Isamaya Ffrench’s pioneering work as a make-up artist includes seashells glued to models’ skin, alien prosthetics, AI amalgamations of ‘beautiful’ Instagram images applied to a supermodel’s face, and many more elastic interpretations of beauty that snap from the classically appealing to the radically strange.
As global beauty director of Burberry and the original creative director of Dazed Beauty and Byredo Makeup, Ffrench has created strikingly visceral images, sometimes disturbingly so, but beneath their arresting surface are always serious questions: how is our perception of beauty formed? How can we subvert those perceptions? Is there any such thing as beauty anyway? Can that which is ‘ugly’ or ‘grotesque’ not be beautiful too?
