Dr. Comenge wanted to break into the skincare market with a splash. His bio-medical facial cream products were natural and non-invasive, so I developed the idea of taking a famous and familiar face and attacking it with all the intrusive beauty methods on the market. Mona Lisa’s smile won’t ever the same after players manipulate her famous gaze with lip-plumping and cosmetic alterations using botox, collagen, and some nipping and tucking of her other “famous assets.” Clicking on the various tools will turn the cursor into a syringe, scalpel, or beaker of skin bleach. Distorting the painting’s classic beauty feels wrong, and this aversion transposes onto the invasive beauty techniques symbolized in the game. 

The seed campaign was sent to a list of 300 journalists, and submitted to relevant beauty blogs. Over five thousand visitors signed up for more information about Dr. Comenge products, and the game received more than two million plays in the first year, with a peak of 30,000 visitors a day for a month.

Major brands in the skincare space spend enormous amounts of money on advertising, making it difficult for a start-up brand to compete for consumer awareness. The lesson? Humor, a clever idea, and some baroque harpsichord background music can beat the odds. Media buzz on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and W Magazine led to unprecedented placement for a startup brand in Sephora, Apothia, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue.

The game was built in Flash and programmed with Actionscript. Dozens of facial states were created in Photoshop and saved with feathered transparent backgrounds so they could seamlessly overlay based on the user interaction. Even though Flash is deprecated, through the wonder of the Ruffle Flash Emulator you can play the game here:

https://getmefrank.com/mona