Can Makeup Be An Artwork Medium

Who says you accept to confine yourself to a gleaming lip, a pretty eye, and maybe a little glitter at holiday time? The about exciting, almost adventurous young makeup artists working today—emphasis on that second word, artist!—create magic past treating their faces as glorious blank canvases. This crew thinks nothing of adorning and obscuring their features in ways that hover betwixt dream and nightmare, inviting usa along on a fascinating excursion to the night—and the calorie-free—side of cocky-creation.

Okay, Cupid—tell usa virtually yourself. "I'thou a creative practicing in mediums including makeup, fashion design, and music," the New York-based creative person says. "I'm always changing visually, simply I would describe my look as cinematic: I like to manipulate my image into different characters that each represent a single genuine fragment of myself." When it is pointed out that some of Cupid'due south Instagram images, while stunning, appear to be, bluntly, painful, he responds, "Hurting is something that is ever present and very real, while beauty is seen equally purely superficial and objective." His eternal inspiration: Nature. "I'm e'er looking at images of animals and the trunk, organic forms, and natural phenomena—things like the colors of an open up flame. The universe already contains every idea that could exist, and the more we study it, the more we have access to it. So I think information technology'due south interesting to explore the possibilities of body modification and determine for yourself what is painful, what is beautiful, and what'south the deviation (if whatsoever at all). I thrive somewhere between the 2!"

Photo: Courtesy of Kiki Nafig

"I pay a lot of attention to pop civilization—initially, I found inspiration from drag culture and from the LGBTQ community," says Nafig, who is 22 and thinks nothing of wandering around a garden and sticking flowers on her face up, or turning her visage into a symphony of pearls and white dots. "Rather than the illusion of a glamorous woman, I am interested in my ain form of expression—an exaggerated girliness," she explains. Nafig says her day job in the hospitality industry makes information technology impossible for her to sport her improvident makeup in her work life, and then "it'due south liberating when I go home—I can utilise bright colors and feel this freedom to limited myself." Her early years—she grew up in Malaysia from the age of five to ten—have informed her artful, though now she has a film caste and has washed some makeup jobs purely every bit a hobby. Still, she says, "I don't want to exercise just makeup! I similar to accept my foot in lots of different places, including music and mode. In that location are so many different ways to express myself. At the end of the mean solar day, it's all nigh beingness resourceful."

"When my friends encouraged me to start an Instagram account about makeup, I was fairly new to the manufacture, so I would upload images that I thought people would like, rather than trying to push the boundaries." So says Ana Takahashi, a London-based makeup creative person whose creations hover between pretty farthermost and extremely pretty. "Information technology was only once I started uploading things I truly liked that my Instagram started to become popular. I wasn't thinking of impressing anyone or doing it for anyone other than myself—it became therapeutic." Of form, the road to expertise is never straight and narrow: "At the age of xiii or 14 I would raid my female parent'southward cupboard and endeavour all these amazing products," she says, "and I did them such poor justice. I call back the showtime time I wore mascara—information technology felt like half my vision had gone, because I could constantly encounter this blurry line of black. I vowed to never wear mascara again, until I realized that wearing eyeliner with no mascara was not a cute wait." Does she have any cute-look secrets she is willing to share? Two words: Soap brows. "I learned this pull a fast one on from @nikki_makeup on Instagram, who shared her secret for getting amazing bushy brows that stay in place all solar day. I simply wet a bar of articulate soap and rub a spoolie into it and brush information technology through my brows."

"I'k a gender-nonconforming person, so Grace Jones is my go-to muse when information technology comes to embracing my unconventional look," Jacinda Pender explains. "I especially adore her unconventional dazzler and androgynous look—I dearest how she effortlessly makes femininity and masculinity coexist with each other." Pender, a author and makeup artist who lives in Georgia, describes her preferred await every bit an unlikely fusion of "swish and reckless; I tend to heart the reckless role of my makeup on my optics, while making the rest of my face very subtle. Certain people can pull off that total dramatic wait, but I'm not one of them—I honey to go along things counterbalanced. Most days, though, my face is bare and gratis." Any beauty secrets to share? "I'm a inexpensive individual," she says with a express mirth, "then I use Elf and Maybelline products. Elf liquid eyeliner is very pigmented, which I dearest. You lot can never go wrong with black liquid eyeliner. Oh, and i last thing: Never, always, sleep in your makeup!"

