A lipstick covered in crystals, a sparkling plate, stretch marks turned into constellations: in Sara Shakeel's world, the most ordinary things suddenly look like treasures. It would be easy to dismiss it as a pretty, fleeting Instagram effect. Yet behind that shower of light lies a distinctive way of looking at what we consider beautiful, what we try to hide, and the small things we have stopped noticing.
An Artist Born on a Screen
Sara Shakeel's path is not the one we might expect of an artist exhibiting internationally. Originally from Pakistan, she first pursued dentistry before discovering in digital collage another way to express herself. Her early experiments began appearing on Instagram in 2016. Learning her tools through trial and error, she layered crystals onto photographs and gradually developed a signature that is instantly recognizable. What began as the urge to make something became a visual language of its own.
What I find delightful is how often her pictures make us question what we are seeing. Does that lipstick actually exist? Is that fruit really studded with gemstones? The boundary between photograph, collage and physical object becomes deliberately uncertain. That brief hesitation is part of the magic: it stops us in the middle of an endless stream of images, if only for a few seconds. And on social media, making someone look rather than merely scroll is already a small victory.
Making What We Hide Shine
Among her most memorable works are the images of stretch marks covered in glitter. Sara Shakeel turns these marks, so often described as imperfections, into luminous lines resembling maps of the night sky. The gesture seems simple, but it reverses the usual gaze: rather than erasing a trace, she highlights it. I love the idea that a detail someone might wish to conceal can become the very heart of an image. The sparkle is no longer merely decorative; it suggests a kinder way of looking at bodies.
When Crystals Leave the Screen
Digital success could easily have trapped Sara Shakeel in a single formula. Instead, her world gradually stepped off the screen and into physical spaces. In 2019, she created The Great Supper for London's NOW Gallery: a dining table, chairs, crockery and food entirely dressed in crystals. Spectacular, certainly, but inspired by something intimate: family meals, those moments when people take time to talk and be together.
I like this work because it gives her fascination with sparkle a different meaning. The crystals do more than make a table extraordinary; they draw attention to a daily ritual whose value we sometimes forget. Her work has also crossed into music, notably through the cover of Chance the Rapper's The Big Day, and expanded through other installations. The same question seems to return: how can we give new presence to something we thought we already knew?
From Viral Images to Lasting Work
In August 2026, an exhibition at Islamabad's Tanzara Gallery offered a reminder of how far she has travelled since her first Instagram collages. Sara Shakeel is no longer simply an artist whose pictures travel widely online: she builds spaces, works with memory and creates a dialogue between the virtual and the material. Of course, not everything that sparkles automatically becomes art. But when the shimmer makes us see a body, an object or a memory differently, something more interesting than a visual trick is taking place. Perhaps that is where the true light of her work can be found, somewhere behind the crystals.
