Wearing makeup has long been seen as an act of defiance, from teenagers to New Romantics. Now that defiance has taken on a harder edge, as growing numbers of people use it to try to trick facial recognition systems.

Interest in so-called dazzle camouflage appears to have grown substantially since the Metropolitan police announced last week that officers will be using live facial recognition cameras on London’s streets – a move described by privacy campaigners and political activists as “dangerous”, “oppressive” and “a huge threat to human rights”.

Unlike fingerprinting and DNA testing, there are few restrictions on how police can use the new technology. And some of those who are concerned have decided to assert their right not to be put under surveillance with the perhaps unlikely weapon of makeup. Members of the Dazzle Club have been conducting silent walks through London while wearing asymmetric makeup in patterns intended to prevent their faces from being matched on any database.

“There was this extraordinary experience of hiding in plain sight,” said Anna Hart, of Air, a not-for-profit art group, who founded the club with fellow artists Georgina Rowlands and Emily Roderick.

“We made ourselves so visible in order to hide. The companies selling this tech talk about preventing crime. There is no evidence this prevents crime. It might be sometimes used when crime has been committed, but they push the idea that this will make us safer, that we will feel safer.”

Facial recognition works by mapping facial features – mainly the eyes, nose and chin – by identifying light and dark areas, then calculating the distance between them. That unique facial fingerprint is then matched with others on a database.

Makeup attempts to disrupt this by putting dark and light colours in unexpected places, either to confuse the technology into mapping the wrong parts of the face or concluding there is no face to map.

The concept was created by an artist, Adam Harvey, who coined the term “computer vision dazzle”, or “cv dazzle”, to mean a modern version of the camouflage used by the Royal Navy during the first world war.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Design student Jing-cai Liu has created a wearable face projector to counter surveillance cameras. Photograph: Jing-cai Liu

Many other artists, designers and technologists have been inspired by his attempts to hide without covering the face. Jing-cai Liu, a design student, created a wearable face projector, while Dutch artist Jip van Leeuwenstein made a clear plastic mask that creates the illusion of ridges along the face.

Others have used hats and T-shirts with patterns that are designed to trick cameras into not recognising part of an image as a human at all. Researchers at the University of KU Leuven in Belgium managed to avoid recognition by holding a large photograph of a group of people. Yet few people used these countermeasures on any regular basis until the Dazzle Club began last year as a response to the installation, later scrapped, of technology at King’s Cross, London.

“It was very annoying and made us quite angry. There are a lot of issues with bias,” Roderick said, referring to research that showed black people were more likely to be misidentified.

The group meets once a month to walk through different parts of London and it has been inundated with inquiries over the last few days.

“It would be interesting to wear it day to day and for it not to be too outrageous, for it to be more commonplace,” Roderick said. “But the speed that facial recognition algorithms learn means that you can’t find one design and use it for the rest of your life. At some point, it will learn that you are a face with cv dazzle. It’s a classic arms race.”

Harvey, an American artist based in Berlin, has been investigating surveillance technology since creating cv dazzle in 2011. He told the Observer that dazzle was a technique rather than a pattern. “It has to be a meandering, evolving strategy,” he said. “The lifespan of any strategy seems to be… I don’t know for sure, but one, two maybe three years.”

While makeup presents a challenge to facial recognition, it can still be beaten by other technologies, said Dr Sasan Mahmoodi, a lecturer in computer vision at the University of Southampton. “They cannot do makeup on their ears,” Mahmoodi said. “It’s difficult to change your ear, although you can hide it with a hat or hair. There is also gait recognition – people have distinctive walking patterns. If you know where the camera is you can walk differently, but if you’re not aware of where it is you cannot hide your gait.”

Harvey is sceptical about gait recognition but has other concerns about infrared, thermal and polarimetric techniques which measure heat and the polarisation qualities of skin.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amanda Dave of Dazzle Club. Photograph: Cocoa Laney/The Observer

“Giving too much power to the police or any security agency provides the conditions for authoritarian abuse. It’s like pollution – there’s a cost which we are ignoring. Hopefully this provides an alert to people that it’s so easy – you can turn on the system in one day, and the cost is so low, that there aren’t any built in frictions that discourage people from using it.”

Laurie Smith, a principal researcher at Nesta, the innovation charity, said there was a need for regulatory systems to be smarter: to anticipate technologies rather than react to them.

The Met faces challenges to its facial recognition plans. Big Brother Watch is bringing a crowdfunded legal challenge against it and the home secretary, according to Griff Ferris, the organisation’s legal officer.

“Live facial recognition is a mass surveillance tool which scans thousands of innocent people in a public space, subjecting them to a biometric identity check, much like taking a fingerprint. People in the UK are being scanned, misidentified and wrongly stopped by police as a result.

“We’ve seen activists in Hong Kong fighting oppressive surveillance using masks, umbrellas and laser pointers. When we protested the police’s use of facial recognition surveillance at a football match recently, many of the fans arrived wearing masks to protect themselves.

“Our rights should really be protected by parliament and the courts, but if they fail us on facial recognition people will have to protect themselves in these ways.”