Elephant Cosmetics, a collaboration between Nadia Martinez and Mark Dixon (Mr. Twist), is a satirical beauty brand built around the declaration: “Everyone has a right to want to look older.” By imagining cosmetics through the eyes of elephants—beings who wear age as memory—the project flips our culture’s hunger for instant youth.

Instead of promising quick fixes, Elephant Cosmetics treats aging as a form of delayed gratification: a slow, dignified accumulation of experience. The work exposes the absurdity of erasing time from our faces and invites viewers to reconsider why smoothness has become a measure of worth.

www.elephantcosmetics.com

Zoria + Nadia is a collaboration with Zorianna Altomar, inspired by the Ukrainian embroideries created by her maternal grandmother. The edition began as a series of digitally designed prints, some of which were embedded with QR codes to reflect how time alters design and meaning.

My own grandmother was also a woman of the needle — a seamstress whose hands shaped my early memories. As a child, I dreaded embroidery assignments, and she often helped me finish them so I could pass the class.