The Home of a Make-up Artist

I got into a weird mood the other day and just decided to clear out my make-up closet, and inventory everything. It's such an important process, it's really easy to just let a storage area go and that's just a bad time- product goes bad, you end up with multiples of the same items, stuff gets crushed or you just cant find what you are looking for in a crunch. It just helps to know EVERYTHING that I have. I try to go through my stuff at least twice a year and edit it down, donate or give away the stuff that I know I'll never use or that would benefit somebody else a lot more than me- so, that being said, it wasn't TOO bad- just a mess. I cleaned all of my brushes and freshly marked them, I realized that I haven't marked any brushes in YEARS and things just go missing way too easily- they are just easier to recover if they are clearly "dipped".  I use nail polish to dip mine, a coat of turquoise, a coat of glitter polish (because I'm girly like that) and then a clear coat to seal it in.

Dipped brushes.

 Make-up artists can never really keep what they do a secret, at my house at any given time there is always something make-up related happening or lying around. I recently pulled out my copy of Kevyn Aucoin's Face Forward and Paul Starr's On Beauty to have on my coffee table. As I was looking through the pages of Face Forward it dawned on me just how important Mr. Aucoin's books were to the artist community. Before I even fathomed that a person could make a living doing make-up, my friends and I would just sit down and dissect every look in Making Faces and The Art of Make-up and just gather everything we could from each others' make-up boxes to recreate the looks. I can't even fathom how many other artists' passion for the craft was sparked by his books. For me, my love of make-up started in theater with that little standard issue Ben Nye starter box and I loved it so much that some of my teachers gave me leftovers from the production, so I've always had a fairly large collection. In the 5th grade, Mrs. Sommers taught me how to do a couple latex/tissue FX and in 8th grade when we cleaned out the "drama closet" I scored all of the extra make-up that had been left behind as payment for my services. I scored similar when I was in high school cleaning out the costume closet, however at Elsinore High some of the old stuff was 1970's Max Factor grease paint tubes, so there wasn't a whole lot I could snag. My Dad used to bring me home eyeshadows and nail polishes when he'd find them on clearance. In high school I discovered Pic-N-Save and figured out that I could buy a TON of make-up for super cheap. My collection continued to grow. Eventually, in college it led to me discovering higher end make-up lines, fashion, and an entire online community of people who loved make-up as much as I did, I actually met quite a few people who are also now making their mark into the profession.  I can't believe that my parents were surprised that I chose a career in make-up artistry... but I suppose that's not exactly the direction people expect a person to go after they graduate with a Bachelor's in History & Political Science.

Coffee table.

 So to all of the educators who wrote the books, gave me the spare Ben Nye kits, let me clean out the drama closets in exchange for 5 year old Clinique shadows and taught me how to create wounds, thank you.