Everything you need to know about Isamaya Ffrench's year of Isamaya Beauty.

The name Isamaya Ffrench seems to be on everyone’s lips lately - and rightfully so. The title make-up artist doesn’t quite seem to sum up the levels of expression and raw talent that Ffrench has showcased in her twelve year career - from sculpting with clay, creating wearable art and expressing with body paint, she has created a completely new category of what beauty expression looks and feels like.

In a world filled with abundance of beauty brands, make-up launches and celebrity-led beauty, Isamaya took a giant leap of faith to create a beauty brand that serves the opposite - the raw expression of bold colours, bringing in odes to kink, and ironic beauty standards, but also packaging and imagery that seduce, shock and confuse, making you look beneath the product and witness the brand more as an artistic expression of language - fantasies, and alter egos that we all possess in between our layers of self.

Launching Isamaya Beauty in 2022, Ffrench has had to wear many faces in the process - product developer, operational manager and artistic director, all roles that she has taken on head strong, without any hesitation or compromise. Her first collection titled Industrial, explored the many facets and hidden pleasures of kink - mascaras with Prince Albert piercings, and custom shadow palettes embedded for a latex feeling - creating a world of fantasy, all shot by Steven Klein. Her second drop Wild Star, painted the world of over-expressive glitz and glamour, shining in gold, embellishing its packaging to match the curated world of thought. Retrospecting to what a year of ownership looks like for an artist currently, Isamaya Ffrench speaks to Perfect about the freshly dropped LIPS collection - a penis-shaped lipstick that became all the rage when first teased online - and what it means to stand your ground in a balancing act between business and art.

Angel: Isamaya, reflecting back on a year of Isamaya Beauty, what are the lessons you learned in owning your very first beauty business?

Isamaya Ffrench: You have to fight for your ideas - working in a commercial space means you have a lot of noise to work against, so it’s important to be confident in yourself. You need to make space for yourself, physically and mentally - working across everything from production to creative direction to strategy and distribution means you regularly face decision fatigue. It’s so important to give yourself space to breathe, and if you have a close team of people you trust, it makes the whole journey worth it.

Angel: You have worked really hard to create an aesthetic that is very unique, and putting a specific emphasis on packaging. What is your process in developing a new product, where does your inspiration come from?

Isamaya Ffrench: It starts with the concept of the collection. An idea, a sentiment, a reference to a subculture. They all inform the sort of theme I want to work on, and everything stems from there - the choice of products, the packaging, the makeup looks, the campaign storytelling… My attention to detail simply comes from the fact that I love beautiful objects and design. I’d find it sad to work on off-shelf packagings that get discarded as soon as product runs out. It’s also important to me from a sustainability point of view.

Angel: The beauty industry is heavily influenced by trends, and what becomes viral nowadays. How does one navigate being current, whilst being long-lasting in the business?

Isamaya Ffrench: I suppose it all comes down to being true to yourself… People can feel that subconsciously, it’s what they are inspired by. I keep an eye on what the kids are doing but really, there’s no point sticking to something that’s not relevant anymore. Trends are about newness, so it’s important not to recreate anything that exists already. I believe there’s a balance between those two aspects. As soon as you start doing things to fit into trends or to target a specific audience for commercial reasons without any authenticity, you’re doomed.

Angel: What is your favourite experience with Isamaya Beauty so far? What are you most proud of?

Isamaya Ffrench: Seeing the audience’s response to products and concepts we were told not to pursue because they were deemed too risky. That was the whole point of doing Isamaya Beauty, proving you can do things differently.

Angel: Looking forward to the future, what are you excited about both personally and professionally?

Isamaya Ffrench: I’d love to keep focusing on the pure artistic core of this job and let other people figure out how to make it work commercially with as little compromise as possible - I’m also working on a beauty documentary, investigating where our beauty ideals come from and where they are going…