Q & A - Chiara Di Ponzio & Francesca Mircola
Please tell us about your different backgrounds and what brought you together to start Microscope me up?
Francesca: We have known each other for a very long time, we attended high school together in our hometown, Taranto. Then I studied in Pavia for my master’s in biotechnology and Chiara studied in Rome for her master’s in biomedical engineering. Now we have swapped: I am working on my PhD in engineering, while Chiara is about to achieve her PhD in biology. We have been great friends for the last 15 years, and we share a big passion for makeup and science. That’s what brought us together in
this project: we wanted to bridge these two worlds to show the beauty of science to everyone.
How do you use the artistic aesthetics of make up to communicate scientific concepts?
Chiara: Science has a huge weight on our life, but often scientists don’t consider the importance of scientific communication. It can be really hard to understand science, but microscopy allows the visualization of many different complex systems. It is a mesmerizing world of shapes, patterns and colors that can inspire any creative mind. Make-up, on the other hand, is a form of art and any face, or body, can be the perfect canvas to portray the beauty of the microscopic world. But to achieve our ultimate goal, merging these two worlds visually in a post is not enough: as scientists we try to explain scientific concepts behind the microscopy image and give everyone the chance to understand science a little more.
Please describe some examples of your works, and explain what they show.
In the images shown, we show an example of our format. We collaborate with scientists who provide us with microscopy images from their research.
Then, we propose these images to make-up artists whose work we particularly like and we ask them to create a microscopy ispired make-up look in their own style. Finally, we post the two images together and shortly explain the scientific content.
As shown in the first image of this article, Sophie Morgani imaged stem cells derived from mouse models and stained (colored) them to highlight the cytoskeleton proteins.
The image on the previous page shows Raluca Elena Mirea’s make-up look inspired by Morgani’s image. The Microscope me up logo (shown below), represents the philosophy of mixing microscopy and make-up in a creative way.
What are you hoping to achieve next in your project? Are exhibitions a possibility?
Francesca & Chiara: The reason why we created this page is to make science accessible to everyone, no matter the age, the gender, or the background.
So, our next goal is to expand our community and include as many people as possible.
We appreciate many other sci-artists so one of our next steps will be to collaborate with some of them to organize exhibitions or sci-art events. In this perspective, we think such events should use the potential of social media as the perfect virtual space.
In fact, we are currently working on another initiative on our Instagram page: creating a new style of “scientific conference” to open the science community to make-up and the artistic side of science. An exemplary session works this way: a scientist explains her/his findings while a make-up artist creates a look during the time of the talk.
We have gladly realised that our community is highly interested in these live sessions because they can ask scientists any question and get a direct answer from experts. In future, we plan to collaborate with make-up artists to bring science outreach to make-up and fashion events.
Finally, we would like to establish new collaborations with make-up and microscopy related brands - possibly combining them.