SOCAL STYLE / Looks : Doing What Comes Naturally : Wearing Fall’s Muted Shades, Actress Nia Long Stays in Character

When asked about her personal style, Nia Long looks at you as if you’d just asked her to describe her favorite character at a Star Trek convention. After a pause she says, “I guess it’s . . . natural.”

Long speaks carefully in a way that implies that she just now thought of the word “natural,” selecting it from a field of equally valid words that might have included “innocent,” “fauvist” and “cherche.”

She is understandably too busy to be thinking about style. With five new feature films in the wings, the star of “Soul Food” and “love jones” has been preoccupied with a wide range of roles: In the ecclesiastical thriller “Stigmata,” she mixes company with Gabriel Byrne and Patricia Arquette. In “Boiler Room,” with Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi, she plays an office worker. “In Too Deep” has her lost in the underworld with Omar Epps and LL Cool J. She plays a lesbian in a segment of the HBO movie “If These Walls Could Talk 2,”executive-produced by Ellen DeGeneres, Suzanne Todd and Jennifer Todd. In “The Best Man,” she’s directed by Malcolm Lee, brother of Spike, who produced the film.

Born in New York, Long grew up in Iowa City, where her mother was an art student. “She was an artist’s model,” she says. “Everyone in our house walked around naked!” When the family moved to South-Central Los Angeles, Long, at age 9, had a hard time fitting in as an Iowa bohemian in cool town. “I had a Midwestern accent; I ate Tiger’s Milk Bars! I had my first bologna sandwich at the neighbors. And my mom would be making brown rice and lentils.”

By her own admission, there was no better style role model than an eccentric mom: “She’s the only person I’ve ever known who could wear completely mismatching things and pull it off,” Long says. “As a painter, she had a completely different palette.” For Long, being classic and muted was almost an act of rebellion. Even now, she favors sleight of hand over look-at-me stunt makeup, and the most extreme look that she can dredge up from memory is a red lipstick and braces phase in high school. That “natural” thing, it turns out, is not at all actressy--that reconstructed insouciant modesty so many famous girls get when asked to talk about just how little they depend on cosmetics--but the product of years of character study.

As an actress, Long makes conscious use of stylistic detail in the roles she plays, and owns up to having experimented at length with character-driven lip color. “I like characters with a light lip,” she says, “because it makes them more accessible.” Off-camera, Long’s approach to style is more casual: She’s a quick sketch artist, assembling lyrical self-portraits from the simplest of artists’ materials. In her own terms: doing whatever comes naturally.

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Makeup by Bethany Karlyn for M.A.C/Artist Group Management; hair: Louise Moon for Nubest & Co./Profile, L.A.; stylist: Lisa Michelle/Artist Group Management; set design: The Painter; makeup assistant: Tami Riddle for M.A.C