Isamaya Ffrench:‘In the future beauty will be about displaying your DNA’

“Her work is unmistakable, gorgeous and sometimes terrifying. She combines classic beauty looks with radical fantasy….She likes to subvert traditional ideas of beauty, often using illustration, or digital abstraction. For the cover of Dazed Beauty she used an AI system that analysed 17,000 images from Instagram to learn what society considers beautiful. Using the imagery generated, she created hair and makeup looks for Kylie Jenner – in the pictures, Jenner’s face appears to be melting…(Isamaya Ffrench): “What I think will happen next as well is that physical health will become even more equated with beauty. From somehow displaying say, your maximum lung capacity or your energy levels or how long your telomeres, your strands of DNA are. Beauty will be about how healthy a person is down to a cellular level, because, just like in Renaissance times, that’s probably an indication that they’re a fertile person.” These are themes she’s been thinking about in advance of a documentary she’s making that will investigate beauty today, including, but not limited to: beauty ideals for trans people, beauty ideals for a generation that’s grown up on Instagram, women in Iran who wear plasters on their nose to pretend they’ve had rhinoplasty, and the exoticism of the Kardashian face, one that draws on black culture but relies on white privilege. She is especially fascinated by the intersection of beauty and science, her predictions occasionally spinning into dystopian places that leave us silent for a second. “The fact that up to 80% of women in Korea get plastic surgery is interesting, isn’t it? Especially when you start to think about their kids, and the money they’ll spend on their surgery. On shaving their jaws. But then there are developments in genetics, a process of choice now with pregnancy, where you can start to decide what your baby looks like. It’s happening!…”

-The Guardian

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