When Makeup Becomes Art: Reclaiming the Face as Canvas
How artists are using makeup as a material of protest, performance, and personal power.
Once dismissed as superficial, frivolous, or “strictly feminine,” makeup is now stepping boldly into the realm of contemporary art. Beyond the runways and red carpets, cosmetics are finding new life in galleries, museums, and performance spaces. This is not as accessories to beauty, but instead as materials of resistance and radicalism.
Across the world, artists are reclaiming beauty products as powerful tools of transformation, confrontation, and critique. The result is an ongoing redefinition of what makeup can be – not a mask, but a medium.
Makeup as a Medium:
For some artists, makeup becomes the art. This is more literal even than the beauty created by makeup artists: the pigment, texture, and scent of cosmetics become the material language of their work.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, a French multidisciplinary artist, uses lipstick, foundation, and bronzer to paint both her body and the walls of gallery spaces. Her performances often blur the line between ritual and rebellion – the intimate act of putting on makeup becomes something public, even political. Her body, smeared in red and beige, moves like a brushstroke across sterile white cubes, confronting the viewer with questions about race, visibility, and authorship. In Reynaud-Dewar’s work, makeup becomes an unstable force: simultaneously seductive and disruptive.
Nandipha Mntambo, a South African sculptor, takes the politics of beauty a step further. She works with cowhide and hair relaxer – the latter a loaded product tied to histories of colonial beauty standards and racial trauma. By applying relaxer to raw cowhide, Mntambo reshapes the material, warping its texture and form. The resulting sculptures feel both ancient and futuristic, both bodily and abstract. Her work challenges not just femininity, but how bodies – especially Black, female bodies – are seen, shaped, and sometimes erased.
In both cases, beauty products lose their conventional glamour and become something else entirely: messy, visceral, and strangely intimate. These aren’t cosmetics for enhancement; they are pigments of politicism.
The Art of Transformation:
Other artists are drawn not to the products themselves, but to what they represent: the power to transform, to invent, to perform.
Cindy Sherman stands at the forefront of this tradition. Over four decades, she has used makeup, wigs, and prosthetics to construct a gallery of fictional selves – from bored housewives and forlorn clowns to aging celebrities and office workers. Her images are not about vanity, but illusion. Sherman doesn’t just wear makeup – she disappears into it. In doing so, she exposes the fragile scaffolding of identity and gender. If femininity can be painted on, she asks, is it ever real at all? And who gets to define it?
The stakes of that question rise even higher in queer and drag performance art. For many drag artists, putting on makeup is a daily act of defiance – a joyful, theatrical form of self-creation. The transformation is often extreme and deliberate, using makeup to transcend binaries and expectations. In this space, cosmetics are not mere tools – they are talismans of power, courage, and imagination.
For example, the work of performers like Travis Alabanza, whose makeup-heavy performances explore the intersection of Blackness, trans identity, and public visibility. Or Victoria Sin, a drag artist whose performances collapse the boundaries between beauty tutorial, philosophical lecture, and intimate confession. In these cases, makeup becomes both armour and mirror – a way to build the self, and to reflect the world back, refracted.
In a world increasingly concerned with appearance – filtered, curated, hyper-visible – makeup art dares to complicate the picture. It invites us to ask not how we look, but why we look at all. It reminds us that the face, too, is a canvas, and every contour, every smudge, every line, can speak volumes.
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