Darcey Sarah is a London-based makeup artist and creative director whose work explores the intersection between beauty, emotion, and sensory experience. With a neurodivergent lens and a background in editorial and collaborative artmaking, Darcey’s practice focuses on translating sound, memory, and feeling into visual forms. She is the founder of TIHIF: Sensorium, a growing collective spotlighting sensorially-led creatives, and is passionate about building space for artists whose work goes beyond the surface. Her recent work spans editorial direction, music visuals, and multi-artist collaboration, with a commitment to beauty as storytelling, not just aesthetics.
Current Obsession: What story or idea does your graduation work explore, and why was it important for you to tell it now?
Darcey Armstrong: This Is How It Feels: Sensorium is a multi-disciplinary beauty project exploring how sensory experience, emotion and neurodivergence influence creative practice. Split into three sub-projects, it merges hair and makeup artistry with storytelling, music and fine art to create expressive, editorial visuals rooted in identity.
From translating sound into makeup in collaboration with musician Adenike Lawal, to sculpting hair as architectural material inspired by neurodivergent artists, and creating personalised looks based on interviews with ten multidisciplinary creatives — this project celebrates intuitive, feeling-led design. Through sensory exploration, emotional depth, and bold experimentation, it asks: ‘What does creativity look like when we stop trying to be palatable and start honouring our own sensory world?’
This story felt urgent to tell now because I’ve spent years learning to unmask, to reframe neurodivergence not as a limitation, but as a creative gift. In a world that often prioritises minimalism and control, I wanted to make something maximal, emotional and free.
‘What I once called a limitation — my sensitivity, my intensity, my need for texture — became the foundation of how I create. Neurodivergence gave me a new grammar for beauty.’
CO: Who or what has shaped your practice in unexpected ways?
DA: Honestly, the biggest influence has been other artists – not necessarily established ones, but my peers. Hearing how dancers, artists, musicians and designers feel their work, rather than just make it, has shifted how I approach beauty. Collaborating with people outside of traditional fashion or makeup circles has made me see artistry as something deeply sensory, emotional and instinctive.
Also, neurodivergence – learning about my own has helped me realise that what I once saw as limitations were actually strengths: my sensitivity, my intensity, my need for texture and ritual in what I make. It’s made me honour process over polish. The more I unlearn the‘right’ way to be an artist, the more powerful my practice becomes.
CO: Does your work reflect or respond to a cultural context or issue that’s personal to you?
DA: Yes, this project responds to the pressure creatives often face to dilute or strip back their work to make it more digestible. As someone who works intuitively and is influenced by sensory experiences, emotions, and neurodivergence, I wanted to challenge the idea that beauty must be clean, minimal or palatable to be taken seriously. My work reflects a desire to honour maximalism, feeling, chaos, and depth ,especially in spaces where that’s not always celebrated. Collaborating with other artists from underrepresented or alternative practices allowed me to explore beauty as storytelling, identity, and even resistance. In that way, the project becomes a quiet act of reclamation , a way of saying that work led by feeling and instinct is just as valid, powerful, and deserving of space.
