Faces of Grace
A studio portrait series for a skincare launch: forty-two faces, one lighting setup, and no retouching beyond dust.
Grace approached us six weeks before launch with a brief that was unusual for the category: show real skin. No frequency separation, no smoothing, no borrowed texture. Every product photograph in the campaign would sit next to a face that had not been rebuilt.
We shot forty-two people across three days in a single setup, so that the only variable between frames was the person in front of it.
Forty-two subjects with entirely different skin tones, ages and textures, all needing to look like they belonged in one campaign, shot in three days, with a client understandably nervous about what unretouched would mean in practice.
One large source through diffusion at forty-five degrees, a white bounce on the shadow side, and a background lit separately so it held the same value for every subject. Fixing the light meant the differences between people stayed differences between people rather than differences between setups, and we graded to a single neutral profile and did nothing to skin except remove dust.
