In a new interview, with the Independent, Emma Watson discusses her role as Lancôme’s “Rouge in Love” lipstick range girl, fashion choices, life post Potter and more! A few snippets from the interview may be read below, you can read the full thing here.

“It’s just given me time, really,” she says. “People use their time at university and at school, which I didn’t have, to really think about and figure out what they want to do, and who they want to be. And it’s been so nice not to be pushed around or pushed into doing things.”

In fact, Watson has carefully peppered her career with choices that pertain very closely to her own interests, putting her name to a collection for eco-fashion range People Tree as well as partnering with designer Alberta Ferretti to work on a “Pure Threads” ethical line too. Her next film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, will be released later this year. She paints and reads books. She has, she tells me guiltily, a university essay to hand in the next day, not yet finished.

“Doing the Potters was such a bubble,” she says, “and then having to figure out how to function in the real world has been a challenge. But it’s been the small successes for me: I know how to use a washing machine, I can cook. It’s worth it to me not to feel disconnected from everything, feeling like I’m in touch with people who do other things than acting or being in the entertainment industry.”

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There was a time, though, towards the end of the Potter franchise, when Watson came of age and began appearing on front rows at shows such as Chanel and Burberry, in whose billboard campaigns she featured along with her younger brother in 2009. “I was fully game for ‘Throw me in this, throw me in that,'” she admits, “but I’d like to develop my own sense of style, and dress for myself. The press destroyed me over this Rodarte dress I once wore – it was bright blue with chains on it.” She laughs and shivers slightly. “I loved it. And I wore a leather Christopher Kane dress with embroidered flowers all over it. It wasn’t that crazy, but at the time…”

She seems to have ridden out the post-Potter publicity admirably, though. “Fashion gave me a chance to feel like I was something outside of Potter,” she explains, of her appearances front row at shows such as Chanel and Burberry. “I’m a multidimensional person and that’s the freedom of fashion: that you’re able to reinvent yourself through how you dress and how you cut your hair or whatever.”

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