Ask Isamaya Ffrench how to achieve the perfect smoky eye, and her face will take on a glazed, if polite, blankness. As the most important makeup artist working in Britain today, she could certainly do it, she could certainly reel off tips on how to apply a matte lip or blend your bronzer, but within seconds of meeting her it is clear she would far prefer… not to. She would prefer, if it’s OK with me, to scrape all that away, and discuss what’s underneath. Things like: the evolution of beauty ideals, and beauty as a symbol of wealth, and the changing face of femininity. I am fine with this.

She arrives for coffee on a Saturday afternoon, having just dashed through London to buy a new suitcase. Her last one broke from overuse, as did the one before that – this is the downside of being extremely successful. She returned from Paris this morning and is flying to LA first thing tomorrow, because there is something Ffrench offers that no other makeup artist does, which is a sense of the uncanny. At 29, she has elasticised the idea of what a makeup artist is for, stretching the brief between prettifying tricks and gender politics – she’s less a makeup artist, perhaps, instead an artist who works with makeup.

As she takes off her cap and orders a coffee, I study her own face, which is sort of spectacular, even without the bleached eyebrows and gold shadow of a recent selfie. She has extremely blue, sulky eyes, broad brushed-up brows and wide lips that look bitten into a swollen pout; her hair is greyish violet. The effect is that of a computer game heroine who has tricked the matrix and escaped.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I feel so honoured to be alive in the time of the Kardashians’: Isamaya Ffrench puts the finishing touches on a model at a Vivienne Westwood show. Photograph: Hugo Yanguela

Her work is unmistakable, gorgeous and sometimes terrifying. She combines classic beauty looks with radical fantasy – at the recent spring 2020 shows she was busy, creating moments. She was responsible for spider-leg lashes at Olivier Theyskens, for wildflowers framing models’ faces at Giambattista Valli, and glittering black discs of eyeliner, like 50s sunglasses, at Halpern. Last September she worked with Nick Knight for British Vogue’s cover featuring Rihanna in a floral mane, black-red lips and razor-thin eyebrows. They were the subject of much debate. Good Morning Britain even went to the trouble of recreating the look. Ffrench does this, daily. She starts quiet conversations about what looks right, and how, and why – a flick of her pen and a celebrity appears in a different light. On her Instagram, she is her own model. Ffrench’s Cindy Sherman-like experimentation with prosthetics, masks and bleach sits alongside the pure glamour of Kendall Jenner gazing out of the frame as a silent movie star.

“I feel so honoured to be alive in the time of the Kardashians,” Ffrench says today, with genuine glee. “What an amazing spectacle and cultural phenomenon, don’t you think? I mean, if you can separate that from the growth of such an illness of narcissistic self-indulgence, that pathology.” She sips her decaff thoughtfully. “They’ve dominated ideas of what wealth looks like, they’ve presented themselves as status symbols. They’ve dictated what beauty is. So I think, of course, people want to emulate it.”

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Purr-fect: the ‘sexy tiger’ makeup that led to a shoot for i-D. Photograph: Charlotte Rutherford

This intersection of mainstream glamour and boundary-testing experimentation is what separates her from her peers and what led brands such as YSL, Tom Ford and Christian Louboutin to sign her as a collaborator. But she entered the industry through a side door.

Born in Cambridge, her ambitions and skills were various. She was a semi-professional diver at school and then, at 19, moved to London to take a place on MasterChef. “I was obsessed with food, still am. there’s a huge amount of creative energy, but you’re not creating anything lasting. It’s the same with makeup.” She pulled out of MasterChef at the last minute because she had a dance audition and went on to join the Theo Adams Company as a dancer.

