The Subject:
Why CELINE beauty as a strategic challenge
I chose CELINE as a creative subject because their beauty evolution demands something most brands sidestep: showing vivid pigment and skin reality without sacrificing restraint. Working as a photographer in Vancouver, I watch luxury houses struggle with this balance constantly. Dramatic color reads as mass-market if lit poorly, yet timid beauty images vanish on social feeds. CELINE's expansion into beauty under recent leadership offered a perfect brief to explore that tension. This is a personal project, not client work, but the strategic challenge felt urgent enough to build a full system around it.
The Brief:
Solving the campaign versus commerce split
The brief I set for myself centered on a problem I see repeatedly in luxury beauty production. Brands need two incompatible things from the same shoot day: main portraits with enough mood to hold attention across editorial placements and press kits, plus forensic product-truth frames that prove pigment accuracy and finish for e-commerce teams. Most photographers deliver one or the other. I wanted to prove both could live in a single visual language, anchored by disciplined lighting and zero compromise on texture fidelity.
If a house like CELINE needed to launch a bold lip collection while protecting their quiet-luxury codes, this approach would solve it without requiring separate campaign and product shoots.
The Execution:
Bi-directional lighting for texture and drama
I built the lighting around bi-directional sharp sources: hard keys from both sides to carve facial structure and reveal every gradient in the dark red ombré lips my makeup artist created. That setup does two things simultaneously. It gives you the controlled shadows and specular highlights that read as premium editorial, and it refuses to let texture hide. Pore structure, the blush blend along cheekbones, the micro-sheen where lip color transitions from deep garnet to near-black: all of it stays visible under that light.
I alternated between mood-forward portraits with negative space for typography and tight, face-forward white-background frames where pigment and skin grain become the entire story. The white seamless shots work as e-commerce anchors and approval images. The moodier compositions function as campaign leads and social main images.
Minimal posing that protects brand codes
Posing stayed minimal: hand to face, direct gaze, slight head tilt to introduce movement without visual noise. CELINE's brand language does not tolerate anything that feels shouty, so the dynamism had to come from lighting tension and color intensity, not over-styled gestures. I kept retouching surgical, preserving natural skin texture, letting the lip edge show true application, maintaining the gradient's integrity. Over-smoothing would break trust with the customer and trigger pushback from internal brand teams who have learned that plastic-looking product images increase return rates.
These images protect product truth while still delivering the polished, editorial finish that validates premium positioning.
The System:
Multi-channel images from one shoot day
The resulting collection includes images designed for multiple uses across CELINE's fragmented channel ecosystem. Campaign-grade main portraits that hold up in press placements and paid social. E-commerce close-ups engineered for color accuracy across devices, with enough resolution for product page zoom functionality. Macro lip studies that work as proof-of-pigment images for launch decks and regional digital teams. Tight crops optimized for different social formats without losing compositional integrity.
Every frame in the series maintains lighting and color consistency, so global teams could theoretically localize without regrading or fighting to match skin tones across vendors. This approach would serve as a repeatable content system: one shoot day yielding both brand storytelling and conversion-focused product documentation, eliminating the visual fragmentation problem that happens when brands use too many different photographers.
The Proof:
Editorial ambition meets commercial discipline
What this demonstrates is a capacity to operate at the intersection of editorial ambition and commercial discipline. Luxury brands expanding into beauty need photographers who understand that dramatic makeup and true-color fidelity are not opposing goals. They are the same goal if you control your lighting and resist the urge to fix texture in post. As a Vancouver product photographer, I can deliver high-impact beauty images that scale across campaign, e-commerce, social, and press channels without losing CELINE's signature restraint or misrepresenting the product.
If your brand faces the same challenge, needing beauty content that performs across different channels while protecting premium positioning, let's build a system that solves both problems at once.
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