One of her favourite products, explains Li, is the Exclusive Creation – Coco Denim, a highlighter that looks blue on its palette but comes off on the skin in a pink, almost-sheer layer, like gossamer. “That’s what I like about this product. It’s like a magic trick.”

Li’s own journey to Chanel is similarly unexpected. Born in Guangxi, a small village in China, she left a career in journalism in her early twenties to pursue makeup, studying in Beijing and later in Paris, where she immersed herself in colour and form. When she entered the world of beauty, she did so as a boundary-pusher, a renegade. She calls herself a ‘face painter’ more than a makeup artist, and the phrase captures the whimsical, experimental verve of her work. Li designed the Denim collection in her work as part of the Cometes Collective, a group of makeup professionals that Chanel recruited to help shape its beauty vision into the future. Each member was selected for their unique perspective and ability to expand Chanel’s palette of possibility. In the beginning, Li says, she wasn’t sure how the collaboration between different creatives would function in practice. But her fears were soon dispelled. “The day we met each other, we worked so well. We all come from different backgrounds and we have different kinds of skin tones and we have different cultures. We’re learning a lot of things from each other.”

The Denim collection plays on colour, and encourages a bolder take to makeup than what is perhaps ordinary. So what of the colour-shy, those who aren’t quite sure they have the requisite attitude (or aesthetic) to pull off blues and metallics? The collection’s shades might look intimidatingly bright at the outset, but according to Li, the Denim collection is the ideal entrypoint to using colour for the chromatically reticent. She recommends “starting small”, like with the Noir Allure mascara in Indigo. The deep, dark blue hue frames eyes in a subtly different way to a typical black or dark brown mascara. “It’s perfect for someone who is new to colour,” Li says.

Then, you can take baby steps into the brave new world you’ve entered. “Do your makeup like you’re familiar with,” she suggests, “and then dab a little bit of blue in your inner eye corner,” using one of the shades from Les 4 Ombres in Denim Dream or Coco Jean. Then, if you feel comfortable, it can extend out into a liner, or act as a washed-out base for a blue smoky eye. “When we talk about smoky eyes, you think about black and grey. Why not blue, right?”

Li, who has long expressed her sense of self and identity on her face, has a gripe about social media’s prescriptiveness when it comes to makeup. In recent years, interest in colour analysis – which fell out of fashion after its boom in the ’80s – has skyrocketed online, with experts and novices alike draping multi-layered bibs over their clientele and triumphantly declaring them a ‘soft winter’ or ‘rich autumn’ in line with how their skin ‘wears’ the colours. “Everyone’s being all, ‘If you have brown eyes, you can’t use these types of colour. If you have green eyes, you should use that type of colour.’” But it’s not something Li feels has an encouraging effect on creativity. “Personally, I don’t really like this type of advice from the internet.

“Colour and makeup, it’s something very personal,” she adds. “I feel like the reason people love makeup is that you use it to enhance your confidence, you use it to show the best of yourself. There are a lot of tutorials that try to teach us what to do. But to be honest, at the end, everybody starts to look the same on the street. What is wrong, what is right…. To be honest, in makeup, there is no wrong and right. The only thing that matters is, do you like it?”

It’s also important, according to Li, that we allow room for the different versions of ourselves to be expressed – even if today doesn’t quite align with the version that was here yesterday. It’s a philosophy echoed across the Denim collection. “Maybe today your hair is blue and the next day your hair is green. You can wear blue for spring, but then in summer, you are in a green mood, you know? You change. It’s just makeup. It should be playful.”

Li knows all about personal transformations. Her shock of bright blue hair was not always this way. For many years, she wore her hair in its natural black. She always finished her look with green contact lenses and a bright red lip. “I wanted to be a little tough,” she says, “so that was my signature then. But I wasn’t really feeling myself.”

So she started experimenting with colour, because “colour is very emotional”. She dipped into green, in and out of yellow, and it didn’t stick. It was only four years ago that she became the version of herself that sits before me now. Once she dyed her hair blue, a vivid cobalt that brings to mind royalty and Matisse, “it just made sense,” she laughs. “And then I thought, ‘Of course.’ Blue is the colour of the sky and the colour of the ocean. And as a person who lives in between, I just want to use blue to devote my love to nature and to the world. So now, as long as I’m alive, I’ll wear my hair blue.”

If blondes are supposed to have more fun, how does the world look to the blues? Does her hair – electrifying, singular in almost every room she’s in, one imagines – change how she interacts with the world? “It’s like… peace. I feel like I belong to the world at this moment.” She’s also found reserves of energy and a new appetite for experimentation. “After I changed my hair to blue, I have more belief in myself. I do the things that only please myself. I only do the things that I feel are right. I just feel more confident.”

The CHANEL Denim Makeup Collection is available now.