On August 25, 2020, Byredo Makeup was revealed as the fragrance house’s first color cosmetics line, created by Ben Gorham with makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench.
On August 25, 2020, Byredo Makeup was revealed as the fragrance house’s first color cosmetics line, created by Ben Gorham with makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench.
August 25, 2026
Byredo had built its reputation through fragrance, where names, memories, raw materials, and minimal packaging worked together to make invisible products feel emotionally specific. Moving into makeup gave the house a harder challenge. Color sits directly on the face, carries stronger visual risk, and enters a market where product function, shade logic, texture, packaging, artistry, and identity all have to work immediately.
The line was developed by Byredo founder and creative director Ben Gorham with British makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench, whose work had already made her one of fashion beauty’s most experimental voices. Their collaboration mattered because it kept Byredo Makeup from looking like a fragrance brand simply adding lipstick for category expansion. Ffrench brought a professional understanding of face, image, transformation, and product behavior, while Gorham brought Byredo’s instinct for object design, emotion, and atmosphere.
The first collection treated makeup as a set of beauty objects rather than a conventional product wall. It included lipsticks, lip balm, mascara, eyeliner, eyeshadow palettes, and 16 Colour Sticks designed for use across eyes, lips, and cheeks. That multipurpose format gave Byredo Makeup a clear point of view: makeup could be flexible, expressive, and less tied to fixed instructions. A pigment did not have to belong to only one facial zone. A color could become a tool for mood, gesture, and personal interpretation.
The significance of Byredo Makeup also came from its refusal to organize beauty around a narrow idea of prettiness. The collection used unconventional hues, expressive textures, and a mood shaped by gender-fluid and nonconformist beauty codes.
For Byredo, the launch expanded the brand from scent memory into visible self-styling. Fragrance had already given the house emotional vocabulary; makeup allowed that vocabulary to appear on skin, eyes, and lips. This made Byredo Makeup a meaningful brand extension because it translated the same abstract world-building into color, packaging, and daily ritual.
