Isamaya Ffrench’s Debut Make-Up Collection Is Here

There’s a translucent mulberry gloss in Isamaya Ffrench’s make-up line that clouds the lips in shape-enhancing shadows. “It looks great on guys and girls,” she says, summing up a genderless approach to beauty instinctive to her generation. Launching at the end of June, the 33-year-old make-up artist’s first cosmetics collection embodies a nonconformist understanding of “glam” – as Hollywood calls it – which couldn’t be further from the traditions tied to that term. “This isn’t another off-the-shelf competitive red lip,” as Ffrench puts it. “There are people out there who don’t just want ‘glamorous and pretty’, but something more edgy and exciting. I want my brand to talk to those people. Something honest and uninhibited – that’s how I see it.”

As global beauty director of Burberry Beauty and recognised as one of the most directional make-up artists of her peers, Ffrench ranks among the chief influential voices in fashion. Over the past 10 years – while still in her twenties – she has co-developed cosmetics lines for Tom Ford and Byredo, and created some of the most arresting looks of the decade, epitomised by Rihanna’s pencil-browed cover of British Vogue for September 2018. “She is a real visionary,” says editor-in-chief and European editorial director Edward Enninful. As part of a generation devoted to diversity and self-expression, Ffrench’s graphic, subversive and even menacing face art has challenged the conventions of beauty. “Make-up was always meant to make you transform temporarily before you washed it off. I want this make-up to be weapons for truth. I want people to feel like they can be themselves or they can join something or try something,” she says.

From the inside out, this first drop from her eponymous Isamaya line is the physical embodiment of those values. An eyeshadow palette of “industrial” colours in putty textures – moody, inky shades interrupted by hazardous bright green and orange – is encased in a black compact with a ghostly torso pressed through its lid. It evokes the grammar of bondage similarly conveyed in the cap of the Rubberlash mascara – which has an instant stretch effect – impaled by a hard metal piercing. Ffrench has developed a pomade that completely laminates the eyebrow for a naked effect, over which foundation can be applied and new eyebrows pencilled in. A capsule collection for now, subsequent drops are expected to follow, with the brand focusing on working towards sustainability as a key goal. The transformative aspects of the collection are core to Ffrench’s attraction to cosmetics.

She spent her teenage years in Cambridge obsessing over the late make-up pioneer Kevyn Aucoin’s radical book Making Faces from 1994. “When I work with Cher, she always tells me about how big his hands were, and how he could just put these fake lashes on using his fingers,” she says, referring to one in a celebrity clientele that also includes Madonna. “It’s often a little bit of a lesson for me working with them. Cher and Madonna, they probably know more than you do – about everything.” New-gen regulars count models Bella Hadid (“She’s perfection, isn’t she?”) and Aweng Ade-Chuol (“She’s so incredibly beautiful”), but no one has impacted Ffrench’s career more than her creative collaborators.

One is her boss at Burberry, Riccardo Tisci, whose minimal-maximal approach to make-up has taught her the “fresher” beauty of an un-contoured face. “Isamaya has such authentic creativity. She isn’t afraid to push boundaries and does so with such a youthful, modern lens. For me, it’s this attitude that works so well with my vision and identity at Burberry,” Tisci says.

She credits photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott with her fashion upbringing: “It feels like you’re learning something new when you work with them, which you can’t say about everybody else.” Vivienne Westwood, Ffrench says, “can sit on the podium with Cher and Madonna”. And Junya Watanabe is a dream client: “Often, I’m not allowed to see the collection while I’m coming up with ideas. He’ll send me words and inspiration. It’s all about solving a riddle.” When it came to shooting the first campaign (and Vogue’s own shoot, for which she did her own make-up) for her line, she knew the photographer had to be Steven Klein. “There’s a dark quality to his way of seeing things that I think we share. It’s just perfect in my eyes, the thing that we’ve created.”