Roscino and the Art of the Unbeautiful

There is a moment, a few minutes into a conversation with Roscino, when you realise you could listen to them for hours. The precision of their language, the ease with which they move between references, the quiet authority of a mind that has done the work, it is a rare kind of intelligence, and an even rarer kind of speaker.And then something shifts.

You are no longer looking at their face. You are looking at yours wondering what they would do to it. A ghost of green on the eyelid? A mouth that drifts slightly too far to the left? It is not an uncomfortable feeling, exactly. It is more like standing in a funhouse mirror that, for once, might be telling the truth.

Roscino - they/them,formerly of southern Italy, now based in Paris’s 18th arrondissement - is a makeup artist. But that word, on its own, is almost comically insufficient. They are also a philosopher, a pamphleteer, a caricaturist, a dropout-turned-academic of ugliness. On Instagram, where nearly 15,000 people follow their work, their bio reads: Priestess of Ugliness. Caricature / Asymmetry / Kitsch / Grotesque / Disgust.

It sounds like a manifesto.
It is.

"In all of us there is something agri and something beautiful. Not on the outside. Inside. The goal is to decide what to do with both."

I. The South, The Mirror, The Mother's Makeup Bag

The story begins in 2017, in a town in southern Italy that Roscino describes, diplomatically, as not very open-minded. They were 16, fascinated by drag culture, and surrounded by people who had no particular framework for that fascination. So they did what any resourceful teenager does in a creative vacuum: they raided their mother's makeup bag.

"Her products were disgusting," they tell me, with the affectionate brutality of someone who has long since made peace with the origin story. "Cheap, ugly, really terrible." Their friends attempted to help. Their friends were not skilled. Roscino looked in the mirror at the results and reached a conclusion that would define the next eight years: I think I can do something better than that.

Halloween 2017: their first real look. Chanel Oberlin. Created in southern Italy. "Very specific energy," Roscino says, and laughs. Then came a collaboration with a local hair salon that organised an annual fashion show for its clients - the clients themselves walking as models. "For southern Italy, it was kind of revolutionary. They had no idea what a fashion show even was." Roscino did all the makeup alone, speaking to each person about their face, reading their identity, offering them something. "It was the first time I understood what it means to build a character on someone else's skin."

After Milan - where they worked, trained, and began to crystallise a sensibility - came Paris. The reason was love, in the form of an ex. The reason it stuck was something more complicated and more interesting: opposition.

"Paris is all about control. The images, how you dress, which café you go to. Beauty here is a given. So my instinct is: great, I'm going completely in the other direction."

"It's a duel with a city," Roscino says. They live in La Goutte d'Or, the multicultural neighbourhood in the 18th that feels nothing like the Paris of tourism brochures, and they love it precisely for that reason. "The south of Paris? Who goes there? The men are sweaty and corporate. It's not my world." Paris, for Roscino, is not a home so much as a sparring partner : a place so committed to a certain idea of beauty that resisting it becomes, in itself, an aesthetic and political act.

II. Hegel, Rosenkrantz, and the Fourteen-Year Book

This is the part where the conversation stops being a conversation and starts being a lecture - the best kind, delivered by someone who has forgotten they are supposed to be charming and has started being brilliant instead.

Roscino discovered the philosophy of ugliness the way most people discover things that change their lives: by accident, on the internet, late at night. They were already making bold, disharmonious makeup. They were already, instinctively, working against beauty. Then they found a book. The first book, they say, that truly addresses the subject: Karl Rosenkrantz, a student of Hegel, who spent fourteen years - fourteen years - writing a comprehensive philosophy of the aesthetic of ugliness, published in 1853.

"Hegel himself gave four courses at university in 1829 on the beauty of ugliness," Roscino tells us, with the quiet satisfaction of someone dropping information they know will land. "And then Rosenkrantz said: okay, maybe I'll do a huge research on this. Fourteen years. It's a lot." It is, indeed, a lot. But it produced something that Roscino has read, annotated, and incorporated into their practice like a second nervous system.

Then came Umberto Eco - the Italian, more accessible, more encyclopaedic - who compiled texts, paintings, sculptures, and films into a single history of ugliness as a philosophical category. Then Baudelaire's sculptor friend, whose work on caricature and French politicians Roscino describes as "devastatingly funny and very political." Then Mushtari Lal, one of the first women to write a book explicitly titled Agriness - beginning with a personal experience and expanding it into something collective. "I don't like artists who only talk about themselves," Roscino says. "Your experience is not collective. But if you start with your experience and then look outward - that's where real politics begins."

"Pre-politics is understanding you have a problem. Politics is understanding that other people have the same problem and deciding to do something about it."

This distinction - between pre-politics and politics - is one Roscino returns to often. It is, in many ways, the engine of their entire practice. They are queer, they are southern Italian, they are agri in a world that rewards its opposite. And rather than stop there - at the personal, at the individual wound - they use it as a starting point. The makeup is the vehicle. The message is larger.

