Icon is a conceptual makeup look developed for a Master’s-level module in Beauty Technologies & Corporeal Sensations. The work explores the relationship between human identity and the natural world, using makeup as a site of experimentation where the boundaries between body, nature, and design begin to blur.

The brief invited students to investigate how beauty practices might evolve when influenced by environmental systems, biological processes, and non-human forms of intelligence. In response, this look examines what happens when the human face is treated not as a fixed or purely human surface, but as something that can be altered, adapted, and reshaped through visual references to nature.

Through colour, texture, and placement, the makeup deliberately disrupts familiar ideas of beauty and individuality. The face becomes less expressive in a conventional sense and more symbolic—suggesting a body that is no longer separate from its environment, but entangled with it. Elements of the design reference organic forms, growth, and natural systems, positioning the human figure as part of a larger ecological structure rather than at its centre.

Rather than imitating nature literally, Icon abstracts natural qualities and translates them into makeup design. This creates a hybrid visual language that sits between the human and the non-human, where the face reads as something altered, ceremonial, and evolved. The work questions where the human ends and the natural begins, and how future beauty practices might reflect a shift toward coexistence, adaptation, and ecological awareness.

Icon presents makeup as more than surface decoration. It functions as a speculative tool, one that allows the body to become a site of dialogue between humanity and nature, inviting viewers to reconsider beauty as a relationship with the environment rather than a purely human construct.