EXCLUSIVE: Aneet Padda wants you to live, love, laugh (for real this time)

What she hopes to bring to Lakmē, she says, is expression. “It’s like in PS I Love You,” she recalls, “she [Holly Kennedy] says just create something, anything. Because then a part of you is outside of you. For me, that’s makeup.” She talks about makeup the way others might talk about journaling, recording moods in glitter, blush and eyeliner.

Before asking a question that makes me sound more boomer than millennial–“what drives you”—I half-jokingly confess that I’m often motivated by spite, the urge to prove people wrong. Padda laughs but takes it somewhere else. “Proving myself right, for sure,” she says. “There’s always doubt in my head. All of us are confident, we know what we want, but we’re also overexposed and under pressure, even when we don’t need to be. I have so many expectations of myself. I want to prove that even with fear and doubt, I can still do it. Those things will always be there, but they’re no reason to stop.”

She catches herself and winces. “I’m just too cheesy as a person,” she says, almost apologising. I tell her the world could use more of it. She laughs, then tries the word again, this time without the apology. She talks about the Vedas and how the same truths repeat across centuries. Live, love, laugh. People roll their eyes, she knows that. “Tell me, why is it cringe?” she asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “For real though, just live, love and laugh.”

That embrace of what others dismiss finds a fitting stage with Lakmē, a brand that has always lived in vanities and been a part of the shorthand of beauty in India. For me, it was the chubby kajal stick. For her mother, it was the lip liner. For her, it’s now the chance to carry that legacy forward, only louder, more experimental, more Gen-Z. When she talks about makeup, she describes it as a way of turning an intangible feeling into something visible—a little glitter, a sweep of blush, a different lip colour depending on the day. For Padda, the look seems to follow the feeling.

“Give the gift of you to the world.”

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