For nearly five years, Filipino beauty has been obsessed with the idea of looking effortless. Dewy skin, soft brows, and a wash of nude or gloss on the lips—the kind of makeup designed to look like you don’t have any makeup on at all. It’s a look that brands have chased hard, and even if the average shade range in the country has doubled, according to an audit by Allure Philippines, the aesthetic itself hasn’t moved.
Everyone has more options. And everyone uses them to look the same.
Makeup artist Sylvina “Slo” Lopez, however, is doing the exact opposite. She showed up to the studio dressed in a way that’s undeniably her: a pastel green tulle top layered under bright pink dress, icy blue glitter eyeshadow, electric blue liner. She greeted everyone with a smile that reached her eyes, and when we started talking, her tone was warm and immediately easy—though there was no missing how deliberate and enthusiastic she was about her work.
She’s Issy’s Creative Visionary, working alongside Creative Director Joel Andrade in developing the brand’s products since July 2020. Her first collaboration with the brand was a collection of pressed single shadows with mattes and duochromes, the kind that dared you to actually use every shade in it.
She isn’t alone in sensing a shift.
Kim Santos
At the Allure Beauty Lab, other Filipino makeup artists described the same thing Slo has been building toward for years—a shift from the “clean girl” minimalism and back toward color, texture, and experimentation. “Makeup in general is coming back,” said Jelly Eugenio. Makeup artist Kenric Carpio puts it more bluntly, “Let’s get crazy. More experimental.”
But Slo was already there; in fact, she never left.
Even though she’s also known for her natural and skin-like makeup style, she still created head-turning looks that made you second-guess if it was her or not. She was the makeup artist behind Randolf’s Manila Fashion Week runway—making 16 looks, with 10 of them chosen. None of them were safe; they were artistic and playful.
Naturally, there were questions to ask—starting with how she first became fascinated with makeup and later becoming one of the most sought-after makeup artists for her creative and boundary-pushing work.
On how it all started for Slo Lopez
Kim Santos
You could say that Slo got her start in the same way other makeup artists did: doing makeup for other people back when she was in college. That’s how she told it anyway, giggling about how she hasn’t told the story for anyone in a while.
“I was in my second year in college, in 2011,” she shared. She described how she first started doing other people’s hair and makeup for college organizations and for herself—like it was no big deal. She wore makeup to school every day, without fail—not as a costume, but just as herself.
“All four years of college, I had makeup on my face,” she recalled. “And then eventually, by the time senior year rolled around, people knew me as the girl that did makeup.” At the time, Slo and her photographer friends would hold shoots around campus, at someone’s house, and she’d be the one doing the makeup on her models—no formal training, no client list, just the beginning of her reputation.
And even then, she was already gravitating toward the fun, creative makeup she’s known for today.
“As a kid, I would watch FashionTV,” she shared, recalling how her fascination started young. “They would sometimes do a feature on the makeup, especially during the Galliano Dior days or the crazy Pat McGrath makeup, where it was made out of balloons or crazy glitter. That’s where the fascination started.”
She even shared the first makeup product she ever owned when she was around 11 or 12 years old: a clear lip gloss. She might have received it after shedding some tears, but it was one that she remembers distinctly even now.
By the time she graduated from college, friends in the publishing industry were already tapping her for shoots—the first sign that everything was changing for her. But even as her work picked up, one thing stayed constant: an unwillingness to chase whatever was popular at the time.
On not chasing trends
Kim Santos
If you ask Slo where her artistic instincts and inspirations come from, she’s quick to draw the line between trends and taste. “I’ve always seen trends as trends, and when I look at it, there’s a part of me that feels like it’s always existed.”
To her, trends are more about timing than substance—grungy makeup, for instance, never really left; it’s just repackaged for whoever’s rediscovering it. “A trend feels like something you transact with,” she explained. “How I feel about makeup is not so transactional.”
So, does that make her a trendsetter? She laughed at the question. “The simple answer is, I have always struggled to not be myself. I don’t know another way to be.” Whether or not she was doing makeup professionally, she’d still be creating—taking photos with friends, making things for the sake of making them. “I feel the most fulfilled when I’m making something, and it doesn’t have to be witnessed at all,” she said.
It’s the process, she added—including the part where you’re bad at something before you’re good at it—that’s taught her the most about training her head, eye, and mind about what looks good.
On breaking the rules
Kim Santos
Ask Slo about the rules of conventional beauty, and she doesn’t hesitate. “I don’t really have rules of beauty, to be honest,” she said.
What she’s built is a reputation among creatives as a “yes!” person. “Photographers and creative directors tell me, ‘I can tell you the craziest idea, and you’re always just like, okay,’” she said with a smile. It all comes down to curiosity rather than rebellion—she’s not the type of person to sort ideas into categories like good or bad, pretty or ugly. “I’m like, ‘There’s something usually interesting about this,’ and I want to understand that.”
