Into the Future with Makeup Artist Isamaya Ffrench

My background is dance and performance. I ended up going to Central St. Martins, studying industrial design. I was dancing right up until I was 22 and realized I didn’t want to design mobile phones and chairs and stuff. I got a side-job as a face-painter and also began working with this company called the Theo Adams company, which is a performance group who creates bespoke shows for Louis Vuitton and Tate. It was a mix of those two things, working with the company and doing this very childish painting somehow. I found some middle-ground and ended up working in a more professional way doing shoots. At the time, there was a bit of a gap in the market for creative makeup, especially concept-based makeup. Obviously, you had a lot of high fashion artists, Pat McGrath and Val Garland, who really led the way in what we’ve known as fashion makeup for the last few decades. They pioneered that. But I think there was a lack of playfulness or childishness in it somehow that coincided with the sudden rise of street casting and real faces and real people. It happened at the right time.

It made me approach a face in a more conceptual way. I always try to build some sort of narrative or character with the work. I’m not really that bothered about aesthetics and makeup or fashion for the sake of it. It has to be entertaining and tell a story.

I suppose everything is in relation to what we already know. The term "transhumanism," 50 years from now, could mean something completely different to what we know of it. So currently, I think it’s about the integration of technology or something even in-built to our DNA programming. Transhumanism is a form of process that we are going through now, because we’ll always be humans.

It probably stems from a childhood coping strategy. [Laughs] And most kids do things to escape, don’t they? It’s about dreaming. Or at least for me in doing or imagining things to escape my reality. I feel that obviously anything that carries weight on its own story or narrative only adds another dimension to the image you are creating. Someone like Marilyn Manson, for instance, and that whole idea that his conscience is represented in a physical form. With Yves tumor, I work with him in quite a free way to try and express his tastes. People tell the ultimate story– the more loaded the character you’re working with, the deeper the work will end up.

It’s very different when I work on myself because there’s a sense of humor, which is really important for me. I don’t care if there’s no sense of humor when I’m working with other people, but it has to exist within what I make for myself. Again, all these things are a collaborative effort, it’s not really just my vision; it’s the photographers and it’s the subject. As is the case with most editorial projects. In a way there are relatively few things I’ve done that I could really call my own work. In terms of from start to finish, which is something I have to think about a lot because everyone has to make a compromise. Rihanna makes a compromise. Nick Knight’s making some sort of a compromise.

There are a lot of things I like to explore, which comes back to the whole storytelling aspect. I’m about to work on this project with this amazing guy who makes grills which will be coming out later in the year. I am really interested in the symbology of how different things affect you emotionally and playing with that. For example, teeth are actually really loaded subjects – they are the last thing that disintegrates when you die; they are how you communicate; what feeds you; for pregnant women, it’s last thing to lose calcium; it’s really scary when people are without teeth and people dream about losing them. That’s kind of where my brain goes at times, to these subjects that maybe in the end isn’t translated into the work but generally informs me and is the starting point.

Beauty is something that, speaking from myself in a Western world, has been shaped by big corporations and it’s monetized in a huge way. I think a lot of our perception of beauty is adhered to what makes money and what sells.

Exactly. It’s a completely deluded version of our beauty ideals because it’s based on a social construct. I think we’re losing touch with the emotional side of beauty too, partly due to the communication online. It’s not very romantic anymore, it’s very superficial.

At least in terms of what we find attractive. We’re going through it, we’re not on the other side of it yet.

Definitely, all of it. It’s what moves me as what’s beautiful.

Yes, but in a weird way, I love and hate both. Often people ask me, "Who do you think is beautiful?," and you kind of lose sight in a sense when you are looking at something so objectively, of what is beautiful and what’s not. One man’s treasure is another man’s trash. It’s quite hard for me to look at things subjectively as well, because beauty is something that is an emotion, it’s not an aesthetic.

That’s where the industrial design degree is probably most helpful because it’s purely about problem solving and understanding a brands vision and their objectives; being able to advise in regard to what they want. I work with a lot of different kinds of brands, so for me that’s interesting. Even when they all want kind of the same thing. "The New Thing."