Kitty Su Beauty is putting drag in your makeup bag

Launched by The LaLiT in 2011, Kitty Su is India’s pioneering queer-affirming nightlife brand, bringing together music, drag, performance and unapologetic self-expression. For 15 years, it has been at the centre of India’s drag, queer nightlife and performance culture, so makeup has always been more than makeup here. It is transformation, character, armour and, under stage lights, an effective way of announcing that subtlety can take the night off. For drag artists, the face is part of the performance; at Kitty Su, that idea has always been baked into the brand. Keshav Suri (left) and Rakhi Sawant at the launch of Kitty Su Beauty in Delhi | Photo Credit: PRINCE KUMAR To mark Kitty Su’s 15th anniversary, media personality Rakhi Sawant launched Kitty Su Beauty, billed as India’s first queer-led beauty brand, at The LaLiT New Delhi. Hosted by founders Keshav Suri and Cyril Feuillebois, the evening brought together beauty, drag, nightlife and queer culture — the worlds Kitty Su has occupied since it opened.The collection itself is small and deliberately so: three weightless matte liquid lipsticks and two treatment glosses, designed to survive stage lights and long nights without feeling like you have applied industrial paint to your face. The idea is freedom over conformity and individuality over convention. Lipsticks start at ₹399 for minis and ₹1,950–₹2,490 for full sizes; glosses are ₹1,950.“We didn’t want to make a beauty brand because nightlife brands are supposed to have one. We wanted to make it because Kitty Su already had a beauty language of its own,” says Keshav Suri, Executive Director, The LaLiT Suri Hospitality Group. For Keshav, that language begins with a simple distinction. “Enhancement assumes there is something about you that needs fixing. Expression begins from a completely different place: there is nothing wrong with you.” Rakhi Sawant | Photo Credit: PRINCE KUMAR That thinking also explains why the brand comes from queer nightlife and drag rather than the familiar celebrity-beauty playbook. “Queer nightlife has been experimenting with identity, beauty and transformation long before the beauty industry decided to call it innovation,” Keshav says. “We didn’t want to borrow that culture as an aesthetic. We wanted to build from the people and the spaces that actually created it.”Hash Brownie, the Delhi-based drag queen, performer and makeup artist who worked on the collection, puts it more simply: “Drag taught me that makeup is a language.” It isn’t necessarily about making someone prettier. It can create a character, alter proportions, communicate a mood or deliberately contradict what people expect to see. Drag performers, she points out, also have to make products work, often improvising, layering and ignoring the instructions entirely. “Beauty doesn’t have to be obedient,” she says. The Kitty Su Beauty collection | Photo Credit: Special arrangement That irreverence shaped the collection’s colour story. Hash wanted the shades to have a strong identity without becoming restrictive. “A product should give you a starting point, not a set of rules.” The three lipstick shades — Hotline, Tantric and Blackmail — are designed to be more versatile than their names suggest. Hotline can be an unapologetic red lip, a blush or a face pigment; Tantric brings earthy depth and warmth; while Blackmail can go graphic and editorial. The same three shades, Hash says, should be able to look completely different on three different people.Wear with prideCyril Feuillebois, founder of Kitty Su Beauty, which has been in the works for around three years, approached the formulas with a similar idea: performance should not mean punishment. “Performance should come from the product, not from having to fight with it,” he says. The brief was to create colour with presence and staying power without making it heavy or uncomfortable, particularly for makeup designed to withstand movement, heat, lights and long nights.Working with Hash also pushed the team to think of the products as creative materials rather than finished makeup looks. The aim was to leave room for manipulation rather than dictate a single outcome. Kitty Su Beauty | Photo Credit: Special arrangement Even the brand’s idea of luxury is less about looking expensive than getting the details right. “Luxury is the accumulation of good decisions,” Cyril says, referring to everything from raw materials and pigment to texture, packaging and consistency. “I don’t think an Indian beauty brand needs to reproduce someone else’s idea of luxury. We can create our own standards around quality and sophistication.”For Hash, the larger idea extends well beyond drag. “You don’t need a stage, a wig or a drag name to experiment with who you want to be.” Makeup can be subtle one day and excessive the next; it can reveal something or invent an entirely new version of you. “Sometimes, the most empowering thing makeup can give you is simply the freedom to decide what you want to look like.” Kitty Su Beauty | Photo Credit: Special arrangement After 15 years of building a nightlife institution around freedom, performance and self-expression, Kitty Su is now taking the same philosophy into beauty. Really, it was already wearing the lipstick. It has just finally put it in a tube.Kitty Su Beauty will be available at kittysubeauty.com and Amazon; with launch events planned for Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata; dates are yet to be finalised.