It’s also the same instinct that’s earned her a signature look that people recognize almost immediately, even if she resists naming it herself and just lets people figure it out.
“People have told me that when they look at my work, they’re like, ‘ikaw gumawa niyan, no,’” she said. Her looks occupy both extremities. On one end, they disappear entirely—skin-like and natural. On the other, they fully commit to the art. “I painted people blue,” she said. “I did super hyper-realistic makeup, where people didn’t look like themselves.”
She’s also built the cyborg look that James Reid sported for his “SODA” music video, an editorial she shot with Frankie Pangilinan for a different publication, and has credits on films such as “Abutan Man Tayo ng House Lights” (2023) and “Alamat: Gayuma” (2023).
It’s also the same signature behind the Randolf runway show mentioned earlier—recognizable enough that it doesn’t need her name attached to it.
“It’s a question for people, not for me. I don’t know if people know, but they do. So okay, I guess that’s my signature.” She laughed a bit more before relaxing. “But I guess it’s not restrained—even if it’s natural, they say that there’s a sort of feeling that they see.”
On “Art is Everyone. Everyone is Art”
Kim Santos
This same instinct is what drives her second collaboration with Issy—a collection of multi-use liquid pigments in brights, neutrals, and reflects, built under the tagline, “Art is Everyone. Everyone is Art.”
“If the first collection is basically all the powders I’ve carried in some version or the other in my makeup kit since I first started, then this new collection is all the liquid formulas I carried,” she said. These, she explained, are the shades a working makeup artist depots and curates in their kit constantly—colors she can build anything from skin tones to color characters.
The brights are pulled from two color wheels, RYB and CMY, with both a cool and warm option in pink and purple. The neutrals are built around value—how light or dark something is, regardless of hue—which she uses for toning.
The reflects, meanwhile, are simply for fun: water-based finishes meant to layer shine over the matte shades. These were formulated specifically because glitter, as Slo puts it, is fundamentally “some sort of shiny, plastic-adjacent material” that melts if built on the wrong base.
But the collection isn’t just a formula story. “I think of Issy as an entity—like what’s their vibe,” Slo said, describing her process in the creation of this new line. “This collection is basically me, as an artist, creating with Issy.” Her goal, as always, is to bring something into the Filipino market that people haven’t experienced before—even if that means something “slightly challenging” and “different.”
“People take makeup so seriously,” she said, slightly cross. “Like asking, what’s the best, or what’s the best bang for your buck? And people forget to have fun.” Whether the collection is for everyone isn’t really the point, she adds—what matters is that it provokes a reaction and a conversation, one way or another. “I think having an opinion tells you a lot about your relationship with makeup and beauty.”
It’s here where she draws her clearest line. “Pretty has never been equal to beauty for me, as a person and as an artist,” she said. “We all love pretty things—it’s shiny and fun to look at. But beauty for me is a feeling.”
Some people, she explained, don’t feel beautiful in a physical sense at all—they feel it when they’re creating something, or trying something new. “This collection is made for people who want to explore that side of themselves.”
While talking more about the collection and how it came to be, Slo’s eyes lit up. “That’s why the tagline of the collection is ‘Art is Everyone. Everyone is Art’—because I felt like my whole career is community-based,” she said. “I wanted to include people I’ve known for a decade or more because they’re the ones that helped me; they championed me when I didn’t know how to start. The very idea of community and creativity is my whole career,” Slo said proudly.
That community shows up in who she chooses to work with, too—and how. “One of the favorite people I’ve worked with is Ena Mori,” she said. “Every project I’ve worked on with her feels so special. She’d let me hear the music first, then I’d tell her that we could work together. It’s very collaborative.”
She also recalled the work she did behind that same Randolf show. “I made a total of 16 looks, and they chose 10,” she said. “I’m pretty ambitious when it comes to creative direction because I know what can be done with my skillset. It’s fun to challenge myself.”
On beauty without the pressure to follow the norm
Kim Santos
For someone this comfortable pushing boundaries, Slo is also careful about how she brings other people along. “I try to be empathetic about it,” she said. “If a person is scared, of course I’m not going to be like, ‘You should do this.’” As opinionated as she can be, she says she’s never uncompromising—always willing to hear someone out.
That same empathy shows up in how she works with clients directly. I asked about her approach on set, and she didn’t shy away from being direct about it. “When I work with a client, makeup isn’t about me—it’s about them,” she shared.
Slo described the act of doing makeup as a vulnerable one, telling me how every client that sits in the chair tells her about the things they hated about their skin and features. “So I’m able to disconnect my creative side in a way and ask, ‘How do I hold your hand and ask to tell me what you want?’, and we’ll make it work together,” she said.
Slo also describes it as an act of trust and partnership, where she creates for someone and with someone. “One of the things I do with the client is basically I’m like, ‘Is there anything you like to do with your makeup? Please tell me. And if you see something you don’t like while I’m doing it, we can tweak it.’”
