Love & Passion Quote by Ville Valo

Valo’s charm here is how casually he deflates a whole mythology of rock-image transgression. He starts with Kiss as permission slip: if those guys can paint their faces and still be “real” rock, then makeup becomes less a scandal and more a tool. That’s the first move - reframing what could read as gender panic into fan logic and stagecraft. The misspelled “exiting” even accidentally helps; it carries the breathless, teenage buzz of discovering a loophole in the rules.

But the second sentence is the tell: “I’ve almost stopped using make-up nowadays.” The arc is from novelty to normalization to fatigue. Makeup isn’t treated as identity’s final truth, it’s treated like a phase of armor you can outgrow once you’ve proven what you needed to prove. That’s very HIM-era Valo: romantic gloom packaged with a wink, sincerity delivered through a self-aware pose. He’s acknowledging that the look mattered - it made the band legible in a market that rewarded visual signatures - while insisting he isn’t trapped in it.

The subtext is also a quiet comment on masculinity in late-90s/2000s rock. Valo isn’t staging a grand manifesto; he’s describing adaptation. Makeup was exciting when it signaled danger, softness, theatricality. When culture caught up, the edge dulled, and the cost-benefit changed. What remains is an artist hinting that the most “authentic” thing might be the willingness to change costumes when the story demands it.