ABOUT

Micellar water had already transformed the cleansing category. L’Oréal Paris was now pushing it somewhere unexpected: a new black formula harnessing the purifying power of carbon. The product was visually striking, but also counterintuitive — cleansing water that was itself completely black.

The project came out of a longstanding relationship with L’Oréal, built over years of working across its brands.

The Brief

Launch Black Micellar Water with a campaign that could make a new and unfamiliar formula immediately understandable — communicating its deep cleansing credentials while creating enough intrigue and visual impact to cut through a crowded beauty category.

The Work

The creative was built around the idea of deep purifying power: black becoming the visual language of cleansing rather than dirt.

I led the creative direction across the campaign, developing a dark, highly graphic world of carbon, ingredients, particles and black water. The hero film dramatised the product’s ingredients and cleansing action, moving between macro textures, suspended particles and fluid imagery to show impurities being attracted, captured and removed.

The visual system extended that story into key visuals, product imagery and digital and ecommerce content — giving the launch a distinctive world that could work from brand storytelling through to product education and conversion.

The Impact

The result gave an unconventional new product an immediately recognisable identity and helped turn a potentially difficult proposition — black water for cleaner, brighter-looking skin — into the campaign’s strongest asset.

The work supported a highly successful product launch, bringing together product efficacy and beauty storytelling in a visual language that could carry consistently across campaign, social, retail and ecommerce.