In a decisive break from the typical gilded and sparkly holiday cosmetic tropes, NARS has partnered with avant-garde fashion designer Iris van Herpen for its 2025 holiday collection. This marks van Herpen’s first foray into makeup, a partnership that moves away from traditional holiday themes to embrace the fantastical and futuristic. Drawing profound inspiration from her own “Hypnosis” couture collection, van Herpen has created products that explore the “interesting relationship between beauty and hypnosis,” using elements of texture, transparency, and light to create a captivating visual experience. The result is a collection encased in whimsical, futuristic metallic lilac packaging and featuring marbleized pastel colors with hypnotic designs. In this collaboration, which includes her favorite item—a lipstick—and a light-reflecting powder, van Herpen showcases how the boundaries between fashion, science, technology, and the primal language of beauty are meant to be fluid and endlessly intertwined.
Couture to Cosmetics: The Concept of Beauty and Hypnosis
Iris van Herpen’s collaboration with NARS is less about seasonal colors and more about translating complex, deeply intellectual concepts into a tangible beauty experience.
At the core of the collaboration is the designer’s long-standing fascination with the concept of “Hypnosis,” a theme that continually informs her work. Van Herpen explains that this theme explores the powerful, almost trance-like way people become engaged and inspired by beauty. In her view, beauty, like fashion, is a primal and emotional language that deeply connects to one’s core feelings and inspires love. This collection attempts to capture that mesmerized feeling through its aesthetic elements, particularly through the use of light, transparency, and intricate textures. To achieve this unique sensory experience, the collection consciously avoids the expected reds and golds of traditional holiday releases, opting instead for metallic lilacs and pastel marbleized effects that feel futuristic and whimsical. For the designer, the collaborative creation of this makeup is a continuation of art; a language used to express one’s inner world and transform the self using the body as a canvas.
The Intersecting Worlds of Science, Technology, and Art
Van Herpen’s work has always been defined by its seamless integration of high-level scientific research and innovative technology with traditional artistic expression, a philosophy carried directly into her makeup design.
The designer views the relationship between science, technology, and beauty as inherently intertwined. Science, she posits, serves as a crucial “lens” through which new perspectives and ways of exploring the world become available. Technology, in turn, functions as a powerful “tool to create” the next generation of art. In her fashion atelier, this translates to combining traditional, complex craftsmanship with newer technologies like 3D printing. For the NARS collection, this boundary-breaking approach is evident in the products’ hypnotic packaging and the complex, light-reflecting formulas. Van Herpen emphasizes that beauty, like science, is an ongoing process of evolution, and her designs seek to express the complexity of the world we inhabit today by constantly experimenting and letting go of rigid boundaries between these fields. The collaboration stands as a testament to the belief that art can be expressed in countless ways, including the highly technical and personal realm of makeup.
The Hidden Language of Water: Revisiting the Archive
A lesser-known, yet foundational, source of inspiration for the NARS collection comes from the designer’s personal archive, specifically her years of experimentation with the organic fluidity of water.
Though van Herpen is always focused on the next phase of her creative output, she recently spent time revisiting her archives, a process that she describes as a creative cycle rather than a linear progression. This retrospective work led her to rediscover early experiments with the ancient Japanese technique of suminagashi, a marbling art form where ink is dripped onto water to create stunning, organic, and highly hypnotic patterns. Given her deep connection to the element of water—which she references as the “origin of life”—she abstracted this visual language of fluid, ink-on-water patterns and integrated it into the NARS collaboration. While the average consumer may not consciously reference the technique upon seeing the final product, the underlying visual rhythm of the collection’s designs directly channels this fluid, beautiful complexity. This subtle nod to her past work illustrates how she finds new solutions and waters the “seeds” of old, unworked ideas, evolving them into a contemporary context for the beauty world.
Synesthesia and Surrealism: A Multi-Sensory Approach
Van Herpen’s creative process is significantly informed by the merging of senses and the intention to look at the world from a radically different, surrealist perspective.
The concept of synesthesia—the merging of different senses, such as seeing colors when hearing music or tasting textures—is a key element of her creative flow. Van Herpen explains that she experiences a mild form of synesthesia, often seeing patterns emerge when she listens to music. She strategically utilizes this sensory connection in her work, using specific music to enter a flow state where these patterns become visible and inform the designs of a collection. In this collaboration, this multi-sensory approach ensures the final products appeal not just to sight, but to a deeper, more emotional feeling. Furthermore, the philosophy of surrealism—inviting the observer to look at something from a different, unexpected perspective—is also integral to the collection’s overall aesthetic. By tapping into these two powerful, transformative concepts, the NARS collaboration serves as an invitation for the user to engage with beauty in a more profound, self-expressive way, ultimately diving deeper into how they experience the art of transformation.
