From magazine pages to TikTok: an ode to the ever-changing beauty tutorial

From celebrities opening up about their beauty secrets, to YouTube ‘beauty gurus’, and quick-fix TikTok make-up hacks – the beauty tutorial seems to have taken the internet by storm. “We scroll, we eat it, we get stuck on it, and we stick around until the end, fascinated,” notes photographer Lorenzo Païno Fernandez and make-up artist Lisa Michalik. Together, the two creatives reflected on a time before beauty tutorials belonged to the digital age – referring back to glossy magazine pages from the 70s and 80s.

From there, Fernandez and Michalik decided to combine old and new, creating their photo story: The Beauty Tutorial. “It was while finding my old magazines that the idea came up. Why not create our beauty tutorial pages mixing old and new?” says Fernandez. “Nowadays we are bombarded by beauty tutorials every minute on social networks (where) the only format is video. We wanted to enhance the format by making it a series.”

The result – created in collaboration with casting director Marie Lévy, and graphic designer Cassandre Esteve – a series of striking portraits, all documenting the before and afters of six models’ beauty transformations. Anna wears subversive blue winged liner, Daniel matches his lip colour to his grillz, Honest pairs her green lip gloss with rosy blush, Otalia wears a dark ombrè lip, Tavi dons glossy eyes, and Hyunjong traces black liner around red coloured contacts. Topping off the looks, models wear futuristic hairstyles crafted by Quentin Lafforgue.

While each look utilises modern beauty techniques, they also have their own vintage-feel magazine page – circling back to the beauty tutorial’s roots and documenting each step of their beauty look so that people can recreate the looks from home. 

“We wanted to do something new with something old, the process was to mix our mutual knowledge and aesthetics of beauty and replace them by the old ones,” says Fernandez. “It’s a confrontation between two different centuries.”

On top of recreating the looks, Michalik hopes the story might inspire young people to look back at more classic beauty tutorials. “The story reminds me of all the time I spent reading and rereading my old beauty tutorials from old magazines. That time when it was a treasure now it's everywhere on social networks,” she said. “They are very inspiring.”

Photography LORENZO PAÏNO FERNANDEZ @saint_germain_agency, make-up LISA MICHALIK @saint_germain_agency, make-up assistant CHLOE DEMOUSSIS, hair QUENTIN LAFFORGUE, casting MARIE LÉVY, graphic design CASSANDRE ESTEVE, models TAVI @imgmodels, ANNA @premium_models, HYUNJONG YOU @bananasmodels, HONEST @metropolitanmodelsgroup, OTALIA @women_paris, DANIEL @rockmenmodels