Cracking the code of phygital beauty

What does it mean to create make-up for both inside and outside the screen? It’s a question a number of beauty brands have been trying to answer in recent years, especially in the wake of Covid.  

The pandemic encouraged an expansion of our digital lives as much as it circumscribed our physical ones. In response, brands created digital tools to stoke consumers' interest in cosmetics when the central appeal of wearing them (i.e., to be seen outside) and the main way of getting them (i.e., trying them out in the store) suddenly disappeared. 

Those responses were vast and came from almost every major player in the market — Gucci Beauty paired with fashion game developer Drest to launch a range of virtual Gucci makeup that players could try on avatars before purchasing in real life; Chanel launched a Lip Scanner so that users could snap a picture of any red, pink, plum, or orange colour they might find throughout their day and match it to a Chanel lip colour in the same shade to then digitally try on; Lancôme debuted an E-Shade Finder that used an algorithm to analyse your skin tone and undertone to find your best foundation colour; just to name a few examples. And while these ventures had mixed success, they did reveal a growing trend among brands to create make-up that adapted to our increasingly online lives. 

One of the most innovative pioneers of this movement is London-based brand The Unseen. They debuted in 2021 with a reflective cream eye product called Spectra that is a subtle grey or a pigmented black that then becomes a reflective silver in photos or videos. The Unseen’s founder Lauren Bowker was inspired to create the product after attending a gig where she noticed most people were watching the performance through their phones rather than in real life. “I realised that there's a whole generation that lives and consumes through a screen”, she says. “That is their reality. And it’s even more enhanced now because of lockdowns”.

“I just thought, wouldn't it be funny if you created a colour that physically existed, but was only ever seen in the digital space? So it became a kind of interesting question of that digital [versus] physical reality. What is real? How can I create something that exists in both worlds?” 

What set Spectra apart was that it responded to the question of physical and digital make-up in a more tangible and easily applicable way than others. Here was a product that could be used in both the digital and physical realms. That could be applied and played with on your skin rather than just an avatar or photo, but that still offered something new on the screen. 

Most recently, Prada has followed suit with their own beauty line. Calling itself the first ‘phygital’ beauty line, Prada Beauty has been developed by digital artist and 3D make-up pioneer Ines Alpha alongside ‘real-life’ makeup artist Lynsey Alexander. To create the range’s eyeshadows, foundations and lipsticks, Alpha designed avatars to develop various make-up looks on. These led to, as Alexander puts it, colours and textures “that I hadn’t seen before, that maybe didn't exist” which she would then translate into physical products.

The Unseen and Prada have offered make-up that bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds in the most tangible way, creating a dialogue between the two that will set the stage for other brands to come. Yet, it’s worth noting that almost all major beauty brands are already creating make-up that is informed by the influence of digital technology in more subtle, and some would say more insidious, ways. 

Scroll or stroll through any beauty retailer and you’ll quickly find a plethora of products that promise to make you look like a digitally improved version of yourself — Charlotte Tilbury's Flawless Filter foundation, Fenty’s Pro Filt’r, and Huda Beauty’s #FauxFilter. There are also viral TikTok products like Dior Lip Glow, Too Faced Lip Injection Extreme Lip Gloss, Saie Glowy Super Gel and Glow Recipe Dew Drops, which reveal a desire for high-sheen products that emphasize features when captured in a camera. Plus, major brands like Rhode, Lucia Pica’s new iteration of Byredo Beauty, ISAMAYA, Kylie Cosmetics and many more have made lip glosses and face glosses their hero products.

As beauty journalist Jessica DeFino points out, the trend for unnaturally smooth, illuminated skin has been around since the rise of cinema in the early 20th century when “low-definition cameras created a super-smooth, unblemished effect which, of course, altered the general public's perception of what constituted ‘celebrity-level’ beauty”. The same can be said of gloss, which was invented by Max Factor in the 1930s to emphasize the lips of movie actresses on film. When colour TVs became common he even went on to develop the ‘Hi-Fi fluid’ make-up range with bright colours that created the “glowing” look seen on colour television. 

Clearly, technology has always influenced make-up, but it’s interesting to note that the more omnipresent cameras become in our everyday lives, the more we desire an ever more extreme airbrushed and glossy appearance. Mix in the rise of AI and our increasing exposure to digital avatars and it’s no surprise ‘Instagram Face’ is quickly morphing into what DeFino aptly calls ‘cyborg skin’ but which could just as easily be termed ‘cyborg face’ — smooth, poreless skin; glassy eyelids and lips; lacquered or bleached brows and contoured features into an almost alien-like perfection. There is, of course, a downside to these trends. As beauty becomes more dehumanised it sets an ever less achievable benchmark for how we should look. How can a person ever hope to look the way society says is beautiful if what it considers beautiful is not even a person? 

On the other hand, digital technologies can also offer a new realm of creativity for innovation when it comes to make-up. Digital make-up artist Isabelle Udo, who has collaborated with brands like Dior Beauty on digital make-up projects, points out that “with every new development in technology there comes new opportunities, and that shapes beauty in the digital world and the physical world. You see it on TikTok with lots of people recreating digital make-up looks in a physical world so that they are riffing off each other and creating this feedback loop that generates so much more creativity”. 

Sarah Mayer, another digital artist who explores how AI and filters can alter our faces, predicts that digital technologies might accelerate a desire for extremely abstract faces. “I don't see a counter-movement that brings back authenticity and natural happening”, she says. “An exciting possibility that could easily happen soon is an advanced way of personalising your face, creating really abstract versions of yourself. Not like Bold Glamour that makes everyone, once again, look the same, à la Kim Kardashian. I'm talking about adapting your appearance to the extreme, adding a third eye, a second head, purple skin. Who knows what kinds of beauty trends created in the digital space catch on. It would certainly be cool if people ordering a coffee in your local bakery had purple, blue or green skin. A normalisation of abstract skin colours like that might alter the whole world”.

It is hard to say what exactly the future of beauty holds. It's true that humans have been using make-up since ancient times to reconfigure their faces, and how we decide to shape and paint them has always been a mirror that reflects back what society values. The rise of make-up that blurs the line between our digital and physical realities reveals a desire for ‘cyborgian beauty’ that transcends what we think of as ‘naturally’ human. How that will continue to evolve is something that, for better or worse, will be revealed in the IRL and URL realms.