paying homage to the style of make-up and the make-up influences that I've always loved: very '90s-heavy, very MySpace scene queen, very emo revival.”