Colour and confidence haven’t always come so easy for Chan, who, at the time of writing, was sporting turquoise hair with a periwinkle shade of eye shadow – a look finished with winged liner.

“I didn’t start fully diving into colour until maybe two or three years ago,” she says, noting that the longer she spent working in the beauty industry, the braver she became. “I think a lot of it was me finding a community of people who also liked those things and seeing how they wear it and getting inspiration from them.”

She names Michelle Li, an editor at Teen Vogue, whose Instagram is bursts of pinks, lime greens and tangerine. “We feed off of each other,” Chan says.

“When I first started in beauty, the language was very ‘no make-up’ make-up,” she says. “At that time, that Beyoncé song Flawless had just come out – I remember almost every beauty article would start with some sort of reference to Flawless.

“It was ‘peak [beauty brand Urban Decay's] Naked palette’ then. Now I feel like we’re getting to a place where people want to experiment with colour. It’s a cool juxtaposition of wearing fun colours on the eyes and lips, but maintaining a really fresh, minimal face make-up situation which I would describe as very much my vibe.”

If you try to label her style, Chan is quick to give her community credit, naming influencers who are setting the bar for freestyle and graphic make-up, such as Ali, known as @sweetmutuals, Rowi Singh of @rowisingh, and Vanessa Funes of @cutcreaser.

“Sometimes I don’t feel like I’ve completely established what my style is – I’ve been borrowing from other people and when I’m having introspective moments, I’m like, ‘Do I even have a style?’” she said. “Is it even a thing when people have their very specific style, when in reality, we’re all just pulling inspiration from anyone and anything that we see?”

“I feel like I do work really hard where I do want to make things ‘me’, and I do want to feel pride in what I put together, but at the end of the day I think it’s just normal for people to have changing styles,” she adds.

“I think there’s a problem with the way people colloquially use the word ‘Asian’, and I think there’s a lot of under- representation in terms of South Asians,” she said. “People sometimes have this notion that ‘Asian’ just means Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and there so many other types of Asian people.”

Trio launch platform to give Asian-American women a voice

“One of my friends, Lauren Singer, is a zero-waste expert and she always says, ‘Don’t make yourself feel bad for loving and liking the things that make you feel good, but use your voice to encourage different industries to be better,’” Chan said. “So there should be more sustainable options, and cleaner options for all skin tones in beauty and at all price points.”

Chan’s free time in lockdown has given her space to be expressive in more areas than just beauty. In her newsletter series Incessant Rambling she shares her personal thoughts, kitchen tools she’s ogling over, her go-to podcasts, and other titbits that don’t come through over Instagram.

“I think a lot about my role in Instagram and whether what I’m doing is making people feel bad – I don’t want to portray myself as this perfect curated person that has an amazing life and is never sad.”

Social media’s positive influence, though, no doubt comes through in its endless threads of inspiration, even in times where many people are spending significantly more time at home. Aside from profiles of other graphic make-up artists and beauty creatives, her go-to Instagram accounts are profiles dedicated to home renovation – think American home magazine Domino Mag and its new platform Renovator’s Notebook (@reno_notebook).

“I love seeing people’s colourful flats, and sometimes I will take those colour palettes and do them as make-up looks,” she said. Her socially distanced walks around Brooklyn, a borough of New York, and to the farmers’ market mean she’ll get a flicker of inspiration from a springtime flower box, tulips on the streets, or a brightly coloured vintage car.

“And cakes! I get a lot of inspiration from cakes,” Chan says, noting that two of her favourite Instagrams are the accounts for dessert cafe Romantic Standard and design cake shop Goeun Cake in South Korea. “I’ve done a lot of looks based off the colour palettes of cakes,” she said.

No make-up creation is too bold for a day spent indoors – Chan stresses that people shouldn’t feel like they have to wear make-up right now, but nor do people need a reason to apply a jet black lip, a floral face or a rhinestoned eye.

“I don’t like to subscribe to the notion that there is ‘occasion make-up’,” she said. “I think that if you want to wear it, then the occasion to wear it is whatever day it is in your life.”