Early this month, amid her Tropicoquetta album tour, Colombian superstar Karol G unexpectedly released "No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto" (I Don't Regret Feeling So Much). The title functions as an almost perfect thesis for the album: melancholic, raw and unfiltered. It contains melancholic ballads, including "Después de Ti", her collaboration with Greg Gonzales from pop band Cigarettes After Sex, alongside wilder anthems like "Matadora".
Fans had reasons to suspect something new was coming. Months before the album's surprise release, Karol began dropping hints related to beauty, unsurprising given her known willingness to play with her hair and nail colours. In January, she posted a carousel on Instagram that included an image of herself wearing rhinestones on her forehead and a baby blue manicure, with the caption: "Unfocused But SparkLYYYY".
The aesthetic of "No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto" could not be more different from Tropicoquetta. One is fluorescent, maximalist and celebratory; the other is dark, introspective and refined. On the album cover, Karol appears with minimal makeup and immersed in a cold blue tonality, giving the image a nostalgic vibe reminiscent of Britney Spears' 2003 album "In The Zone".
For Karol, colour has always been part of the narrative, according to Duván Foronda, her makeup artist for nearly a decade. "She is someone who adds colour to everything; for her, a song has a colour; for her, a feeling has a colour", Foronda said. When creating Tropicoquetta, that feeling was happiness. "She said: 'I want an album that is really tropical, that feels really happy'. And for her, the colour that expressed that was orange", Foronda recalls. Beauty followed the same path. "That album had a very defined aesthetic", he said. "In terms of makeup, we did a lot of red lips, brown eyeliner and cheeks with orange tint".