NicMac Beauty Photography
Beauty photography for NicMac Beauty. I am a corporate photographer who creates beautiful 'on-brand' images for websites.
The NicMac brand was created by its owner, Nicola McFarlane. Nicola could not find the makeup in the palette she wanted that also met her values. She was looking for a vegan-friendly environmentally aware brand.
Motivated by her values, Nicola set about creating a business that aimed high in every way. Now, not only does she offer a fantastic range of high-quality beauty products, they all meet the highest ethical standards when it comes to her core values.
NicMac has successfully combined top-quality makeup in a host of vibrant colours with a cardboard pallet with removable colour pods instead of a fixed plastic palette. This underlines her attitude towards recycling, renewable resources, and the environment.
The complete product line is vegan-friendly, and nothing in the range has been animal tested. The core product of the mix-and-match palette is certainly customer-centric as the colours you choose are unique to your tastes. You pick what you want to be on your own palette.
NicMac Beauty launched to rave reviews from customers who shared her desire for top quality and a clear conscience towards animal testing and the environment. The tagline for the company, "Make Up With The World," certainly feels appropriate.
Getting the Right Image
Beauty photography for the business (a specialist niche within commercial photography) had to match the look and feel of the light pastel colours of the company brand. All of the makeup must jump out of the image as vibrant and saturated. There would also be product shots of the colours as well as the cardboard palettes, both empty and full.
Our initial work led to us identifying the key elements that I needed to capture, the colour palette, and even an initial look at how the images would be used on the new website.
One area of discussion was the processing of the skin of the models. Traditionally, beauty photography (and in particular, makeup) is processed to perfection. Flawless skin, seamless transitions between shows and light, and, of course, beautiful models. There has been a growing trend to move away from this to a more natural style of beauty photography.
To fit in with the values and brand of the company, we decided that processing should be "natural". In retouching terms, this equates to minor dodge and burn (reduction of skin colour variation) while retaining skin tone-i.e., no plastic people!
Our models were friends of owner Nicola and both had beautiful natural skin to start with, making my job much easier.
Behind the scenes: lots of laughter, silliness and goofing around!
All images were created in a single day: product, scene, and facial shots. From about 1100 images captured, we curated a smaller finished image library for Nicmac Beauty to use in all of their marketing. Click here to visit the NicMac Beauty website.
