What would happen if you asked a child what a makeup looks like? That is what the Paris-based creative studio Buro Nōto, photographer Pierre-Emmanuel Testard, and makeup artist Tiziana Raimondo did. Instead of asking artists to imagine new beauty looks, the team invited children to draw directly on portraits, turning their spontaneous sketches into fully elaborated makeup compositions.
The result? Instinct takes precedence over skill, and imagination becomes more valuable than technical perfection. No clean, perfect strokes; childlike perception challenges the canons and the standards already in place and shows that what we today conceive as correct is a learning we acquire with time.
With the aim of finding innovation in art, this project emerges from questioning established norms. For this, Draw Me A Face grants authorship to children in an act that temporarily suspends the invisible conventionsthat shape the culture of contemporary beauty.
With imagination and childlike creativity unleashed, the result achieved is not fantasy nor disguise. It is an experiment in perception and interpretation in which the portraits invite the viewer to reconsider where beauty begins: not in mastery, but in curiosity.
The play proposed to the children becomes less an evasion of creative practice and more a method to expand it, according to the studio. And indeed, it is the best representation of the conceptual evolution we undergo as we age.
Adults spend years refining taste, learning proportion, and internalizing visual codes. Children, on the other hand, simply make strokes that seem right to them. The project suggests that creativity sometimes depends less on acquiring knowledge than on recovering a way of seeing that has gradually been lost.
For this reason, the studio wants to clarify that these portraits are not about childhood at all, but about remembering that imagination often arises before instruction, and that the most original ideas can emerge when we stop trying to do things well.
It is then that graphic forms extend across faces without worrying about balance or proportion, while vibrant colors occupy places that conventional beauty rarely allows. Freed from aesthetic expectations, children’s drawings give rise to compositions that feel expressive rather than corrective.
