We didn’t make a beauty ad; we engineered a sighting. Cape Town’s airport approach became our set—mascara as street furniture, billboard as interaction layer, a LIFT jet gliding past on cue—and we comped it like it was caught on a friend’s phone, not a soundstage. The brief was simple: make Sky High feel native to travel culture, then let the product do something only VFX can stage—brush lashes on a billboard while a plane cruises by—so people argue about reality in the comments while the benefit lands. Maybelline SA rolled it out with LIFT as a CGI teaser, the airline pushed the reel, and the internet did the rest; Vertex handled the mixed-reality build and integration, keeping the physics, reflections, and light wraps honest enough to pass the casual-scroll test.