As our identities become increasingly enmeshed with digital worlds, it’s easy to feel split between who we are online and who we are IRL. It’s a reckoning that’s led us to view our real-life selves as avatars we can upgrade, customise and deck out into new forms. One medium that has been expressing those ideas is the world of SFX and body art. Once more firmly rooted in film and TV, we’re now seeing SFX mutate its way onto runway shows, fashion campaigns and music videos, where distorted, contorting and varied takes on the human form are becoming increasingly popular.

Some of this work channels anxiety: a fear of technology infiltrating the body, of the human form itself becoming obsolete. iPhones embedded in gaping chests, headphones emerging from skin, plugged deep into veins – a commentary on a corporeal world consumed by the digital. Others lean into customisation, swapping material items like clothing for body-based upgrades. Airbrush artist Mia Violet creates IRL skins, spraying LV tracksuits, cybernetic armour, and torn flesh directly onto the body – like flicking through character options in a game lobby.

Through SFX, we’re seeing visions of the human form pushed to its limits. Where Catalina Sartor embeds shiny orbs into Michèle Lamy’s forehead, Jordan Glancy plants fleshy angel wings deep beneath the surface of skin, Echo Seireeni grows coarse horns from a head of hair, and Clers Bow buries glowing LEDs deep into heels. We gave you a list back in 2024, so here are five more artists raising the bar with their transformative creations.

ECHO SEIREENI

Echo Seireeni is a prosthetic and make-up artist creating a distinctly mythical SFX world. Treating prosthetics as extensions of the human form, her work has rendered Bladee ghostlike through airbrushed veins and gunmetal shadows, drenched VTSS in blood, and crowned Eartheater with horns. Seireeni’s signature warped style is unearthly, referential and theatrical – shaped by an upbringing in the creative sprawl of Los Angeles and now evolving as she brings her creations to the London scene.

JORDAN GLANCY

Jordan Glancy is a London-based make-up and prosthetics artist working in the tension between horror and beauty. While her creations include sparkly-tipped horns, gleaming, skin-set stars, and pastel-washed butterfly tramp stamps, their direct embedding in the body lends them an unsettling edge.

CATALINA SARTOR

Catalina Sartor is a Paris-based SFX and prosthetics artist who transforms skin into sculptural terrain: scale textures stretched across chests, shiny orbs embedded in flesh, skin-deep necklaces of beads bound around necks. She has shaped many of FKA twigs’ most iconic looks, and has worked with Arca, Caroline Polachek, Rosalía and Björk, among others.

CLERS BOW

Clers Bow is a Barcelona-based prosthetic and SFX artist whose work expands the possibilities of body, tech and identity. Lasers shoot from skin-fused bikinis, chest hair sprouts from sculpted vests, and prosthetic hands wrap around living bodies. Through these transformations, Bow elevates the human form, exploring how flesh can exceed its expected limits – a curiosity she’s pursued since first discovering prosthetics and orthotics.

MIA VIOLET

Mia Violet is a London-based airbrush artist whose designs inhabit a fantasy world she has been building for years. Her wardrobe of playful reimaginings of clothing using airbrush includes denim two-pieces, argyle-jester patterns, an armour suit for a Lueder runway, and even business casual sprayed onto skin. Beyond clothing, Violet’s work often leans fully into the surreal: with torn flesh, emerging gargoyle-like monsters, and cyborg-esque hybrid forms all painted onto the skin.