PHOTO SHOOT + ARTICLE
Hyperspeed
By Leah Vermeulen
Models
Soliel Faraday, JazNina Brown, Adriano Rivera, Amanda Velez Rivera, Myung Yoo
Stylists
Samuel Mushailov, Bebe Smith
Directors
Elijah Allen, Bebe Smith
Photographer
Giacomo Silvestri
Hyperspeed
The Role of Makeup in Identity and Self-Perception
I bleached my eyebrows once. Not for any particular reason — mostly curiosity, partly boredom, a little bit of that reckless energy that comes with wanting to see a different version of yourself in the mirror. When I looked at my reflection afterward, I didn't recognize myself. Not in a dramatic, existential way. More like the way you don't recognize your own voice on a recording. The features were all the same, but something essential had shifted.
That's the power of a small change to the face. It recalibrates everything — how you see yourself, how others see you, how you move through the world. A different lip color, a sharper brow, a bold eye — these aren't just aesthetic choices. They're identity choices. Each one sends a signal, and the world receives it whether you intended the message or not.
Makeup exists in a strange space not everyone can understand — that limbo between wanting and needing to. For many women, it's both pleasure and obligation, art and armor. There's genuine joy in the ritual — the brushes, the palettes, the transformation. But there's also the quiet understanding that the world treats you differently depending on how much effort your face appears to have received.
The cost is real too. I once calculated my annual spending on beauty products — over $1,500. That's rent. That's a plane ticket. That's money spent maintaining an appearance that society simultaneously demands and dismisses as vanity.
Here's the paradox: we're supposed to look effortlessly perfect. The "no-makeup makeup look" — that phrase alone tells you everything you need to know about the contradiction women navigate. You should look natural, but not too natural. You should look polished, but not like you tried. The goal is to appear as though you woke up this way, even though "this way" took forty-five minutes and twelve products.
And yet — there's artistry in it. Real artistry. The same skills that go into a painting go into a contour. The same color theory that informs a gallery installation informs an eyeshadow palette. Makeup artists are artists, full stop. The medium is the face, and the canvas is alive.
The relationship women have with makeup is not simple. It is necessity and art, obligation and expression, cost and reward. It is a strange, beautiful, exhausting negotiation with a world that will judge you either way — for wearing too much or not enough.
So we exist in that limbo. Between wanting and needing to. And we make it look effortless.
