Opinion: Creatives Should Not Fear the AI Revolution

I’ve built my career on making images — painstakingly painted or posed, often over weeks of planning and days of on-set sweat. Now, here comes a suite of tools that can make them in seconds based on no more than a sentence or two.

And yet, unlike some of my peers, I’m not anxious. I’m excited.

2025 has been widely heralded as the year artificial intelligence fully penetrated every industry, including beauty and fashion. And yet, behind the collective eye roll remains an undercurrent of uneasiness: What, exactly, will become of this new, almost Machiavellian technology? And how will it affect “us”?

I’m no newbie to it. I launched Dazed Beauty magazine in 2018 with the sole purpose of onboarding digital creatives to challenge the standards of beauty image creation. It was one of the first serious editorial approaches to working with creatives who fell outside the classical beauty image creation standards — 3D designers, game engine artists and even creatives tied to music. A year later, the magazine published a cover with Kylie Jenner, her makeup done using a beauty algorithm based off any images associated with “Kylie Jenner” along with a second cover starring Kate Moss and Travis Scott as digital centurion avatars living amongst a post-apocalyptic fantasy landscape.

Then in 2022, I launched one of the first AI-embedded editorial projects with Exhibition magazine. Hundreds of participants photographed their faces wearing red lipstick, and in collaboration with another artist, we used generative software to merge them into a series of composite portraits. The results were monstrous and uncanny; Frankensteinish lacerations, distorted features, faces that felt both human and not. The limitations of the software were glaring, in the same way early, clunky computer interfaces once suggested future possibilities rather than current capabilities.

As a creator, my instinct is always to push boundaries. After all, my love for creative experimentation, technology and innovation is how I’ve made a name for myself in the beauty industry. With AI, that creative impulse is even stronger: The possibilities feel endless and transformative.

Today, most entrepreneurs and creatives now echo the same words: If you’re not already on the AI train, you’re too late. But the technology has supported fashion and beauty’s creative labour for far longer than we tend to acknowledge. Retouching, colour grading, facial mapping — all of these processes have relied on generative technologies for years, provoking little public concern. So why does AI in beauty feel so threatening now?

As a founder and operator, I have to pause and consider the personal and business cost. I brought up the subject of AI beauty to my internal team at Isamaya Beauty, and after a lengthy internal debate about whether to incorporate AI imagery into our makeup swatches — a category that is incredibly time-consuming to produce and functions primarily as a navigational tool rather than a creative one — I took to Instagram Live to ask my audience how they felt about AI.

Beyond concerns about the AI’s impacts on the planet, many viewers expressed that they didn’t mind AI being used, provided it didn’t threaten the jobs of photographers, models and other creatives and — as long as the generative imagery was additive rather than reductive. When framed thoughtfully, with clear creative intent, it felt acceptable.

One of the most revealing takeaways from last year’s BoF Voices was the insight, from a conversation between Pixel Moda president Gianni Serazzi and Etro chief executive Fabrizio Cardinali, that audiences don’t appear to object to AI imagery as long as it feels completely believable. What unsettles people is the subtle uncanny quality AI often produces; a reaction that exposes the human relationship to integrity, authenticity and ultimately connection.

So what does a model of ethical creative AI use look like? One way to navigate this was by teaming up with a university that specialises in machine learning. This year, Isamaya Beauty is collaborating with university students to give them hands-on experience in working with an established brand, and I get to have a playground to explore AI in an expansive and experimental way. It’s a way to satisfy my creative instinct without compromising business integrity or consumer trust — creating a space where experimentation, learning, and innovation coexist safely and meaningfully.

As long as AI serves as a tool to elevate, connect, and empower, rather than replace or obscure, we can feel comfortable celebrating a significant leap forward in the relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence. Because unless our future involves abandoning our bodies altogether in favour of digital, avatarian cyborg selves, a red lip will always require a steady, human hand.

Isamaya Ffrench is a makeup artist and the founder of cosmetics label Isamaya Beauty.

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