Aesop and Amsterdam-based body architect, Lucy McRae, have released a short film – Morphē, which coincides with the relaunch of Aesop’s website.

Aesop commissioned McRae to conceive and direct a three-and-a-half minute piece. For the setting, McRae transformed an old Amsterdam church into an ordered space that references Aesop’s own laboratory. Here, a scientist employs an assortment of gels, liquids, and weird contraptions to minister arcane beauty treatments to a sleeping muse.

There are references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, however, McRae describes her scientist as inspired by nineteenth-century scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz, and his revolutionary research on human perception: “Everything,” wrote Helmholtz, “is an event on the skin.”

“I wanted to suggest a journey inside a world beyond skin care, one that involves farther realms of perception within the sensory landscape of the human body. At the edge of this world, the skin and hair play key roles for the female specimen fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a new kind of super-sensory beauty treatment,” explains McRae.