Britain's brainiest beauty... but doesn't she want you to know it: From condoms made from rainforest trees to restoring Britain's 'pagan culture', there's little Lily Cole doesn't have an opinion on

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Of course, she’s beautiful. But it seems Lily Cole is rather keen we get the message that she’s terribly brainy, too.

While the redhead supermodel — who has a double first in History of Art from Cambridge University — has never shied away from showing off her intellect, some are wondering whether she’s bitten off more than she can chew with her latest role as ‘creative partner’ at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire for the 200th anniversary celebrations this July of Emily Bronte’s birth.

But the involvement of a supermodel has left some Bronte experts incandescent over what they see as an insult to the writer’s memory. It’s not just 19th-century fiction on which Lily, 30, has an intellectual take. From saving the world with condoms made from Amazon rainforest trees, to resurrecting Britain’s ‘pagan indigenous’ culture, it seems there’s little on which Lily doesn’t have an opinion . . .

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Of course, she’s beautiful. But it seems Lily Cole (pictured) is rather keen we get the message that she’s terribly brainy, too

She went Veggie at the age of ten 

Lily’s artist mother, Patience Owen, met Lily’s father Chris when she was selling her drawings — and he sold jewellery — on the Bayswater Road, West London.

Although Chris has subsequently faded from Lily’s life after her parents split, her mum Patience is said to still play a supporting role in her daughter’s career — and Lily has art works by her mother on display in her flat.

The model’s childhood does sound rather intellectually intense. Lily admits to ‘thinking about charity and watching things on the news and donating money from a young age’, and has been a vegetarian since she was ‘about ten years old’.

Today, still resolutely vegetarian, Lily has been known to say, rather crossly, about cuisine that ‘if it hasn’t got a free-range egg in it, I won’t touch it’.

Her interviews need footnotes 

Lily entered a different league when she got her Cambridge double first in 2011.

Her heavyweight reputation appears to have put her in the enviable position of being able to talk, virtually unchallenged, on pretty much any subject she likes.

As a result, broadsheet TV critic Andrew Billen said a meeting with her last year gave him ‘the feeling that I [had] entered a rather taxing tutorial’, while another interviewer added that she talks ‘with the conviction of someone who knows she is clever’.

Billen elaborated: ‘This is the only interview I can recall conducting that gets its own footnotes: an email, from the PR, of references for, among others, the French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of reciprocity and B Corps, which are companies that sign up to an ethical audit.’

All of this was to plug Lily’s role as another intimidating redhead, Elizabeth I, for a docu-drama on Channel 5.

She testifies to having read widely about the Virgin Queen before agreeing to play her and mulled over 16th-century Protestantism and Catholicism, drawing comparisons to modern issues raised by a documentary she was simultaneously editing about volunteers working with refugees on the Greek island of Samos.

‘At the same time, we had the travel ban in the U.S. It seemed an interesting comparison,’ she said.

When it comes to saving the Earth, there are few model-turned-activists busier than Lily. Philanthropy: Lily presenting a creative enterprise award. 

‘I don’t want to be reductive, but the conflict between Protestant and Catholic in Elizabeth’s time — in my opinion, today, it’s just [the same] conflict by a different name.

‘Ultimately, they are differing belief systems, different enough for people to die over.’

Ethical condoms and £65 wool hats

When it comes to saving the Earth, there are few model-turned-activists busier than Lily.

Her many causes include saving the Amazon rainforest by encouraging people to use condoms made out of wild rubber grown in the region, so local people don’t cut down the trees.

She said in one interview: ‘We’ve designed trainers with wild rubber soles . . . [and] I did a jewellery collection, but the scale [potential for business growth] with those products is limited. Condoms are both scalable and beneficial.’

Indeed, Lily was so committed to her wild rubber condoms that she risked fashion suicide by turning up to the fiercely competitive Met Ball in a Vivienne Westwood dress made from the same material.

Over the years, she’s also warned MPs that illiteracy is the root cause of most social problems, spoken at high-end department store Selfridges about how we must use our imagination to fight climate change — and declared herself ‘ashamed to be English’ because the UK has not done enough to help refugees.

Other pet projects include a now-defunct fashion company that got ‘grandmas to hand-knit goods and make people think about the fact that there’s a person behind every item that you buy’.

She donated a share of her profits to the Ethical Justice Foundation, but ending exploitation did not come cheap. Items on sale included a bobble hat with a price tag of £65.

And we mustn’t forget that Lily also helps bushmen from the Kalahari Desert trade their jewellery here, something rather airily described by her in an interview as ‘one of my first “trade rather than aid” initiatives’.

Taking tea with Stephen Hawking 

Unsurprisingly, there are few airhead celebrities in Lily’s inner circle, and many of her associates have the declared aim of changing the world.

One of her closest pals is Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. The pair have been in a mutual fan club since Lily was introduced to him at the World Economic Forum in Davos six years ago.

Wales agreed to support her tech start-up — Impossible.com, a money-free ‘social giving’ service where users can ‘wish’ for help and others can offer their time, skills and possessions in return — while he has made her an adviser on his Wikitribune project, set up to fight fake news.

Cole also describes Apple design guru Jony Ive as a friend and has had her ‘hero’, the scientist Stephen Hawking, round for tea at her London flat.

Other buddies include eco-fashion activist Livia Firth, wife of actor Colin, and Bono’s wife, ethical businesswoman Ali Hewson.

Nurture: Lily’s mum Patience feeding her in the Eighties. While most mums-to-be fret over labour pains and sleepless nights, Lily Cole worried about ‘creative death’. In the run-up to the birth of her and Kwame Ferreira’s daughter Wylde in 2015, Lily presented a debate on a critic’s warning that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’

A taste for older lovers

Now with entrepreneur Kwame Ferreira, 40, Lily’s past romances were largely made up of actors, models and pop stars — said to have included Cold Mountain leading man Jude Law, muscular British model David Gandy and Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry, 42 years her senior.

However, in recent years, Lily has become increasingly attracted to successful tech gurus who share her world vision.

She briefly dated Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, after he heard her speak passionately about global sharing at a conference, before falling for Ferreira, who heads a global innovation company that consults for technology giants such as Samsung.

After he offered to build her Impossible.com project for free, they fell in love.

Kwame is taller than her, even though Cole stands 6ft 3in in her high heels.

His online profile describes him as a ‘helicopter pilot, veggie barbecue enthusiast and occasional social anthropologist with an appetite for mid 16th-century Nepalese painting and boats’.

Intellectual of Instagram

It’s doubtful that you’ll find much light reading on Lily’s bookshelves. One tome is likely to be her own self-published work Impossible Utopias, which was based on her Cambridge thesis. Even her posts on social media site Instagram are dauntingly heavyweight.

One past caption to a photograph of a tree read: ‘How do we reconnect with this Gaelic pagan indigenous culture on this island, I asked someone once. “Listen to the birds and the streams” — the original music of the land which inspired our first spoken sounds.’

Lily’s foreword to a book about knitting is also telling. She wrote: ‘I am really interested in marrying the old and the new, allowing them to coexist, enhance and inform each other — whether it’s reading about Sufism on my iPad or wearing a modern sleek, designed hat hand-knitted old-school style in real wool.’

£2,000 stools - made of bread

Ever the optimist, Lily set up her website Impossible.com as a ‘Tinder for favours’.

The idea is that people should offer their skills for free in their local area — with no expectation of anything in return.

Thankfully, Lily has said it doesn’t matter if her companies don’t make money.

In the 2015 company accounts, records show I Am Possible, the company behind Lily’s website, has debts of £285,751.

This is despite receiving £200,000 of taxpayers’ money five years ago as a start-up.

Lily, however, points out that she has also injected her own cash and refuses to take a salary.

Her laudable aim of wanting to see a society run on generosity, rather than cash, also resulted in her setting up an online shop, selling ‘products that have a positive impact on the world’.

Items included £165 pyjamas and a ‘Lily Pearmain Stoneware Boob’ — pottery pieces shaped like breasts that can be hung on the wall — priced at £30.

In the past, she has also sold a range of homeware products made from baked bread, which included a £2,000 footstool that ‘will disintegrate in four to six years’.

Million-pound Boho bolthole 

Lily bought her 1,300 sq ft flat, converted from a Grade I-listed railway hotel, near St Pancras Station in London, so she could easily commute between the Capital and Cambridge while studying for her degree.

Since then, she has expanded the apartment, which cost around £1 million, to include a walk-in wardrobe and en-suite bathroom, featuring a copper bath and apothecary cabinets for her beauty products.

She also added a balcony in the entrance hallway creating a unique ‘Romeo and Juliet’ balcony ‘to add a sense of theatre and eccentricity’, according to the planning application.

The style is unapologetically shabby chic — and Lily says that she battled the builders to keep peeling paint on the doors.

Visitors say it’s decorated with images from some of Lily’s most iconic modelling shoots.