You may have seen Maybelline’s new advert for their Sky High mascara – and if you haven’t, where have you been? It’s all over TikTok and people just Can’t. Stop. Watching.
The video shows public transport such as trains and buses with lashes on top of them which then get brushed through with a mascara wand as they go under them. It’s such a cool concept—only it’s not real.
The comments under this video are proof.
One person wrote, “Is this real??? Or animated?” while another said, “POV: you came here after finding out it’s CGI and not real” with a mindblown emoji. Someone had to ruin the mood, though, with one user saying that the fact people couldn’t tell if it was CGI or not was “concerning” as if big brands haven’t done some crazy shit before that is, in fact, real (you know, like build a whole, actual house.
After days of the advert getting more and more popular, a member of the brand’s U.K.-based marketing team, Lauren Chapman, explained in a TikTok just how it came to be.
“We had no idea this would blow up so much. So essentially, I think it was about two or three months ago give or take, me and my manager found this really cool video on Instagram by this CGI artist and we were like ‘Oh my god it would be so cool if we do something like this’ because we’ve just never done anything like this before.”
The artist is Ian Padgham (Origiful on Instagram) and I don’t blame her for being fascinated, his art is incredible.
She went on to explain that because Maybelline is such a big brand, it can be “quite hard” to do “cool, weird things” as there is a lot that needs to be approved and hurdles to overcome to get the final product.
“We had this idea of ‘is it real, is it fake?’ type of content that we wanted people to genuinely think that ‘Maybelline’s actually managed to pull this off,’ and we knew that we wanted it to be about our mascaras.”
She then reached out to Padgham on Instagram and gave him the brief and he, of course, agreed to help with the project. Lauren called him “such a creative genius” and said that he was the one to come up with the transport idea.
“Honestly, I feel like I’ve seen it so many times that I feel like I’m almost desensitized to it,” she says. “[I was thinking] ‘are people going to like it?’ ‘Are people going to think it’s weird?’ I had no idea what people were going to think. But luckily people loved it.”
She finished the video by saying that, actually, the team behind the video isn’t as big as you may think. “It’s just a couple of normal people wanting to do something fun.”
(featured image: Maybelline)
