film stills leave the screen and become elaborate makeup compositions

Emerald Vysions turns the face into a cinematic stage 

For Toronto-based makeup artist Emerald Vysions, the face becomes a small-scale stage for images, emotions, and cinematic memories. Working on her own face, the artist reinterprets film stills through saturated pigments, graphic lines, metallic textures, rhinestones, feathers, and highly constructed lashes. Vysions extracts the visual language of movie scenes and compresses it into eye looks that can be read in a single glance.

A film normally exists at a distance, projected onto a screen, framed by a rectangle, and experienced through the collective act of watching. Emerald Vysions relocates fragments of that spectacle onto the body. The screen becomes the eyelid; production design becomes color and texture; costume can become an arrangement of rhinestones or an exaggerated lash. 

Pierrot le Fou (1965) | all images by Emerald Vysions

from screen to skin

Cinema is one of the starting points for Emerald Vysions, but her makeup does not try to reproduce a film scene exactly. The artist picks apart what makes an image stick: a particular color combination, a costume detail, the shape of a gesture, or the mood of a scene. These elements reappear across the face as pigment, crystals, unusual lashes, painted shapes and other small details.

Seen alongside the film stills that inspire them, the difference in scale is striking. A whole scene, its actors, costumes, interiors and lighting, is reduced to the area around the eyes. 

One example draws on the rich reds and feathers of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), translating the excess of the original scene into red pigment, jewels and pale feathered lashes. Other looks pick up on the strong blues, yellows, greens and pinks of their respective references. Vysions seems to pull individual details out of the scenes and give those details a new life.

Vysions’ work lives in the gap between the original image and what she does with it. The film still gives her a starting point, but the makeup does not always follow it literally. A color might become more intense, a detail might be enlarged, or something almost incidental in the original scene can become the focus of the makeup, resulting in something familiar without being immediately legible. You recognize the mood before you recognize the reference.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)⁣⁣⁣

Midsommar (2019)⁣⁣⁣

Daisies (1966)⁣⁣⁣

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)⁣⁣

Fleabag (2016)⁣⁣⁣

Mirror (1975)⁣⁣⁣

Funny Girl (1968)⁣⁣⁣

Ratched (2020)⁣⁣⁣

Grey Gardens (1975) ⁣⁣⁣

Suspiria (1977)⁣⁣⁣

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)⁣⁣⁣

Uncle Yanco (1967)⁣⁣⁣

Mulholland Drive (2001)⁣⁣⁣

Rest Energy (1980)⁣⁣⁣

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)⁣⁣⁣

Vertigo (1958)⁣⁣⁣

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)⁣⁣⁣

project info:

artist: Emerald Vysions | @emerald___vysions

This article is part of designboom’s SPECTATOR AND SPECTACLE chapter, asking how wonder gets built, and how it might return some mystery to a world that has measured most of it away. Discover more stories that turn onlookers into participants, alter perception and disrupt the everyday here.