By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
French 3D artist and digital makeup pioneer Ines Alpha has built a new kind of beauty, one thaxs exists only on screen yet feels surprisingly tangible. Over the past three years at Prada Beauty as the brand’s first Global Creative E‑Makeup Artist, she has translated pigments into pixels, building a visual language where the face is not a surface to perfect but a surface to expand.
Her work carries a beauty that defies the physical world. It floats, gleams, and resists gravity, and sometimes even anatomy. Textures drift like liquid metal. Digital eyeshadows bloom like living organisms. They hover between adornment and apparition. Alpha calls it an expansion of the human form rather than makeup or mask.
“I don’t think of it as ignoring anatomy,” she says. “It’s more about expanding it. The face becomes a launchpad for new materials: liquids that float, metals that shimmer weightlessly, pigments that refuse gravity. Digital tools give me permission to sculpt beyond what’s physically doable. A shape that would feel heavy or painful in reality can drift and breathe as a second skin. I’m always looking for that friction point, something that couldn’t exist here, on Earth.”
The Face as Anchor
Alpha’s work is often described as Face Architecture, suggesting the face as scaffolding for digital construction. Yet she is clear, the person underneath is never secondary.
“The human is always the anchor. My digital work begins with the person, their emotions, their style, their personality. The 3D adornment is an echo of that. I think of it not only as decoration but also amplification: technology as a collaborator that helps people project what’s inside, the moods and energies you can’t usually capture. It’s not about hiding behind technology, but revealing more of yourself through it. I want people to feel empowered, to be subjects, not objects.”
Technology, she says, does not obscure identity. It amplifies it. Her pieces function less as decoration than projection, translating internal moods into visible form. The goal is not to become something else, but to reveal what is already there.
Joyful Weirdness Versus Polished Perfection
At the Virtual Beauty exhibition at Somerset House in 2025 (featured image; ‘I’d rather be a cyborg‘ photographed by Li Roda-Gil), Alpha’s textures appeared almost marine, porous, biomorphic, and intentionally exaggerated.
“AI can definitely mimic organic sea life materials, but it does tend to polish everything, which can be fascinating too! I like when my textures look too glossy, too synthetic, too fake. There’s beauty in that hyper-clean surface, because it becomes completely unreal. AI often tries to make everything more realistic unless you push it in the opposite direction. And yet, it mostly generates perfected humans by default—people without texture, without difference, without accident. This kind of beauty is very boring to me, and also I don’t want to risk borrowing someone else’s identity. That’s why I trained an AI on my own face, to reclaim power and control over my own appearance, but also because it’s very convenient to be your own guinea pig.”
My work isn’t necessarily about sabotaging AI beauty or just beauty standards in general, but offering something else. A space where beauty means play, curiosity, and joyful weirdness instead of algorithmic polish. I mean real play: taking risks, being too much, being ugly, bizarre, unique, unapologetically yourself. Isn’t that the most human thing?”
Looking Other, Not Better
Conventional beauty filters standardise. Alpha’s e-makeup does the opposite: eccentric, otherworldly, and sometimes deliberately strange.
“Beauty filters tend to standardise faces into one global template: smaller jaw, bigger eyes, smooth everything. My e-makeup takes the opposite route. It celebrates singularity. It’s otherworldly, eccentric, sometimes just plain strange. Maybe in another timeline it becomes its own form of conformity, who knows! But right now it’s a playground for people who want to look other, not better.“
Sometimes you want to fit in, other times you want to fit in nothing. That’s what radical self-expression means to me: expanding what’s acceptable, not perfecting what already fits the mold. Standardisation kills emotion. So let’s use digital tools to transform, not to conform.”
De-Materialised Luxury
In her collaboration with Studio Halia, Alpha introduces a phygital approach. A physical face jewel unlocks a corresponding digital adornment. In a world where digital assets can be copied endlessly, she reframes rarity as intimacy.
“In the Halia project, the physical and digital are connected by code. The facewear piece literally unlocks its digital extension, but also by emotion—that strange feeling that something recognises you and belongs to you alone. That uniqueness, that impossibility of replication, is what brings back a sense of rarity.”
Luxury isn’t just scarcity; it’s intimacy. In a world of infinite copies, maybe true luxury is when something, even a data file, feels like it belongs only to you.”
The uniqueness is affective as well as technical. An object recognises its wearer. It exists in relation, not mass circulation. It echoes haute couture: not just scarcity, but singular belonging.
Digital Couture with Emotional Weight
Her work for Prada Beauty demonstrates how digital pieces can deliver the same emotional weight as hand-stitched couture.
For me, couture is about time. The patience, the care, the craft. And emotion. The intention, the story, the connection. A digital piece can carry that same intimacy when it’s built with purpose.”
“It’s about creation more than material. From the person’s perspective, whether it’s digital or tangible, the question is always: does it move me? But when automation removes that time and touch, when an AI assembles an image in seconds from other people’s labor, you can lose something human. What moves me is when you can feel that someone truly got lost in their process, whether it’s thread or pixels.”
“That’s where luxury lives,” she says. “In the evidence that a soul was there.”
