Niharika Chandrasekar
@indiepeacock (New York, New York)
For Niharika Chandrasekar, makeup is a form of play.
A longtime fashion lover, Chandrasekar turned to beauty when pandemic lockdowns suppressed her creative outlet of choice. Since then, she has cultivated a knack for finding artistic inspiration in just about anything — from her growing collection of lego flower sets to the orange-and-red gradient of her favorite Ferragamo bag.
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“When I do my makeup, I’m basically tapping into my inner child,” said Chandrasekar, who spends anywhere from two hours to half a day creating a look. “I’m someone that loves to just do what hasn’t been done before.”
Among her most intricate creations are an eye shadow look inspired by the floral patterns and rectangular forms of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss painting, and an “evil eye” brow look, for which she faux-bleached her brows and covered them with a chain of interlocking evil eye symbols, believed in many cultures to ward off evil forces.
“I always get excited to show off a look — I’m someone who literally used to walk around high school wearing 5-inch heels,” recalled Chandrasekar with a laugh, adding that her fantastical makeup looks, too, are anything but homebound.
Betty Tran
@bettytraan (Portland, Oregon)
Though she grew up as a self-described tomboy, Betty Tran was always entranced by the world of makeup.
“My older sister was in high school during the Y2K era, so when I was in elementary school I would always sit back and watch her do her makeup, and I just fell in love with it,” said Tran.
Naturally, she began routinely raiding her sister’s makeup collection. It was in the late 2010s, though, that a string of album releases by her favorite musical artists — including Mac Miller’s “The Divine Feminine” and Summer Walker’s “Over It” — impelled Tran to become more experimental with her makeup looks.
“My two loves at the time were makeup and music, especially hip-hop music, so I started creating makeup looks based on album covers,” said Tran, adding that one of her first posts to go viral was an eye shadow look inspired by the cover art of Tyler the Creator’s “Flower Boy.”
She also relishes holidays like Halloween and Lunar New Year as opportunities to forge new techniques and play with color, once elaborately painting a red and gold paper lantern unto her face to commemorate the latter occasion.
“I see makeup as a blank canvas; I have a lot of interests that I’m not particularly good at, where makeup I can always properly express myself through, so I kind of take all my other interests and communicate them through this,” said Tran.
Chime Dolker
@_chimedolker (Portland, Oregon)
“Editorial avant-garde” is how Chime Dolker describes her artistic style, and a swipe through her Instagram page just about confirms as much.
Sharp graphic eyeliner, technicolor eye shadow and glazed skin are among her hallmarks — but don’t get it twisted: No two looks are the same.
“I grew up in the YouTube era of beauty — I was watching Desi Perkins and these other amazing influencers who sparked my creativity and made me want to play with makeup,” said Dolker, who describes her day-to-day makeup as relatively minimalist, though her social media creations are anything but.
“Most of the times that I sit down to create, I don’t know what I’m going to be doing — that’s probably the most fun part, is seeing what I come up with as I go,” she said.
In a nod to her heritage, Dolker once painted the outline of Tibet across the center of her face, blending the blue, red and yellow of the Tibetan flag together in a gradient — another of Dolker’s stylistic signatures.
“I get a lot of design ideas from my Tibetan culture; symbolically, we just have a lot of different shapes and designs, and Tibetan artwork itself is just this totally unique genre,” said Dolker.
Julie Thomas
@j0ules (Chicago, Illinois)
Julie Thomas can’t fathom confining her art solely to her lips or eyelids.
“I just go crazy on my face — there are no rules,” said Thomas, who has drawn starry nights on her cheeks, extends her graphic eyeliner to her temples, and has even taken dried hot glue to the face in the name of art.
“You learn to trust the process — usually when you’re midway through, it looks scary, but you just have to keep going,” said Thomas, whose passion for beauty was ignited when she came across a Taylor Swift-inspired makeup tutorial in 2008.
“[That video] sparked an idea in me, because I realized you can literally recreate anything you want,” said Thomas. And since then, she has done exactly that, using makeup to morph into a mime, a nymph and even the robot motherboard from PBS Kids’ animated series, “Cyberchase,” to name a few of her creations.
She has also found creative ways to display her Indian heritage, often topping off her looks with an embellished bindi.
“My culture plays a huge part in my makeup; I’m Indian, and we love color, so I like to incorporate color into all my looks. Indian culture has a lot of glam and bling, like bindis and jewelry, so I love to incorporate that into my makeup,” she said.
Renee X
@hydroniuum (New York, New York)
Renee X’s artistry spans many mediums.
A lover of sewing, drawing and, most recently, makeup, her crafts have in common that in each, she is committed to showcasing her talent without ever taking herself too seriously.
“It’s this idea of having an absurd presence, but at the same time a skillful and real effortful execution,” said Renee of her design ethos. “I’ve always been an artist, and I wanted to bring my humor into a different sort of medium.”
She forayed into makeup during quarantine through a series of gaming- and meme-inspired looks, and though her inspiration was often lighthearted (video games like Minecraft and Genshin Impact sparked her earliest ideas), her delivery was nothing short of meticulous.
“There’s a geometry to it, a math and calligraphy, and a structure. Sometimes I’ll even bring out my 6-inch ruler to line things up,” said Renee, whose otherworldly looks feature two-toned lips, unconventional eyeliner shapes and, always, wavy eyebrows that sweep upward at the tail.
“I’ve since moved away from the meme inspired looks, but keeping that humor, that mischievousness in my art — that’s important to me,” she said.