How Normani Stays Fresh on the Sweetener Tour: Fenty Beauty, LED Masks, and Vegan Ice Cream
“She is insane,” gushes the blonde next to me as we watch Normani glide from one sultry dance step to another at Madison Square Garden. “Her choreo? Sharp!” agrees the blonde’s companion. It’s the second night of Ariana Grande’s Sweetener world tour’s stop at MSG, and Normani is intoxicating concertgoers as an opening act. Since March the singer has been on the road with Grande; her first tour as a solo act since her girl group, Fifth Harmony, announced an indefinite hiatus.
During her set, Normani pulses, shakes, shimmies, and rolls with precision through her chart-toppers “Love Lies” and “Dancing With a Stranger.” She shaku shakus and gwara gwaras with ease through the WizKid-assisted “Checklist,” a collaboration with Calvin Harris. The only reprieve from her demanding routine comes when she croons a slowed medley of Rihanna hits—“Diamonds,” and “Where Have You Been”—from a seat next to her keyboardist.
Even on the jumbotron, it’s hard to detect a drop of sweat on Normani’s glowing face as she moves. Her skin melts into her bejeweled bodysuit, one that highlights the power of her physical form. Normani is beautiful, but her subtle makeup makes it clear she wants everything else on stage—her graceful body and those of her four dancers, the technique of her nimble band, and of course, her enchanting vocals—to shine.
“I want everything to look pretty good and cohesive and flawless, but I don’t do a lot on my eye,” Normani says of her tour makeup look. We meet two days before I see her at the Garden in a small lounge in Chelsea’s Jungle City Studios, where she’s recording music for her debut album.
“I like a more natural look,” she says. When we meet, she’s makeup-less, with wispy natural lashes. Her long wavy hair is shielded by a white dad hat.
“But I like beat skin,” she clarifies. On tour, her makeup artist, Grace Pae, has been using a combination of Laura Mercier and Bobby Brown foundations, and Fenty Beauty products to contour her face. Last September, Normani got to meet Rihanna at the Diamond Ball. “It was so brief. But it was the best five seconds ever,” she says, looking lovelorn.
Normani isn’t just looking to have “beat” skin on the road—she’s been working to keep it healthy, too. She says he can’t live without an LED light for it.
“There’s different settings that you can use,” she explains. “It’s like a face mask that you plug up. And they have like blue, red, green [lights]…and different colors do different things. One tightens the skin. One kills bacteria.”
When I ask her for the best beauty advice she’s gotten from Grande, she fawns over a Korean blackhead-removing charcoal mask the ponytailed pop star introduced her to.
“It hurt like hell taking it off, but it worked,” she says. She has to remind Grande to send her the name of it. (Normani’s beauty advice to Grande? To wear her hair down on a few stops of the tour. She obliged.)
Prior to and during the tour, Normani has also been on a skin-conscious diet: avoiding dairy, which she says breaks her out. She has sacrificed pizza, a favorite when in New York City, but hasn’t given up ice cream; she just gets it vegan from Van Leeuwen.
With eight-hour-long days of rehearsals in preparation for the tour, she didn’t go completely vegan, à la Beyoncé for Coachella, but she did try to avoid meat. She fueled her body with salads, smoothies, and lots and lots of water. On the road, she’ll snack on apples, peanut butter, and berries. Right now, she’s on a ramen kick.
And what about pre-tour exercise?
“I tried to…” she says, smiling to herself and shaking her head. “I really did. I told myself, ‘I’m gonna work out every single day. And then I’m going to go to rehearsal.’ That didn’t end up happening because my body was sore after rehearsal, therefore, I couldn’t wake up the next morning and work out. But I would try to work out maybe three times a week, which is good for me. As long as I’m eating healthy.”
Normani experienced a new sense of ownership over this tour that guided her preparation. She dreamt up her set herself, and brought it to life with her creative partners, like the choreographer Sean Bankhead.
“I’m a new artist,” she says, before pausing thoughtfully. “But I have the wisdom of a seasoned artist because I’ve been doing it for so long. This really is the first time that people are kind of getting a sense of who Normani is, so it was really important for me to just ask myself the questions, What do you want? What do you want people to take away after they see your performance?”
One of those things was the power of black women. Normani has been performing with a coalition of black women artists: her keyboardist, drummer, guitarist, and dancers.
“They are the baddest group of women that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” Normani says. “It’s just really cool for me to be on the biggest tour of the year, with the biggest pop star in the world right now, and highlight [these women] in such a way.”
Normani’s most important tour practices seem to be her creative and spiritual ones. When we meet, she’s grateful to be in a recording studio. She’s been songwriting and reviewing tracks on the road, and says it’s nice to be able to express herself off-stage as well as on. And she brings her faith with her both places. Normani starts each day with a meditation, sometimes watching sermons like those of Sarah Jakes Roberts, sometimes just talking to God.
“Every single room that we rehearse in or even every [studio] session that I step into, I pray,” she says. “I cleanse the room. I just let God just take over the space.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
