The list of topics that Maya Jama — siren of the small screen, one of the few twentysomethings (she’s 28) who may legitimately have earned the epithet ‘national treasure’ — will not be speaking on today is fairly exhaustive: Love Island, her personal life, her background and upbringing, objectification of women in the public eye, how she handles scrutiny of her looks. “I’m not sure what we’re going to fill the next 45 minutes with,” I say to her publicist nervously.
“She’s on TV every single night of the week,” the publicist says, “I’m sure you can think of something.”
I suppose there is the major news that Jama is the new face of Rimmel London — following in the footsteps of Adwoa Aboah and Kate Moss — she will be taking up a truly iconic mantle as the face of one of the world’s best loved make-up brands.
And when I finally get to meet her, she seems legitimately excited by the prospect:
“Obviously, I grew up watching Kate Moss and she’s a legend and an icon — I’ve met her a few times, and I’m always like, ‘aaaaaah’. I try to play it really cool but to follow in her footsteps is unreal. Like I think it’s such an honour — and I feel so lucky to be even in the same kind of pathway.”
Jama is as poreless and glowy in real life as she appears on screen, thanks to “hydrafacials, night serums and I use face masks like four days a week,” she explains. “I’ve always been super into skin —I just love a glowy fresh effect, so anything hydrating I’m really into.
“It’s kind of how this partnership came about, I am such a little wellness girly and have been obsessed with make-up for as long as I can remember. I actually can’t believe it’s finally happened.”
To her the ‘London look’ is cool with a hint of glamour. “I think it still has to be natural, even if you’ve got a full face —and it has to last. I use the Rimmel Lasting Finish foundation because I usually need it on all day. I’m not really a ‘toucher upper’... I’m like one and done. I don’t want to have to keep checking my make-up. I think in London everyone’s so busy running around and most people have about a thousand things to do in one day. So I think a look that lasts throughout the day —and that can take you from work to the bar to dinner to the club — is the one.”
Maya herself is all about a sharply lined eye, she says. “I always do my own eyeliner wing no matter who does my makeup. It’s the main thing I practiced in the school toilets at lunch breaks with my friends way back in the day, we’d all sit down and try and do a winged liner, so I love the Scandaleyes eyeliner— it’s so super easy to use. It’s like a pen, so even if you’ve got a shaky hand you can still get that sharp line.”
There’s clearly a reason behind such minute management of her image right now— she’s about to transcend beyond the confines of TV host stardom, into a different stratosphere — but it’s a shame, because when she does get talking she’s warm and clever, and incredibly interesting.
The fact, for instance, that she moved to London from Bristol by herself aged 16 to pursue an acting career — a move which would scare most adults let alone teens: “when I think back on it, I don’t know if it’s just that my memory’s bad or what, but I feel like I’d be so much more scared now, as an adult, to move to a whole new city, than I was as a teenager, mainly just because I was really fearless back then.”
Or that she’s now in a role of such intense public scrutiny, which she handles with admirable level-headedness: “I guess I’m surrounded by other people’s opinions [of me] but, you know, I’ve been online for so long — since I was super young — and I feel like growing up in it, you kind of get used to it. But my whole theory with all of that [trolling] stuff is like, as long as people are nice in person, I try not to put too much value on what [they] say online anyway, because I’m nice in real life, and people are nice to me in real life - so whatever a stranger thinks, it’s not really my business.” Quite.
She’s one of the most naturally personable stars I’ve met in a long time, so it’s surprising that even she gets starstruck every now and then: “Just by Rihanna,” she says. “I couldn’t even speak to her. She was like [motions across the room], this far away from me and someone asked if I wanted to meet her, but I thought, ‘no I’m just gonna mess it up, I’d don’t even want to talk to her, I just want to admire her from a distance.’ I love her so much — until we meet on a casual one, and I can compose an actual sentence though, I just want to look at her from the side eye.” They were at a Fashion Awards afterparty, she explains. “It was at Laylow in Ladbroke Grove, we were in the same little section as her but I just stayed away because I’d been drinking and I didn’t want to be embarrassing. Like, I actually want her to be my friend.”
Before she leaves, she tells me what it was like saying that iconic line, ‘get the London look’, “it’s actually ‘live the London look’ now,” she laughs. “It was absolutely mad, that was the bit that I was most excited for, mainly because I’ve just seen it growing up. And obviously, everybody knows that line, don’t they? When you think about Rimmel you think about ‘the London look’ so just to say it, it was like, ‘whhhaaaa’ — it felt really good.”
