Amazing Face

I harbour desires to be a make-up artist and have done a few bits and bobs in my spare time. I've done wedding make-up for a few friends, glitzy evening looks, tutorials on every day natural looks and even a specially tailored lesson for some young girls just getting into make-up.

This is the lovely Sarah:

 

 I did Sarah's wedding make-up a few years ago and she must have liked it because for her last birthday, she asked if I would do her make-up again and show her how to do a daytime look and then a smokey look for going out in the evening.

Sarah is naturally gorgeous, with good skin, a lovely smile and the highest metabolism on the planet. Her love of food is well-documented, yet she maintains the body of a Supermodel. She also always has fab shoes. If I didn't like her, I would have stabbed her in the eye with the mascara wand. Lucky for her I'm so magnanimous.

Anyway, I forgot to take 'before' shots, but I have one 'during' shot. This is when I had done most of Sarah's natural look and was trying to convince her to let me fill in her brows. She was concerned it would look odd and I know a lot of people unused to shaping and/or shading their brows have that initial response. In order to make my case, I filled one brow and then took her photo:

As you can see, the difference is quite striking. Once I had filled in the other brow, I finished with mascara, blusher, lipstick and gloss and the natural look was complete:

I was really pleased with how fresh and glowy she looked and Sarah couldn't stop looking at herself in the mirror and smiling. My favourite thing about doing make-up for other people is seeing them develop that inner thrill when they look in the mirror and knowing that they feel a little more confident or pretty or glossy or edgy or whatever we set out to accomplish. I also love teaching people to do it for themselves. They will often come back to me and tell me about the new brushes or products they've bought and how they enjoy spending a little extra time on themselves or indulging their alter ego. It's brilliant.

Anyway, back to Sarah. After spending some time enjoying the natural look, we cleaned it all off and I set about creating Sarah's requested sultry, smokey look. I didn't make a note of all the products I used, but I'm pretty sure I used MAC Sharkskin Shadestick and Carbon shadow on the eye, and maybe Silver Ring. I know the false lashes were by E.L.F. I explained that a smokey eye can be done with any colours, it's about getting the balance of depth and tone. I went with the more traditional black, grey and silver for this.

 

I thought she looked lovely and Sarah seemed very happy with it, as evidenced in these photos of her dancing and singing around the lounge (possibly to Wham!) before we went to the pub:

Whadda knockout!