Manifesto of a Provocateur

For ELLE's Beauty issue, Kannagi Desai speaks to iconoclast British makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench on why we shouldn't be afraid to lean into strange territory when it comes to doing up faces

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Every era has a beauty visionary who forces the industry to look in the mirror and see something new. For this one, that person is Isamaya Ffrench. She's the makeup artist creative directors whisper about when they want work that doesn't look like makeup at all. Her images sit somewhere between sculpture and sin: cold chrome skin, vinyl lashes, flesh painted to look both fragile and fearless.

Born in Cambridge in 1989, Ffrench grew up in the English countryside, nowhere remotely near the beauty capitals that would later become her stomping ground. As a child, she found Kevyn Aucoin's Making Faces (1997) in a local bookshop, which, in turn, helped her see makeup not as decoration but as a tool of transformation. “Even though his work was about glamour and perfection,” Ffrench recalls, “it felt like true empowerment—the kind that allowed women to become more of who they really are.”

Ffrench began her career far from the makeup counters and fashion schools that usually feed the industry. She studied 3D design at Chelsea College of Art in London, painted faces at children's parties for pocket money, and joined a performance collective that treated the body as a moving canvas. The art world came first, beauty came later. That's the difference. When she began working with i-D and Dazed, Ffrench was painting faces and bodies for editorials that treated makeup as sculpture, merging performance art with fashion imagery. What followed were collaborations with Burberry, Vivienne Westwood, Byredo, and Thom Browne—each one an experiment in what a face could express if freed from the obligation to please. “My approach has been to explore the vast, ever-changing world of beauty, understand its limitations and challenge them,” she says.