See a Makeup Artist’s Stunning, Surrealist Take on Beauty

This month, the photographer Rankin is releasing the fourth installment in his beauty book series, a collaboration with Hunger magazine’s beauty editor-at-large Andrew Gallimore. The resulting tome, Andrew Gallimore by Rankin, features selected work from Rankin and Gallimore’s editorial and commercial shoots (they’ve been collaborating since 2008) as well as new, never-before-seen material. To that end, it puts even the most outlandish runway beauty to shame: Gallimore has experimented with unconventional beauty materials since he was in art school at Manchester Metropolitan University in the late ’90s. “I used a lot of different things to decorate a face — bits of paper, rubber, parts of old shoes,” he says in an interview with Holly Fraser that appears in the book. “I was playing with the concept of facial decoration, which I think I still do. I don’t think my lecturers at the time could have handled the idea of me putting lipstick and blusher on somebody in the name of art, so they encouraged me to use alternative materials.”

The results of Gallimore’s fantastical, Surrealist approach to beauty are wide ranging, from M.C. Escher–inspired face paint to face jewelry made from glow-in-the-dark string to lip and eyebrow appliqués made from matted embroidery thread. Click through the slideshow for a look at some of his most striking — and, in a few cases, terrifying — creations, photographed by Rankin.