Catie, known as Probably Prisma on Instagram, creates handmade makeup transformations that are equal parts sculpture, illusion, and artistic brilliance.
Ever since AI started flooding our feeds with hyper realistic images and videos, we’ve all developed the same reflex. The second something looks too unbelievable to be real, the first question is, “Wait, is this AI?” That was probably your reaction too if you’ve stumbled upon one of Catie’s art makeup videos, and it was definitely mine. The thumbnail showed what looked like a fully realistic lion mask, and I was convinced it had to be digitally made. Except it wasn’t. She’d sculpted and painted the whole thing directly onto her own face, by hand, layer by layer.
What actually hooks you is watching her build it because she never starts with anything you can recognise. She begins with random shapes, blobs of paint, and odd bits of structure that seem to belong to nothing, and somehow every layer she adds makes it harder to guess where it’s headed instead of easier. She never gives away the ending too soon. Sometimes she changes herself into a realistic lion, sometimes a Venus flytrap, and sometimes a giant blinking eye and it is all done so convincingly that you genuinely forget you’re looking at makeup and not the real thing.
We went down the rabbit hole of Catie’s page and found ourselves watching one transformation after another, each one more unexpected than the last. So we picked some of her wildest creations, the ones that left us staring at the screen and wondering, “How did she even do that?”
