Seeing the Unseen
There is the unseen somewhere between magic and reality, where the invisible world of science and nature meld. The mysteries in our universe are waiting for discovery, and one person is paying particular attention.
Lauren Bowker is a designer, material alchemist and the founder of THE UNSEEN beauty cosmetics.
Here’s an unseen, online-special exclusive excerpt of our interview with the material alchemist.
More of her magic is featured in Futuro Vol II.
Spectra, Photography by Aidan Zamiri, courtesy of Lauren Bowker
THE LAB MAG Can you tell us some of the things you've done, some of the boundaries you've broken with beauty products?
LAUREN BOWKER To be honest, and I say this lightly, it's not been that difficult in beauty because there has been no innovation in colour cosmetics, ever. The first one we did was a colour that we called spectra, which is a colour that exists physically, but can only be seen digitally. And that actually came out of an experience. I was at a gig and everyone was watching the performance through their phones. I'm a little bit past that generation, so I was like, well, why don't they just experience this beautiful singer on stage and feel it? And then I started to question myself and I thought, well, that's their reality. That's how these people are living.
There's a whole generation and more coming that have never experienced life without phones. So wouldn't it be fun if during that experience, we could have an artist on stage that looked one way, and then as you experience them through the phone, it looks totally different? And because I'm a physical person, I have to create something physical. I wanted to create a colour that the artist could wear that then could be seen very differently on the screen when a photo or a video was taken. So we launched that as a bit of a concept project.
And honestly, it's done so well. It won all of the Breakthrough Awards. Everyone was like, how have you invented this new colour in cosmetics? Everyone was calling it makeup for the metaverse, or Mr. Trick. It just was the right time for that one.
Sometimes my ideas come from watching a film, or from old school philosophy, or from being part of different communities here in London.
Colour alchemy, Photography by James Stopforth, courtesy of Lauren Bowker
LB There was a great film in the nineties called The Craft, which is about teenage witches, and one of them changes the colour of her hair. And one day I was at the pub and my friend said, it's basically you. Because when I'm in the lab, I'm not a very safe chemist, something changes in the environment and all of a sudden I've got a pink hand, you know? So it was the running joke in my friend group. My friend said that witch is basically you. And then I just thought, yeah, it's funny. I should make a concept of a girl's hair and bring something to it from a sci-fi reality. Why not? You can see it in CGI all the time, but actually we can create this in the lab easily.
And then I put a piece out for Women in Science Week because it fell on Fashion Week. I wanted to talk about how many women were in science and how in Fashion Week, there was so much science in the clothing, in the cosmetics, but also in the lighting and everything. We were never really talking about STEM in a fashion-led way. And because those two dates ended up coinciding, I wanted to do a piece.
So I created a video to show a prototype formula, and to have visual content to support this type of work; showing what the future of colour in these sectors could do. And it went insane. It got 80 million views onTikTok overnight. It was on the Ellen Degeneres show. It was trending over Donald Trump who was president at the time. It just went mental. I never expected it to have so much traction, but I think there was almost like a bit of a shock moment. We were looking at the demographic of these 80 plus million people who had interacted with this piece of content and there was everyone from an eight year old to an 80 year old, and I was trying to understand what was uniting them. I think it was just that you see this kind of extraordinary makeup so much on TV, in sci-fi and in fantasy, but it had never existed for regular people before. So the success was the fact that they could get their hands on it. It gave them something more exciting in colour and dyes for their hair and their skin. I think it just showed that there was an industry that was absolutely dying for some disruption in colour.
It’s funny. Everyone's doing innovation in skincare, in packaging, but the fundamental colour bit, which is what the category is based on, just hasn't changed since we were in the Egyptian times, pretty much.
Colour Alchemy, Photography by Jackson Bowley, courtesy of Lauren Bowker
LAB What about the ingredients? Because you do a lot as well with ingredients. So has that gone hand in hand with your exploration?
LB Yes. So, on the beauty side, once we start to invent, we create the magic part of the colour, and then we need to create a chassis around it to fit it within a traditional beauty format. Then, we also had these inherent values of being innovative, sustainable, creative, and having performance.
We just kept asking questions, like… Why are they using that? Mixing it with that? Why are they using that polymer? Why don't they use this polymer from the textiles industry? It's much more sustainable; it's way better.
We just saw all of these gaps that had not been leveraged. One of the most significant gaps we saw was that every colour in the cosmetic space was made by burning crude oil and fossil fuels. So every bright colour —whether it was in your black mascara and eyeliner, whether it was a lake pigment or organic synthetic pigment — was made from petroleum. And we were just like, well, that's rubbish. Why does no one know about that?
The secondary way of making it was with mica or by mining the planet. So an iron oxide or titanium oxide, you know, is a finite resource. The mica mines in India have terrible ethical processes. And yet, no one's really addressing that. Or let’s consider microplastic, which is in glitter and has now been banned. So in four years' time, there will be no glitters. But no one's got a solution yet.
It almost became too big a challenge to tackle. And then we found the more we spoke to the industry, the more the industry was just like, well, we don't know how to change it. That's the system. That's how it is. How do you change such a big system?
Air, Photography by James Stopforth, courtesy of Lauren Bowker
LB We can't change it on our own, but as a smaller brand, it was easier for us to really micromanage that formula from beginning to end and then scale it up. We have our lab here in Dalston, and we do everything up to the proof of concept in-house. So we formulate 50 formulas before midday on a Monday, whereas the big manufacturing houses just don't do that level of innovation.
And the community, the people out there, aren't educated enough to know the issues with their product. They might buy a mascara that says, I'm a clean organic mascara. And lots of the products are clean, but then they put the colourant down as a naturally formed colour because petrol is naturally formed. And it's just wild, the level of greenwashing. But everyone's starting to notice it with plastics. We are super well educated now on the misuse of plastics. But I just think there's a huge wave coming on.
Hopefully, we're at the front of opening up that conversation, but also being able to suggest alternatives to give people the tools for self-expression because we're always going to want to do that. We've always wanted to do that since way before the Egyptian times, but we should be able to do it more responsibly. My feeling is material science and nature will have solutions for us, but we've got to do it in a circular way. And that's going to take time.
Absorption, THE UNSEEN BEAUTY, courtesy of Lauren Bowker
LAB I think the hardest thing, and you touched on it, is the systems. They have been in place for so long, it's rigid. You almost have to break it down completely and start again, and no one's prepared to do that.
LB You can't do it on your own. You need to rally, and half the time, you also need to know the right people. It's not always that the person who's sitting there changing the legislation doesn't want to do it. It's just that they've got 50 million other things to do, and this hasn't come to their attention. So there's a bit of lobbying that needs to happen to allow these new materials to come in. That takes time. It needs networks. It needs the right people. And what we found was that we were sick of waiting for other big conglomerates to give us a licensing deal and the authority to do it. So I was like, well, let's just set up a brand.
Let’s do it ourselves, then we can control it, and we'll start to effect change with a physical, tangible asset. Before having physical products, everything we were doing was material innovation for big houses, or art pieces or gallery shows that showed this innovation, for instance doing hypothetical research projects for the NHS or whatever.
But no one was putting in their dollars to convert it onto a mass scale. And I just felt like, they'll only do that if we create something the world buys into. And then there's no excuse, really.
So, from the beginning of The Unseen, I was more conceptual and liked changing the world through art, which I still believe in fully. But as I've gotten more cynical, I think we have to have art shows, we have to inspire people, but we also have to make change from within the business side of things. Then, we should take that through to a physical product and try to hack the system from the inside out.
very laboratory