She also recalled telling clients not to pay for her services simply because they were unhappy with it—showing how much she cares about producing work that they’re happy with. “I don’t feel good about charging them for something they’re unhappy with,” she said. Trust, she said, is everything in her line of work, calling it a “visceral feeling.”
Some of that, too, she said, traces back to how she was raised. “One of the biggest gifts my parents ever gave me was that they never made me feel like being pretty was my currency in life,” she said. “I was always told, ‘You’re a good person, you are creative, you’re talented, and that’s what you’re going to use to get through life.’” It’s also shaped how she moves through the industry now, especially as a woman in Philippine society. “I’m not insecure about how I move, because I’m not worried about how I look at all.”
Given how closely her identity is tied to her art, it’s almost surprising how long it took her to claim the title at all. “I think I’m more hesitant to label myself as something,” she admitted. “Even as a makeup artist, it took me forever to say that, yeah, I’m a makeup artist.”
She’s a self-taught makeup artist, and for years she was more comfortable with saying, “I do makeup,” rather than naming it as her profession. It wasn’t until other people started calling her one that she did too.
What’s next for Filipino beauty
Kim Santos
Slo has said that growing up, she noticed that the Filipino beauty scene was limited—only a handful of brands, a narrow range of shades, and the same colors to choose from. It’s a gap the industry has been actively closing since, as noted earlier—and Issy, the brand Slo now helps shape and develop, leads with 27 shades in its Active Skin Foundation alone.
And then, she met her constant collaborator and friend, Joel Andrade—the Creative Director of Issy. “It was funny, because I was filling in as a makeup artist,” she shared, smiling. “He got into a phone call with me, which was supposed to be just a briefing about the shoot. Then, it became a two-hour-long conversation about products because I love it.”
That curiosity, she’s said, has always been a part of how she works—asking why a product does or doesn’t work for her, what combinations actually hold up, and testing rather than assuming.
She’s been Issy’s Creative Visionary since July 2020, starting with the Active Skin Tint. “I’ve had a hand in all the launches since then,” she said. “I just wanted to make things that I thought were good and exciting.”
In the years since, Slo has watched the Filipino beauty scene shift—more brands are now releasing a wider range of shades, and more products are built with the local climate and skin in mind. And she’s been a huge part of pushing that shift forward.
Asked what she hopes this collaboration says about the future of Filipino beauty, she didn’t hesitate or mince her words. “I don’t like to dumb beauty down into a one-size-fits-all,” she said. “Because it’s never that way.”
Even the most universally flattering product, she pointed out, will always have its critics—and that’s totally fine. What she wants, instead, is a reaction, an engagement, and a shift in how people think about makeup at all.
More than that, she hopes that this collaboration will create space for people who aren’t chasing visibility for its own sake. “I hope that brands and people like me shine a light on people that aren’t necessarily the most flashy,” she said—people with something interesting to say, regardless of how many followers they have.
It’s something she’s already seen play out: creators without a big following making genuinely fun and inventive looks, and audiences responding to it positively. “People have been saying, ‘Creative makeup is back,’” she shared, smiling. “‘I’m so excited to do fun makeup again.’”
Maybe, with this Slo and this collection, creative makeup finds its way back into the local beauty scene. Not just in editorial shoots, magazines, or on models, but everywhere beauty actually lives.
If there’s one thing she hopes people take away from it, it’s this: worth was never about the audience. “There’s so much worth in engaging in something for yourself.”
Art direction by Nicole Almero. Photography by Kim Santos. Makeup by Celine Cabildo.
Frequently Asked Questions
Slo Lopez is a self-taught Filipino makeup artist recognized for bold, experimental editorial looks that range from skin-like natural finishes to fully painted, hyper-realistic transformations, challenging years of “clean girl” minimalism in Filipino beauty. She is also the Creative Visionary of Issy.
After years of “clean girl” minimalism, Filipino makeup artists are returning to color, texture, and experimentation. Industry voices describe this shift as makeup “coming back,” with creators embracing bold, playful looks that prioritize creativity over restrained, effortless-looking styles.
Slo Lopez sees trends as transactional and timing-based rather than meaningful, noting that many looks simply get repackaged for new audiences. Her approach to beauty is personal and consistent, driven by curiosity and self-expression rather than by what’s currently popular.
Slo Lopez’s second collaboration with Issy is a collection of multi-use liquid pigments in brights, neutrals, and reflects, built from the formulas she has carried in her professional makeup kit throughout her career, spanning skin tones to full color transformations. The collection’s tagline is, “Art is Everyone. Everyone is Art.”
She listens first, treating every session as collaborative rather than corrective. Clients are asked what they want and invited to speak up if something feels off, and Slo says she won’t charge someone unhappy with the result.
