EVERY FACE DESERVES ITS OWN FRAME

The beauty industry loves a new thing. It needs a new thing. Every brand brings a serum, a balm, a “skin reset,” a brow revolution even – delivered to your doorstep on the weekly. Brands love to tell us that we are one product away from being resolved. Which is why Amsterdam-based beauty brand ELLIS FAAS has always felt like such an anomaly: the story of the brand has never been one of relentless expansion, forced reinvention, or becoming unhumane: her makeup line was inspired by the hues that naturally exist in the human body. 

ELLIS FAAS, for those who are uninitiated, is an innovative, cruelty free cosmetics line by the late Ellis Faas (1962–2020). She was a highly influential Dutch makeup artist, one of the most important MUAs of her generation even, collaborating with the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier, Dries van Noten, Karl Lagerfeld, Mario Testino, Viktor and Rolf, just to name a few.

Now, with the launch of Ellis Brows, the brand enters a new chapter through a product Ellis worked on, but did not live to see released. An unusual moment, after years of relative silence following the passing of its founder, but definitely a moment to celebrate too. The reasons are layered: first, the brand has been quiet for a long time since her death; second, there is, quite simply, a new brow gel to be celebrated; and third—ironically—because while Ellis would have loved seeing the product launch, she would have hated being celebrated for it. Anything resembling a launch party, networking event, or being placed at the centre of attention was exactly the kind of thing she avoided, despite being deeply social in almost every other context.

The brand decided to have a gathering anyway—in a church full of people connected by a shared affection for a woman whose influence continues to ripple through fashion, makeup, and image-making long after her passing. Thijs Faas, her brother, talks about how the brand emerged from her own intuition, but also by family, lineage, and inheritance. Its origins trace back through late nineteenth-century Amsterdam entrepreneurship and post-war journalistic skepticism—two lineages that produce, if nothing else, a strong resistance to being told what to think. That sensibility is still visible in the brand’s approach: a distinctly Dutch refusal of ornament, authority, and over-explanation.

Ellis approached makeup as a creative tool: something to play with, not to obey. The brand’s objective was always to hand people the tools and let them figure it out themselves. Which brings us to ELLIS BROWS. This gel was built with the same philosophy that has guided the brand from the beginning: enhancement rather than transformation. And in a subtle extension of that ethos, the brand is also opening itself to a new kind of continuity—welcoming collaborators who never worked directly with Ellis, but are now entering the system she created. Fronting the visual story for Ellis Brows, the campaign was shot by Amsterdam-based photographer Dion Bal, who has also left his creative print across several Glamcult covers over the past years.

What makes this product particularly unusual is not simply that it is a browgel—brows, after all, have long become their own micro-economy, with entire careers built around laminating, shaping, sculpting, etc., etc., etc. It is that this specific product was originally created by Ellis herself. True to her philosophy, the gel merges with the brow, adapts to bone, and listens to the face. Each colour is designed to enhance rather than alter, giving every face its own authentic frame. A new object, from an absent hand, still intact.