Hash Brownie On The Making Of KittySu's First Makeup Collection

In August 2011, Keshav Suri opened a nightclub inside The Lalit in Delhi's Connaught Place and named it after a fictional, drag queen he'd invented himself. Fifteen years on, the club has outlasted most of its competition by design. In 15 years of operation, Kitty Su hasn't closed for a single day. 

But longevity isn't the interesting part. KittySu became the first club in the country to run events built specifically for the transgender community, acid attack survivors, and people with disabilities. It has backed the movement to repeal Section 377 years before the Supreme Court actually struck the law down, and has long been the centrepost of queer nightlife in the country.

And all this while running a nightclub so good that DJ Mag named it India's best and the only Indian venue on its global top 100 list. It has since expanded well past Delhi, with outposts and pop-ups now running in Mumbai, Chandigarh, Jaipur, and Kolkata. 

This history is the premise behind KittySu Beauty, the colour cosmetics label Suri has built with Cyril Feuillebois, founder of the skincare brand Kronokare. The range launched on the first of June this year, timed to Pride month, carrying a tagline lifted straight from the club's own language: Beauty for the Misfits. Makeup Beyond Boundaries. 

Three liquid lipsticks, BLACKMAIL, HOTLINE, and TANTRIC, and two glosses, SILKJUICE and BAREBACKSTAGE, make up the debut product range. Delhi-based drag queen Hash Brownie, who has been creating and experimenting with makeup since she was fourteen, played an important role in bringing the brand to life. She and Feuillebois first crossed paths in 2019, when she did his drag for an event, and she became his drag mother afterwards. Years later, he called her in and asked her to build the brand with him.

For Brownie, tying the brand to KittySu was never an exercise in marketing. "KittySu has always been more than a club," she tells me. "It was a space where people could walk in and completely become themselves without being judged for it. Keshav and Cyril built that space around individuality, freedom and belonging." This is a feeling that naturally translates into beauty. Makeup, she says, "has always been a huge part of how I express myself, especially through drag and performance, so creating products from that world felt very personal." 

Yet, she couldn’t help but feel like there was a gap in the Indian beauty market: "A lot of beauty is still presented through a very polished and conventional lens," she explains. "I wanted to create something that wasn't afraid of desire, seduction, sexuality, power and provocation." KittySu Beauty is the trio’s answer to this gap, and it shows right from the packaging, which borrows its leather-and-kink visual language straight from the club.

It shows second in how involved Hash was in the development of the range. "I've spent years using makeup in environments where it genuinely has to work, be it under stage lights, through long nights, sweat, movement, photographs and performances. So I was very particular about the textures, pigmentation and how the products behaved.”

Suri and Feuillebois, on the other hand, formed the brand's larger vision and cultural DNA: the desire to take the spirit of KittySu beyond the club and into the hands of anyone who believes beauty should be inclusive, expressive and without rules.

To this, Brownie brought the lived experience of what was missing in the market. Her manager, Suraj Sheoran, kept the process coordinated through a long run of testing and back-and-forth. Two specific gaps drove her: a black lipstick that didn’t feel like it was made for costume, something she had never managed to find online, and a red pigmented enough to suit different skin tones and change a face instantly. Both are now in the range.

HOTLINE, TANTRIC, and BLACKMAIL were chosen deliberately as entry points for the brand: a universally flattering red, a brown that is just as sensual as it is editorial, and finally the black lipstick she'd spent years failing to find. What comes next pushes further out, by her account: metallics, holographic finishes, unconventional colours, and formulas closer to high-shine vinyl lips, blurred matte stains, and multi-chrome finishes, each one meant to blur the line between conventional beauty and performance makeup. 

Looking at the glosses, I ask her about a future skincare line. After all, the collection’s full coverage mauve gloss, SILKJUICE, has everything from ceramide, hyaluronic acid, peptides, and UV filters. It’s not off the table, but she is cautious about it: "I think there is definitely an opportunity to explore skincare eventually, but I wouldn't want to do it simply because every beauty brand is expected to have a skincare category," she admits. 

"What interests me more is the space between makeup and skincare." Which is how the gloss came to be the way it is. "Even within a very edited five-product collection, we're thinking about versatility rather than one product having one purpose. If we eventually move into skincare," she said, "I'd want it to feel like a natural extension of that philosophy."

When asked about a ten-year horizon, she doesn’t want to put a ceiling on it by naming it. “I’d love KittySu Beauty to become a brand that represents a particular attitude rather than just a particular category of products. I want it to continue questioning what beauty is allowed to look like in India. I want us to be able to talk about colour, sexuality, performance, subculture, desire and individuality without constantly trying to make everything more palatable.

“If ten years from now someone says, ‘KittySu made me feel like I could be whoever the f*** I wanted to be,’ I’d consider that a pretty successful legacy.”