Still Thinking About Lily Cole

There was a period in my late twenties when I lost several hours to the specific gravitational pull of redheads, and two of them sat at the top of that list: Cintia Dicker and Lily Cole. Dicker had a kind of impossible facial symmetry, almost computational in its precision. Cole was something else entirely—those enormous eyes, the pre-Raphaelite hair, proportions that seemed slightly off in a way that made her completely impossible to stop looking at.

She was already doing films by then. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam’s last real swing at his own mythology, where she fit perfectly into a world that had no interest in realism. Then Snow White and the Huntsman, which is less interesting as a film but she’s in it. Then Rage. She was consistently better than whatever she appeared in, which is a particular kind of charisma that doesn’t announce itself.

For the autumn/winter issue of POP magazine she did a shoot that is essentially everything I would have wanted at 27: partly unclothed, unsettling in that specific Cole way, occupying some halfway point between beautiful and alien. Sexy but somehow also strange. The combination that, for reasons I’ve never fully worked out, gets me every time.

Cintia Dicker, the door’s open if you want back in.