LSN : Daily Signals : 24 : 07 : 26

How playful co-creation is expanding beauty’s language

Draw Me A Face, Buro Nōto, Pierre-Emmanuel Testard and Tiziana Raimondo, France

France – Paris-based creative studio Buro Nōto has turned children’s unfiltered imagination into a new visual language for beauty. Created with photographer Pierre-Emmanuel Testard and make-up artist Tiziana Raimondo, Draw Me A Face invited children to sketch onto portraits before translating their marks into fully realised make-up looks.

The resulting images reject the symmetry, proportion and corrective techniques that typically shape beauty aesthetics. Instead, vivid colours and graphic forms stretch instinctively across the face, producing compositions guided by curiosity as opposed to beauty convention.

The project positions play as a design methodology. By handing creative authorship to children, the collaborators temporarily suspend established visual codes and reverse traditional hierarchies of expertise. This expands the category beyond technical perfection towards experimentation, expression and creative freedom.

In our macrotrend report The Great Beauty Blur, we highlight the art of disruption, where individuals and brands are embracing provocation, distortion and interpretive aesthetics to break digital monotony.

Strategic opportunity

Use playful co-creation to disrupt category conventions. Invite unexpected collaborators into the design process to generate fresh visual codes, product ideas and creative campaigns unconstrained by established rules

Foresight Friday: Alice Crossley, principal strategic foresight analyst

Every Friday, we offer an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, principal strategic foresight analyst Alice Crossley unpacks how the climate crisis is turning up the heat on the travel industry.

: I escaped the London heatwave for severe heat warnings in Spain last week. Despite being an island, Ibiza offered little escape from the heat – reaching temperatures of mid-30°C, but with humidity levels of up to 90%, it felt closer to 40°C.

: For an island whose entire economy is built on outdoor hedonism – beach clubs, open-air parties, sunrise-to-sunset tourism – rising temperatures threaten Ibiza’s way of life. Conversation often turned to whether the ‘Ibiza season’ (late April to mid-October) should stretch in one direction or another to avoid over-tourism during the peak-heat months.

: Behaviour is already changing. We moved slower, staying closer to water and sought out spaces with reliable air-conditioning over the spots with the best music or energy.

: Across every sector we track, the story is turning from climate mitigation to climate adaptation, but it’s never more evident than in the travel sector – as explored in our How Climate Change is Re-routing Travel report.

Six Senses, Ibiza, Spain

: This week, we launched the first of our Global Drivers 2027+ – a series of drops understanding and exploring the forces of tomorrow – their origins, their trajectory, their impact. The report series provides a deeper dive into the methodology behind The Future Laboratory’s foresight thinking.

Keep an eye out for our Climate Adaptation and Resource Scarcity Global Driver – coming soon – which will unpack how extreme weather and resource scarcity are now present-day realities, forcing systemic changes to how we live, work and build.

Quote of the week

‘The reality of travel is very different now. We’re having to operate in a very different geopolitical environment and there are big, macro topics that are impacting everything – not just vacations but our way of life, our weather, everything. That’s just our world now’

Julia Lo Bue-Said, CEO, Advantage Travel Partnership, via CNN Travel

Stat: Use of AI for luxury shoppers increases with wealth in the US, but decreases in China

Other Matter x Aesop Hainan, photography by Jonathan Leijonhufvud courtesy of Aesop, China

Global – AI assistants are reshaping luxury shopping, influencing how consumers discover, compare and choose products, according to Face to Face With Luxury Clients produced by BoF Insights and McKinsey & Co.

The research reveals regional differences: 27% of established clients in the US use AI when luxury shopping, with adoption increasing alongside spending. In China, AI use is highest among occasional luxury shoppers (18%), who turn to it primarily to understand product quality and specifications.

AI is becoming a new digital storefront, shifting luxury discovery from brand-led experiences to AI-mediated recommendations. In the US, established luxury clients use AI most often for exploration, followed by decision-making. In China, usage is research-led, particularly among aspirational clients.

Generational differences are also emerging: 51% of Millennials in the US and China who use AI for luxury shopping rely on it for decision-making, while 68% of Gen X in China use AI mainly for exploration.

As explored in our Future of Discovery report, this shift means brands must rethink how they are found. Rather than relying on a single discovery channel, businesses should design for fragmented recall by building distinctive brand signals that remain recognisable across AI assistants, search, social platforms and emerging touchpoints, even when consumers encounter them out of context.

Strategic opportunity

Structure product data, specifications and storytelling so AI assistants can accurately understand, recommend and represent brands during consumer discovery journeys