(Archive) Chthulu, beauty designed for extreme futures

Beauty for anthropocene

Chthulu is a speculative beauty brand. It convokes and subverts the codes and trends of the beauty industry to highlight upcoming threats from anthropocene, along with new desirable solutions to adapt - reconnecting our bodies with what’s living and our extended ecosystems, from bees to bacteria.

This speculative design project turns future-defining structural drivers, wowing possibilities in sciences and technologies and emerging uses into radical artifacts : 5 imaginary beauty products designed for extreme times.

The very name Chthulu is a reference to Donna Harraway's Chthulucene, an epoch beyond anthropocene in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked.

The future in a bottle

Our speculative beauty range includes 5 products, each one being designed around a specific anthropocene threat.

Second Chance is a sprayable second skin, designed to perfectly protect and hydrate skin in times of extreme heat waves, wildfires or floods, adapting in real time to exterior conditions, especially the levels of radiation, UV and SO2.

Caring Utopia is a fragrance supplement, designed for antiobiotic resistance, where each spraying spreads microbial volatiles that acts as antimicrobials and modulators.

Lands of biome are extreme biome extracts, designed to enhance immunity in times of pandemics, enriching your microbiome with extremophyte bacteria to super charge the collective holobiont.

Future Particles is a regenerative mascara, fighting against biodiversity collapse. Each blinking disperses micro-encapsulated fungal spores beneficial for honey bee workers, increasing their longevity and power.

Witchelium is a device that grows an edited and personalized Reishi out of mail clippings, body hair and sweat, turning human waste into holistic probiotics.