Some events feel like events. This one felt like stepping straight into the brand.
Ulta Beauty × Cakes Body transformed our venue partner, Casita Hollywood, into a bright, playful, confident environment, and our team was brought in to shape that transformation through lighting and visual design. The goal was simple: the venue should not just host the collaboration. It needed to feel like it.
Building a Brand-Forward Atmosphere
The creative direction centered on warmth, glow, and color stories that represent both Ulta Beauty and Cakes Body. Our job was to sculpt the room with intentional lighting choices so guests walked into something that felt unmistakably tied to the collaboration.
We shaped the environment using:
• Soft flattering beauty lighting
• Warm pink and coral tones connected to Ulta’s palette
• LED highlights to define pathways, displays, and hero moments
• Clean lighting zones for photo and video capture
• Deeper color accents to create depth and dimension
Every detail supported the product narrative and the playful spirit of the partnership.
Lighting Designed for the Face, the Product, and the Camera
Beauty-focused lighting has its own quiet rules. It must fit the space, the brand, the product, and the cameras capturing it. That means handling shadows, tone, color accuracy, and warmth with intention.
Everything was planned to:
• enhance complexion and glow
• keep product textures true to color
• make talent look incredible both live and on camera
• avoid harsh contrast that flattens or distorts features
• support social content, press capture, and branded moments
When the lighting is right, people feel good and the brand looks expensive. That balance is the core of beauty-focused technical design.
A Venue That Became the Brand
By the time the doors opened, Casita Hollywood no longer felt like a rented venue. It felt like Ulta Beauty × Cakes Body. Bright, expressive, feminine, and instantly recognizable. The lighting, color choices, and architectural highlights created an environment that told the story without needing signage or instruction.
How Lighting Shapes Experiential Moments
In experiential work, lighting is one of the most powerful tools you have. It guides movement, directs attention, shapes emotion, and defines how guests experience the brand. For beauty-focused activations, lighting does more than support the environment. It becomes the environment.
At Ulta Beauty × Cakes Body, the lighting design determined how guests discovered displays, how product moments came forward, how photo opportunities naturally formed, and how the collaboration lived on through shared content. When lighting, color, and spatial design align with the brand, the space stops functioning like an event. It becomes an experience shaped around the product, the people, and the story being told.
That is the foundation of experiential design.
About Lumina
Lumina is a full-service live event and virtual production company specializing in event lighting design, LED wall rentals, large-format video displays, projection mapping, and immersive visual environments for festivals, touring artists, corporate events, premieres, hospitality venues, and experiential brand activations across Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. Our in-house team manages event lighting systems, custom LED wall builds, content playback, audio engineering, media servers, scenic fabrication, staging, rigging, CAD drawings, and full 3D previsualization for shows of every size. From festival lighting and VIP environments to virtual production LED stages and corporate broadcast studios, we deliver high-impact technical design and reliable operation for brands and creative teams. As demand for advanced lighting systems and large-scale LED installations grew across the West Coast, Lumina expanded its operations into Las Vegas and San Francisco to support conferences, nightlife, hospitality, tech events, and major brand experiences with fast on-site coverage. Trusted by agencies, venues, and global clients, Lumina builds bright LED environments, cinematic lighting, and precision technical systems that elevate every event from intimate corporate moments to full stadium and festival builds.
