Getting your face painted at a birthday party is a core memory that remains from many people’s childhoods – a better time, perhaps, when you could leave your worries behind and run around as a lion, a witch, or a tropical sunset. Carlijn Jacobs is no different.

Jacobs’ new book Making Faces “began with a childhood memory,” she says. “Growing up in the Netherlands, I often went to a pancake house where children could have their faces painted. I was fascinated by it, I could be someone else, a transformation, I felt beautiful and free.”

It’s easy to see how this might have inspired the Dutch photographer’s obsession with beauty, artifice, and disguise, and informed the more surrealist slant to her work. But Making Faces draws the link out more explicitly. Facepainted by Yvonne Zonneberg, the limited-edition book turns the camera toward children with painted faces (or in the process of being painted), building out their temporary disguises into full-blown identities via costumes styled by Robbie Spencer.

“That early attraction to ‘grime’ and face paint stayed with me,” Jacobs adds. “Years later, it became the starting point for this project. Through photographing children with expressive, playful makeup, I wanted to return to that feeling of freedom when transformation was simply an escape.”

“The makeup in this book is not about beauty,” she clarifies. “It is about imagination, experimentation and the innocence of becoming something else, even if only for a moment.” With fashion and beauty always pushing toward perfection, this definitely seems like something worth remembering for the adults in the room as well.

Making Faces will launch at Nuovo, Paris, on May 7 from 7pm to 10pm. The book is edited and designed by Christopher Simmonds Ltd, styled by Robbie Spencer and facepainted by Yvonne Zonneberg. Hair by Olivier Schawalder and casted by Julia Lange.