Head Make-Up Artist = A Lot to Think About!

So another week has gone by in my little world of beauty & makeup and what an action packed time it's been! I attended a makeup launch for Armani and discovered a few fab products that I've never used before; like the gorgeous fluid sheer in number 2. It's an iridescent, transparent liquid makeup that gives skin a lift with a hint of pink pearl. It can be worn it on its own or mixed into foundation.

I recorded an on camera makeup demo using Urban Decay makeup - and I'm now obsessed with their waterproof eye liners-they don't smudge or budge! Oh and the pocket rocket lip gloss in the colour James- hot pink with opalescence... and the packaging is awesome.

Then at the weekend I worked on the first  part of this weeks Britains Next Top Model tour, which made me suddenly realised something, for me being a makeup artists is doing more than applying lipstick to someone and make them look pretty .

Let me use the Britain's Next Top Model catwalk show as an example...

Once I was hired I attended a meeting with the client, stylist Rebekah Roy, hair dressers from Toni & Guy - where we discussed the look for the show, had a look at all the clothes to get a feel and got a model to do a practice test on. It's quite a hard show to design a makeup look for because it's not just about adding eye shadow etc to make the models look good.

There needs to me a concept that's fresh, it has to be a style that's current to this Spring/Summers makeup trends, it needed to be something that looked great on a wide variety of girls, it has to work with 9 different fashion designers clothing collections & it couldn't be too off the wall that the average Jane or Joe could appreciate it as all of the catwalk shows are being produced in shopping malls around the UK. Now that's a lot to think about!! And if that wasn't enough, I also am appearing on -stage at every venue to present a S/S'09 makeup demonstration- so I needed to come up with an idea for that that would be fun & entertaining for a live audience to watch

Next step I needed to order and list all the products I wanted to use with my makeup sponsor-who for this tour is the cosmetics brand Benefit. I also to figure out what assistants I would be taking with me for each city, (this always for me depends on 3 things-how much time we have to get the models ready, how complicated the makeup look was and the number of models we had to work on) I had to organise what they would need, making sure they all had the correct info, what they needed to bring, what to wear, times etc.

Then on the morning of the show-my team and I arrive at the venue at 8:30am, I take one of the models back stage and demo the makeup look to my makeup assistant team and they repeat it on the other models kind of like colour by numbers so to speak, so as the morning moves along I am not only working on a few girls but I must have final checks over the other makeup artists to make sure all the models are looking up to my standard- which luckily wasn't that hard as I have a great team of new, hot talent working for me. ( I teach at the AOFMakeup academy www.aofmakeup.com so I often keep my eye on new fresh, talent from the class to come and assist me) We had 3 fashion shows that day- so plenty of touch ups in between and I had 2, 20 minute on stage makeup demos. I decided on a presentation on how to create an old school Hollywood glamour look using false lashes and this seasons "it "colour - Frenched a kitsch 1950s cherry red by Benefit...Whew I feel a little exhausted just writing about it!