Facecrime

Rebellious, anti-beauty campaign photography subverting traditional aesthetics to establish disruptive brand identity for counter-cultural market positioning.

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- about this project

The Challenge:

When Clean Beauty Needs an Edge

FaceCrime Skincare needed to photograph rebellion. Dr. Amy Wilson had built her Vancouver brand around a simple provocation: what if you rejected every polished promise the beauty industry ever made? Her flagship Dauntless Face Oil, a multi-use formula grounded in naturopathic practice, was not another serum chasing flawless skin. It was designed to simplify routines, support the skin barrier with botanicals like babchi and sea buckthorn, and refuse the synthetic shortcuts that dominate competitor shelves.

The product worked. The ethics were unimpeachable: fully vegan, cruelty-free, no pore-clogging agents. But the imagery told the wrong story. Early product shots looked like every other clean beauty brand: soft light, aspirational glow, safe. They communicated care, but not the counter-culture edge that separated FaceCrime from a crowded market. For a brand inspired by Orwellian themes and priced at the premium end, that visual gap was a commercial problem.

E-commerce conversion depends on immediate clarity. Shoppers need to read a label, understand texture, trust the formulation in three seconds. Ad performance hinges on stopping the scroll, and stopping it requires tension. FaceCrime's marketing director could not afford another generic shoot. The business needed an edgy clean beauty campaign photographer who understood how to hold two truths in one frame: clinical credibility and defiant authenticity.

The Brief:

Multi-Channel Visual System Without Compromise

The brief demanded a visual system that worked across every channel without compromise. PDP-ready on-white skincare images with crisp, readable labels and accurate color for fast product launches. Styled campaign portraits that could anchor social ads and homepage hero sections. Macro shots that proved ingredient integrity, the kind of texture-forward detail that converts skeptics into believers. And all of it had to reflect the brand's founding tension: this is health-led skincare, but it refuses to play by beauty's rules.

Most photographers optimize for one outcome. Product specialists deliver clean e-commerce assets but struggle with narrative. Portrait shooters bring emotion but cannot manage glare on glass droppers or keep a label legible at web resolution. FaceCrime needed both, in the same shoot, without diluting either.

Solving the Glare Problem

The photographer approached it as a lighting problem first. Glare-free face oil photography is not about shooting faster or hoping for a lucky angle. It is about controlling reflection. Glass droppers and glossy oils throw hard specular highlights that obscure branding and cheapen perception. The solution was diffused wrap lighting: large strip boxes positioned to create clean, elongated reflections on the glass surface, with black flags cutting negative fill to prevent flare.

Every product frame was shot on pure white seamless with even soft key, exposing for label clarity and true-to-formula color. The result was a suite of images that met Amazon and Shopify technical requirements while still feeling premium. No reshoots. No back-and-forth on overexposed labels or murky ingredient tones.

The Execution:

Campaign Portraits That Channel Defiance

Campaign portraits took a different tactic but shared the same discipline. FaceCrime's visual identity leaned into confrontation. Models were not aspirational, they were conspiratorial. One frame showed two models leaning close, eyes locked, as if sharing a secret the viewer was not meant to hear. Another featured a model forming a gun with her hand, finger pointed directly at the lens. These were not accidents. They were deliberate narrative beats, pulled from Dr. Wilson's Orwell-inspired vision of beauty as an act of defiance.

But rebellion without craft looks cheap. The photographer lit for inclusive natural texture beauty portraits, using soft frontal light with controlled contrast to preserve real skin: pores, micro-sheen from the oil, the hydrated glow that signals the product actually works. Deeper skin tones were calibrated during exposure, not corrected in post, to avoid the muddy flattening that results from aggressive retouching. Minimal editing preserved texture while maintaining the premium feel required for a product at this price point. The models were not polished into sameness. They looked healthy, confident, and real. That credibility mattered for conversion. Clean beauty customers distrust perfection.

Product-Plus-Portrait Integration

The most commercially valuable frames were the product-plus-portrait skincare integration shots. These solved the asset-efficiency problem that plagues every lean brand team: you cannot afford separate shoots for PDP and campaign, but you cannot compromise either objective. The photographer framed tight enough to hold both the model's face and the Dauntless Face Oil bottle in the same plane, using selective focus to keep the label readable while maintaining eye contact intensity.

The model's gaze was direct, almost confrontational, channeling FaceCrime's ethos, while the product sat front and center, label type sharp enough to read on a mobile screen. These images worked as social ads, homepage banners, and email headers without cropping or reformatting. One shoot yielded a full suite: on-white PDP frames that could go live immediately, styled lifestyle content that communicated brand personality, and macro texture shots that authenticated the multi-use claims: oil cleansing, post-shave soothing, makeup priming. Every deliverable mapped to a specific conversion goal, from reducing cart abandonment on product pages to lifting click-through rates on paid social.

The Results:

A Visual System That Justified the Investment

FaceCrime received a library of images that justified the investment by working harder across more touchpoints. The on-white product shots shipped to Shopify within days, cutting time-to-listing and allowing the team to launch new SKUs faster. The campaign portraits performed in Meta ads, driving higher engagement than previous creative because they stopped the scroll without sacrificing trust. Macro shots of the oil's texture became proof points in email nurture sequences, visually reinforcing the naturopathic formulation and botanical ingredient story.

And the integrated product-portrait frames gave the brand a signature look: rebellious but rigorous, edgy but grounded in health. That look was something competitors in the clean beauty space could not easily replicate. For a Vancouver on-white PDP skincare photographer working with an indie brand, the outcome was not just a gallery of beautiful images. It was a visual system that reduced friction at every stage of the buyer journey, from discovery to checkout.

FaceCrime's marketing director could finally point to photography that aligned with Dr. Wilson's vision while delivering measurable commercial results: shorter production cycles, fewer reshoots, higher ad performance, and a brand identity sharp enough to command premium pricing in a category full of compromises. That is the real return on creative investment. Imagery that works as hard as the formulation it represents.

Does your brand need photography that converts skeptics into believers while staying true to your founding vision?

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