"I use the aesthetic of ugliness to speak of things a little deeper. Humans are disgusting inside - that's the most important thing I want to communicate. Because we don't do genocides in the animal kingdom. We don't have capitalism in the forest. All of these horrible things we made them. And then we built the most beautiful cities in the world on top of them."

They pause. "That's the mask. And I want to paint it."

III. The Red Lines

A philosophy of ugliness with no limits sounds like a convenient excuse for anything. Roscino is, in this regard, deeply inconvenient.

Ask them what they will never do, and the answer comes fast, with the quiet certainty of someone who has thought about this for years. Cultural appropriation. Full stop. No geisha makeup for a beauty project. No caricature of cultures they don't belong to. "The geisha has a story. It has a statement. It's important for the story. And it's not mine to use."

The anecdote that follows is told without drama, which makes it more unsettling. A set. A photographer. A Black model. Midway through the shoot, the photographer asks for black paint to be applied to the model's legs. "The model looked at me," Roscino says. "I looked back at her. And I said no. Immediately." They stopped the shoot, spoke to the director, made their position clear. "For me the red line is respect. Not as a vague concept. As a specific, operational decision, on set, in real time."

The same precision applies to brands. Roscino does research. They trace corporate ownership, read public statements, track political positions. They work with MAC, with L'Oréal brands - they are honest about the contradictions that involves - but they have stopped taking new products from labels they can't fully endorse. At the end of fashion week, they take what they've accumulated and give it away.

"On my terrace. Five o'clock. First come, first served. One or two products per person." They smile. "Last time I made it a proper post. A lot of people came. It was a nice connection. Someone who has never had access to a thirty-euro foundation - that matters. That's also part of the work."

"When you put on a different lipstick and call it alternative, that's not a philosophy. That's just a product. An artist needs a message."

And trends? Roscino on trends is like a sommelier on soft drinks - politely contemptuous, deeply uninterested. "I hate trends. I don't work with brands that talk about trends. The interesting thing is not what is beautiful or ugly right now. The interesting thing is why. Why do you want to talk about beauty? Why now? That's already a political question. Without the why, you have nothing."

IV. The Twelve-Euro Book

Culture, for Roscino, is not an amenity. It is infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it only works if everyone can access it.

They grew up in a family with books and university degrees and museum memberships - a fact they state not with pride but with clarity, as context. "And then I watched my friends, who were just as curious, just as alive, who didn't have any of that." The conclusion they reached is characteristic in its directness: curiosity is more important than intelligence. Intelligence is a privilege distributed unevenly by birth and circumstance. Curiosity is a choice.

And the book - the project they have been building for three years, on caricature, on ugliness, on faces as political statements - was nearly published at a hundred euros. Roscino said no. "That speaks to the rich. I don't care about the rich." They found another editor. The book will cost twelve euros. "For a student, for someone precarious, for someone who has never bought an art book because they are eighty euros and you are trying to pay rent - that person can buy this. That matters more than the production value."

"Culture shouldn't be gated. I don't want to talk to the people who already hang art on their walls."

V. Quick Fire

We end, as all good interviews should, with the things that don't fit anywhere else.

Zombie makeup or wedding makeup? "Zombie. Obviously. Wedding makeup is disgusting." Which Parisian monument would you put makeup on? A long pause, then: "The Eiffel Tower to make it even uglier. I actually think it already looks like a TV signal tower. So I would go further. Make it worse." What about something they actually like? "Versailles can explode. It is the symbol of every problem a profoundly unequal society can create, and we've completely romanticised it. Marie Antoinette eating macarons. Please. The woman was sent there as a child. She didn't invent the system. But the system was real, and it was violent, and we made it into a Netflix series."

Their biggest makeup inspiration? Inge Grognard, who started with Margiela in the 1980s when everything else was glamour and cheekbones, and was already doing raw faces, aggressive reds, punk and dirty and magnificent. "That was avant-garde. Real avant-garde - not because it was weird but because it was early, and right." And body art: Yves Klein, Gina Pane, Marina Abramović. The first people to use the body as a canvas. "That's where it starts. Not in beauty. In the body as an idea."

And then the last question, the one we always ask: if the world became universally beautiful tomorrow - what would you do?

Roscino thinks for a moment. Not long.

"Retire. Or maybe try to understand why. Because that conversation – that's an interesting one. Not what is beautiful and what is ugly. But why, at this particular moment in history, did everyone agree? What happened? What did we lose? Or find?" A pause. "That would be worth staying for."

Roscino isn't simply disrupting the codes of beauty.

They're writing a new history of it.

Like historians, they aren't collecting images, they're constructing a language. A system. An archive that will outlive trends, seasons, and even faces themselves.Because what Roscino understands instinctively, methodically is that aesthetics is always a matter of power. And that redefining it is already shifting the lines of history.

There's something rare in their approach: an innovation that doesn't seek to seduce, but to endure.

And that's precisely why it will leave a mark.