What it had to solve
Launch a brand film for make-up brand Karen Betts that turns conventional beauty advertising on its head.
The idea
A surreal, shape-shifting brand film that refuses beauty's rulebook: no permission, no performance, no occasion — ending on a disguised final act of rebellion.
How it works
Directed by ArtClass' Chloe Victoria Hughes, produced by CHIEF Productions with Propaganda Agency: a sequence of surreal vignettes, seamless transitions and unexpected visual turns, each scene pulling the audience deeper into the next.
What it did
The film launched as Karen Betts' brand statement — beauty that is 'freer, sharper and more instinctive' than the occasion-wear rule; the source records no performance figures.
Background
Make up brand Karen Betts launched Beauty Without Occasion, a subversive brand film directed by ArtClass' Chloe Victoria Hughes and produced by CHIEF Productions in collaboration with Propaganda Agency. The film sets out to reject the conventions of traditional beauty advertising.
It moves through a sequence of surreal vignettes, seamless transitions and unexpected visual turns. Chloe builds a strange, playful world where each scene pulls the audience deeper into the next, building towards a disguised final act of rebellion. Bold, cinematic and deliberately unpredictable, the film captures a brand refusing to wait for the right moment: it challenges the idea that beauty should be saved for special occasions and replaces it with something 'freer, sharper and more instinctive'.
The result, in the film's own words, is 'a film about beauty without permission, performance or occasion' — the occasion-wear rule inverted into the brand's promise.
Why it lands
Beauty advertising runs on the occasion formula — the big night out, the red carpet — which caps how often the product matters.
A make-up brand that sells permanent, everyday artistry needed a manifesto, not another transformation reel.
Surreal transitions signal craft and refusal at once, marking the film as unlike the category's gloss.
The disguised rebellion gives the film a turn that rewards watching to the end.
What you can take
Name the convention you are breaking, then make the breaking of it the brand line: 'without occasion' is both the film's logic and the product's new use case.
Since then
The film launched in August 2026; the source records no performance or distribution figures.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE