So Beautiful You Can Eat It

Cosmetics brands have been borrowing from the food world for inspiration, creating consumer craving by naming products with food and dessert names. Most recently, Too Faced cosmetics added to their chocolate-scented eye shadows with a Peanut Butter and Jelly-scented palette.

But iD beauty director and Yves Saint Laurent beauty ambassador Isamaya Ffrench pushed the concept even further with a recent 6-course edibles cosmetics dinner she designed for friends at a French restaurant, which featured edible and potables in cosmetics cases, jars, bottles and even syringes.

The makeup-inspired dishes included white chocolate and strawberry gloss lipstick, “facial toner-tinis” that were really raspberry and mint vodka martinis, compacts filled with foie gras, and a crème brûlée face mask.

But this is not news to Ffrench, as any of her followers on Instagram will attest. She has images of crushed eyeshadow sprinkled on eyelids like powdered donuts, and in a short video, cuts the top off a lipstick with a knife and fork and with the lipstick chunk speared on the fork, applies the lipstick to her lips.

Combining the Pharmacy aesthetic that made British artist Damien Hirst famous with the theatrical makeup transformations bordering on horror of American artist Cindy Sherman, Ffrench uses makeup not only to enhance, but also to shock and push its boundaries, not only on the face, but in the packaging.

Food that looks like art. Perfume that smells like familiar objects. And cosmetics that smell, taste and even look like food. These are all examples of a trend we call Extrasensory, in which senses are combined and borrowed to create new ways of looking at our senses.