She was studying industrial design at Central Saint Martins at the time, and doing face painting at kids’ parties for cash. And she found she was good at it, slightly too good – her butterflies looked as if they were going to fly away by the time the cake came out. “Just like makeup, kid’s face painting is about spacing things in a nicely aesthetic way and brushwork is as important as speed. When you’re doing a party of 30 kids you’ve got like seven minutes per face. So you’ve really got to bash them out.” It was excellent practice.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nail it: a Halpern model made up by Ffrench. Photograph: Jason Lloyd Evans

One weekend a friend asked her to make his girlfriend up as a “sexy tiger”, and the photos led to someone in her dance company recommending her for a shoot for i-D magazine. She was tasked with turning a group of boys into gods – which led to a new career painting a lot of penises, often gold. “I remember on one shoot, I was working with a professional makeup artist. And there was a moment where I was washing my huge brushes in the sink, and I saw her packing away her immaculate little kit, and I was like, ‘Well, that looks much easier…’” She adjusted her focus, moving away from “genital work”, upwards, to faces. Her early work drew on her cleverness with prosthetics, typically requiring her to “cover the model in glitter then make it look like they had a broken nose,” but along the way she taught herself the basics of colour, of “glow”, of makeup tricks. “Like, filling in eyebrows really helps with the structure of the face” and “There’s no such thing as ‘good skin’. To make it look balanced, it’s about learning colour correcting.” Much of what she knows, she chuckles, comes from one of makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin’s books that she pored over at the age of seven.

The first time her work appeared in a high-fashion magazine it was for a shoot where she turned an elegant model into a chameleon. Themes of metamorphosis continue to interest her. Last year she created a series of teeth mouldings for an exhibition that examined the future of fashion and body modification. But it was that shoot that led photographers and stylists to notice her, and see that they could trust her skills with an eyeliner, “And maybe that I wasn’t necessarily going to do anything too scary or mental.”

“Isamaya is a rising talent,” Christian Louboutin emails, “an artist with something to say and express. She is witty and serious, understated and dramatic, colourful and lively.” They’ve recently developed a makeup collection together: “Isamaya managed to create something still very close to my aesthetic, but twisted with her own contemporary and unconventional creative vocabulary.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What’s interesting now is the inclusion of gender fluidity’: Isamaya Ffrench in purple. Photograph: Joshua Wilks/The Observer

For somebody who still works with face paint and prosthetics, famous for their dark creativity, the association with mainstream beauty brands sometimes seems surprising. “Well, there’s an associative element that goes with it,” Ffrench explains. “Just aligning themselves with me says something about the brand and their philosophy, and what they’re trying to achieve. It doesn’t, as I’ve learned many times, mean I’m going to do any crazy shit with them, sadly.” A theatrical sigh.

“There’s always a hell of a lot of control over big brands – most of the time it’s three blokes in suits who are calling all the shots. So I’m learning that it’s quite unusual to ever be in a position of creative direction where you’re actually going to make huge changes, because it’s so well protected. And that’s what all those people in suits are there to do, to financially safeguard them. But fashion is helping shift that vision by, for instance, talking about inclusive beauty. So now brands are more open to working with casting more interesting faces, and freshening their image.” She smiles. “Things are definitely moving forward.”

Where does she see it moving to?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘An artist who works with makeup’: Isamaya Ffrench’s vision for a Giambattista Valli model. Photograph: Jason Lloyd-Evans

“Ooh,” she grins, leaning back for a brief lecture on the history of beauty. “Well, beauty is often associated with fertility and wealth. So, back in the Renaissance period, chunky women were considered very beautiful, because they were rich enough to eat and therefore have healthy kids, and then we fast-forward to the 90s when it was a status symbol to show you were rich enough not to eat – anorexia culture came into play. Thinness defined one’s wealth. And wealth also often means health as well. Then the Kardashians came along, and linked up beauty and the cosmetic industry, the idea that symmetry means ‘good genes’. It’s a psychological thing as much as a trend thing. And I think what’s interesting right now is the inclusion of gender fluidity. We’ve had ‘perfect’ feminine faces for a very long time, but now we have inclusivity in terms of racial diversity and also gender diversity. So that will also fundamentally change the way that we consider wealth and fertility. Right?”

Before I can answer she’s thinking about the future. “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!” Under the table I notice my knee bouncing, a new restlessness, and I am keen, suddenly, to return to subjects like, the best foundations for olive skin. The secret to natural makeup. The perfect red lip.

