Why we're addicted to Alexa Chung's Instagram

“My skin is drier than the Sahara desert—it’s like sandpaper and the outside of a cactus had sex and made my skin.” It’s hard not to love Alexa Chung’s beauty speak. Actually, it’s hard not to love Alexa Chung period.

Along with her enviable style and killer eyeliner, we adore her refreshingly candid attitude. From admitting to never taking her makeup off to stealing beauty products from hotel rooms, she’s a girl after our own heart. We’ve been following her on Instagram ever since she made her account public again, and here’s what we’ve learned through our stalking sleuthing.

She is killing it with beauty collaborations right now.

Chung’s first collaboration, The Alexa For Eyeko limited-edition eye kit featuring the ‘Eye Do Mascara’ and eyeliner, has been out since November, and the 30-year-old has just released the ‘Me and My Shadow’ stick for Eyeko, a thick smudgy kohl pencil she wore to the Met Ball.

Chung has also been busy designing a six-piece capsule collection of “texture-based” nail polish shades for Nails Inc. Coming in August, the shades are fabric-inspired, with names like “Alexa Cashmere” (a pinky-beige), “Alexa Lace” (a palish-red) and “Alexa Sequin” (a gold and black glitter).

Chung is also the face of a new Nails Inc. polish called “NAILKALE.” The jury’s still out into the efficacy of kale in beauty products (we’re pretty sure we know which way they’re swinging). But if you were to have a poster child for the cruciferous vegetable jamming up your Instagram feed, who better than Ms. Chung herself?

She casts magic spells on her perfumes.

For reasons that may or may not have to do with a Google alert we put on Alexa’s name, we learned that Chung gave an interview to beauty site Into The Gloss. She didn’t hold back from revealing her secrets, including some witch-tastic supernatural rituals.

“I always write ‘Magic Potion’ on my perfume bottles so when I use them it feels magical—I make spells in the morning when I put them on. I’m not really into astrology, though.”

She ‘steals’ the beauty products from hotel rooms.

A girl after our own heart, we’ve all stuffed the pint-sized moisturisers into our luggage before we check out but Chung takes it even further. She once took the entire bath set at the Ritz Paris – the bathrobe, bath mat, towels, everything.

“I’ll keep stealing the products day after day, so they have to keep refilling, and that way I can get as much as possible. Sometimes they don’t refill it—they know the game. Now they’re like, ‘Oh, Ms. Chung is in 205. Don’t restock, she’s pilfering the products,’” she told Into the Gloss.

She only started wearing makeup because of the paparazzi.

Even Chung’s meteoric rise to fashion ‘It girl’ status was accidental. Backstage at a Chanel show, Karl Lagerfeld gave her his last interview of the day, telling everyone they just had to record it.

She immediately forgot all her questions and instead of focusing on the clothes, asked him why he played the Shirelles. Lagerfeld was really happy because someone was asking a new type of question for once, and her relationship with Chanel grew from there. It was around this time people starting taking notice of what she was wearing.

“It was once people began taking my picture every time I left the house—because it’s an easy fashion shot—that I started getting a bit weirder about going out without any makeup on, and I think that’s when I started wearing foundation every day,” said Chung.

One of her favourite beauty products is Australian.

One of the only beauty products she mentioned in her book ‘It’ was Australian Lucas’ Papaw ointment. She mostly uses it to moisturise her lips but recently applied it to her whole face on a plane during a “full-on dry skin crisis.”