Photograph: Courtesy of Lyle Reimer / Rizzoli New York

Everything that you meet in my images is a establish object—recycled garbage, things I found on the street," says Lyle Reimer, who prefers to leave the "makeup" off his chore title and only call himself an artist. Reimer, who is Canadian and lives in Vancouver, explains that he is fascinated by "crazy juxtapositions—the mixing of loftier mode with something that's literally trash so that they create a dialog within the piece of work. I dearest the phrase 'ugly pretty.'" Reimer lived in Cuba for a yr every bit a pupil—a transformative feel that gave him a new appreciation of the earth. "It was a totally different mode of living, with a different set of beliefs. And somehow it made me realize that I wanted to do something with my life that connected to my passion." Growing upwardly in a remote Canadian town in Saskatchewan, though, was "not a fun feel. I was so different from anybody else. A unicycle was my first bike." These days, Reimer says, he views the pursuit of individuality and style through makeup every bit no longer an end to itself: "Makeup, I think, is ane of the vehicles that gets you to where you want to go—but it'south not the unabridged mode of transportation."

Photo: Courtesy of Lily Bloom

LB Hell

"I used to exist a different-colored-eyeshadow-and- lip-philharmonic-every-24-hour interval kind of person," Lily Bloom confesses, "but that started making me feel worse near myself, so I sought out more transformative beauty techniques—wigs, face paint, latex—to brand the process fun again. Flower, a 25-twelvemonth-old Londoner, presents extreme, rule-breaking depictions of herself on Instagram—some intriguing, others borderline disturbing, though she says that she doesn't take herself too seriously. "It's meant to be humorous every bit well," she says. "I'k non afraid to be naked online, and judging past all the censorship beingness thrown downwards recently, nudity may become more of a statement than ever." Her inspirations include Dolly Parton, Anna Nicole Smith, the artist Parker S. Jackson— "his pieces make me want to do nothing but figure out how to become them"—and the SFX artists she calls "true magicians—specially those who share their knowledge on YouTube." Bloom herself is an artist and a member of the Something Else commonage. Equally with so many of us, a rough childhood is responsible for a fabulously artistic developed life: "I was larger than the other children in my course, and then couldn't fit into cute outfits like they did. Denim day at school struck fear into my heart—no jeans fit me. That'due south why I don't accept the aesthetic freedom I've created for myself for granted."

Photo: Tim Verhallen; Styling: Jordy Huinde; Make-up: Celine Bernaerts / Courtesy of Fifty'Agency

"I have no inkling how to describe myself!" confesses makeup artist Celine Bernaerts, who is 29, an ambassador for Yves Saint Laurent, and lives in Holland. "People telephone call me 'the bald girl' quite oft, but I can actually be very classic—and a little androgynous—in a arrange." Without much prompting, the delightful Bernaerts will tell you lot, "I've been bald for years—it wasn't that much of a conscious decision. I was 17 and wanted to be unlike!" Her teenage years were transformative in another mode every bit well: When she was xiv, some frisky British girls made her upward, and though they employed far too heavy a hand, she soon realized that "makeup was similar a magic thing for me—it made me so much more confident." And though Bernaerts went to fine art school, all of her projects, it turned out, somehow involved makeup. She credits trailblazers like Peter Philips and Pat McGrath with inspiring her: "They paved the fashion for the new generation to be able to practise this—to appreciate beauty, and to realize that in that location is not simply one industry standard." She loops dorsum to her own stark choice. "I would love it if people would see that your hair is not your beauty," she proclaims. "Hair is not the thing that defines you!"