As the fourth season of Define Beauty kicks off this week, we’re revisiting the film that ignited the series, which has since seen a host of visionary directors—including Bart Hess, CANADA and Barnaby Roper—get under the skin of our relationship to desirability by fusing notions of beauty and the grotesque.

Originally titled Natural Beauty, the film was shot by Dutch photography duo Lernert & Sander in 2011, when beauty blogging and makeup tutorials were yet to saturate the digital landscape. Enlisting model Hannelore Knuts, over three minutes makeup artist Ferry van der Nat applies a year’s worth of makeup onto the Belgian beauty’s face. 

“We tested a 100-layer session a few days before on our intern, as we wanted to make sure that this amount of makeup wouldn't kill a person,” say the duo of the intensive process. “It didn't kill our intern so we trusted everything would be fine on Hannelore.”