‘Cortisol face’ and the lies about muscly women

26 Apr

Lily West, The Weight Of Becoming (2025)Gallery / 22 images ”Ever since I stopped lifting super heavy and incorporated more low-intensity workouts, not only did I feel so much less bloated throughout the day, but I’m in such a better shape now,” – that’s how Mandana Zarghami says she got rid of what’s being called “cortisol face” in a TikTok video. Zarghami is not the only wellness influencer encouraging women to ditch lifting weights in favour of low-intensity exercises like walking and pilates. Other women on #GymTok have claimed that walking instead of running avoids facial puffiness associated with “runner’s face”, stopping lifting is what “snatched” their body and quitting HIIT workouts helped them lose weight. While the buzz around “lowering your cortisol”...

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25 Apr

Echo Seireeni’s prosthetic creations are warping reality

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Beauty, Featured

Echo Seireeni’s prosthetic creations are warping reality

Community: Echo SeireeniGallery / 14 images Prosthetic artist and MUA Echo Seireeni has built a world of transformations that feels almost mythic. “I see make-up as a filter – a kind of protective mask between the model and the camera,” she says. It’s a mask that’s taken many forms across the faces of underground icons: Bladee made ghostly with airbrushed veins and gunmetal shadows, a latex-soft bunny crafted for Fontaines DC, and Eartheater crowned with horns and splashed in Pepto Bismol pink beneath the desert sun. She champions a philosophy of make-up as an extension of self, whether literally through prosthetics or conceptually. “I’ve come to a relatively stable conclusion that make-up has always been a tool to mediate the relationship between...

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25 Apr

How Tilda Mace built – and cut apart –

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Beauty, Featured

Tilda Mace performanceGallery / 12 images You’re standing in the audience at London’s coOc on a Saturday night. DJ Daniel Fabari is on the decks, playing a psychedelic soundscape of humming, shamanic chanting, drumming, breathwork, animal noises, poems, and the thud of a punching bag being struck again and again. The lights around you glitch. On stage, make-up and SFX artist Tilda Mace stands beside a bare-chested model wrapped in furs. There’s something uncanny about him, though you can’t quite place it – until Tilda begins cutting him open. The music grows heavier, hyena cries filling the room. And then a figure emerges from the ruins of the skin, which you now realise was prosthetic: a second head, another pair of...

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25 Apr

5 more body art and SFX artists you need

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Beauty, Featured

5 more body art and SFX artists you need

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...

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