Romanie-Jade Tulloch, a 20-year-old self-taught makeup artist from Nottingham, in the UK, combines her love of makeup and art to create mind-blowing optical illusions on her face.

Romanie has always been into makeup, but she only started focusing on it two years ago, in the hopes of becoming a freelance makeup artist. She never studied professional makeup, preferring instead to hone her skills by watching online tutorials and experimenting with various cosmetics. Having studied fine arts for two years in college, she naturally drifted from conventional makeup to painting artistic optical illusions on her face and posting her best work on Instagram. Before she knew it, she had hundreds of thousands of followers on the popular social network.

Photo: @cakefacerj/Instagram

“I didn’t study makeup, but I was home educated by my mum, and then I studied for a fine art extended diploma at NCN college,” Romanie-Jade Tulloch told English newspaper Metro, last year. “I feel like these things really helped me focus on growing my art and different techniques, which funnily enough still helps me when I’m doing my makeup illusions.”

The self-taught artist mostly relies on small paintbrushes and professional makeup products you can find in pretty much any cosmetics store, and spends between three and five hours on a single artwork.

Romanie’s impressive makeup art has blown up on Instagram, and in less than two years, she has amassed a following of over 300,000 people. She also posts makeup tutorials on her YouTube channel.

Romanie-Jade Tulloch is just one of the expert makeup artist who use Instagram to share their mind-blowing optical illusions with the world. In the past, we’ve featured many other such talented individuals, like Mimi Choi, Luca Luce, Dain Yoon or Monika Falčik.