Isamaya Ffrench’s latest venture: make-up you can eat

Pharmacy or restaurant? East London dining institution Bistrotheque and make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench confused guests (including FKA twigs and Claire Barrow) at a six-course sensory dining experience last week to serve up Ffrench Pharmaceuticals, a range of culinary cosmetics. Blurring the lines between beauty, fashion and food, Ffrench combined her five-year stint as a chef with her pioneering make-up artistry to serve surreal dishes, which to be honest, didn’t at first sight appear entirely edible…

The night featured a squad of peroxide blonde waiters in stark white lab coats, surgical face masks and latex gloves serving dishes clinically packaged in syringes, science beakers and jars. Star courses included a starter ‘Layered Collagen BBLT’, a colourful stripey layered jelly starter of beetroot, bacon, lettuce and tomato in a glass jar and eaten with a small cosmetic spatula as well as the ‘Pressed Parfait Compact’, a rich parfait that resembled a blush.

It’s not the first time the Dazed 100 star and YSL Beaute UK ambassador has pushed her surrealist take on fashion’s minimalistic conventions, of course. The British artist playfully uses the unexpected potential of make-up as a medium to create bold and imaginative beauty looks, from lego-bricks stuck on faces to Sellotaped pouts.

See images from the night in the gallery above.