Last week we introduced the first cover stars of our inaugural issue of Dazed Beauty’s print magazine. All modern beauty icons in their own right, our cover stars represent different aspects of our launch theme: the future of beauty.
Travis Scott and Kate Moss were reimagined by digital artists Darío Alva and Travis Brothers as mythical hybrids – half creature, half machine – roaming a dystopian landscape. Slick Woods was transformed into a digital avatar by Rick Farin, while pandrogynous transgressive Genesis P-Orridge was captured at their last show by photographer Casper Sejersen.
Now we can reveal our final cover star – the face that launched a thousand lip kits: Kylie Jenner.
Kylie’s impact on the beauty industry and influence on our cultural aesthetic is undeniable. When Kylie first admitted to having lip fillers in 2015 there was a 70% rise in enquiries for lip filler within 24 hours, and Kylie went on to turn the intense public fascination with her lips into a near billion dollar global cosmetics company. Today, her power as a beauty influencer is marked by being one of the top ten most followed people on Instagram, and the highest paid woman in the Forbes 100.
The ultimate symbol of our contemporary beauty culture, we paired Kylie with the future of beauty technology: an AI system that can create beauty imagery without the help of a human. The system, named Beauty_GAN, analysed 17,000 images from Instagram and used them to teach itself what we, as a society, consider beautiful. It then generates imagery it thinks looks like a beauty selfie or portrait.
For our cover, we asked Beauty_GAN to create bespoke hair and make-up looks for Kylie, and applied these to Daniel Sannwald's photos of her. “Who else could do it? You need someone like Kylie, who stands for contemporary beauty photography,” says Lukas Rudig, part of the team behind Beauty_GAN. “It’s a collaboration: what the machine does to her is paint her face in the way it thinks it should be in a beauty selfie."
Read more about how Beauty_GAN works and see the full shoot here. A list of stockists for Dazed Beauty can be found here, along with a pre-order link.
