Don’t mess with my face: confessions of a makeup artist

I want revenge makeup. I want him to regret ever breaking up with me.” I was working as a professional makeup artist, and the speaker was my client, a newly single woman going to a concert where her ex was the guitarist. She didn’t want to get back together, but she had a fantasy of his eyes finding her in the crowd. She looked so good that he played the wrong notes and his heart broke on stage. I would always ask clients to send me a picture of the look they wanted. The only brief she gave me was those lines above. That was the only brief I needed.

I did the type of makeup I often do on myself. Smooth, poreless skin. Glowing highlights. Subtle contour. Thick dark brows. Fluffy lashes. Softly glossy lips. I’d been trained to balance and correct less desirable eye shapes, to give clients with unflattering foreheads the illusion of an oval face, and to take a fine, stiff makeup brush and blot out minor wrinkles. She later told me his jaw hit the floor when she walked in – and I knew I’d done my job. It was the cosmetic version of Princess Diana in her revenge dress.

My client’s fantasy may seem straight out of a movie, but so many people have envisaged rising like a phoenix from unfashionable ashes. Many of my customers grew up on that Hollywood staple, the makeover montage: Olivia Newton-John in Grease; Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman; Anne Hathaway in both The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada.

When madeover, Hathaway walks into the office of Runway magazine in The Devil Wears Prada. Emily Blunt’s fashion-obsessed, snobby character asks, stunned, “Are you wearing the…”

“The Chanel boots? Yeah, I am,” Hathaway says. Breezily confident. Pre-makeover she wouldn’t have been so composed. But her makeover isn’t just physical. Outward beauty is a reflection of her newfound inner coolness.

Clients regularly requested that I help them create a version of this moment. It wasn’t just revenge makeup. I madeover a client who wanted to shut up a judgmental in-law once and for all. A friend of mine, who usually wore nothing but lip balm, hired me because she would be at the same event as her former boss, who told her that her performance exceeded expectations in all categories before denying her a raise. I used to do what I termed “bulletproof beauty” for another client. She made appointments when she was feeling particularly down. “It’s like makeup is my armour,” she said. “If I have on my face, I feel prepared for anything.” For these clients, makeup was both their armour and their spear; it protected them and helped them fight back against people who had hurt them.

I didn’t think of my job as a makeup artist as just slapping product on faces. My job, I believed, was to make people happy, to make them confident, to help them manifest the most powerful version of who they could be – and to make their face communicate exactly what they wanted. Brides often wanted to look naturally beautiful with kiss-proof lips and cry-proof liner; their makeup both functional and flawless, proclaiming that this was the happiest day of their lives.

Being Trinidadian, I worked a lot during Carnival, where women wore colourful lashes that arched to their eyebrows, all gems and glitter. Their faces said that they were ready for the riot and revelry of “mas”, the makeup allowing them to express themselves in ways they couldn’t during the rest of the year.

Corporate headshots meant nude and pink palettes; women at the highest levels of business walked a tightrope where they had to be effortlessly gorgeous while not appearing to spend time on frivolous things like makeup, and I tried to convey that while also making them appear unquestionably competent. For male corporate titans, the goal was always to make it look as if the man didn’t have a stitch on his face, because who would trust a CEO wearing foundation?

Most times, clients left my chair glowing. And I glowed, too. I’d helped them become the best version of themselves for an important occasion in their lives. In those moments, I loved makeup and I loved seeing the confidence that came with the makeover.

When I was studying for my certificate in Advanced Professional Makeup Artistry, it was drilled into me that, as a female makeup artist, the best advertisement for my services was my own face. I could never skip the pore minimiser, never wear flats, never have an off day, because that was the day a client might see me and decide that anyone who looked as bad as I did couldn’t do good makeup.

During the course, I learned to dissect my looks and fix my so-called imperfections. I’d done my own dramatic makeover and I never left home without a full face on. In those days, I used to go to the same café every week. I always ordered the same coffee and the barista always called me to the counter to collect. The first day I went with my face done, he brought the order to my table, with milk, sugar, and a little cookie on the side. In two years of going there, I’d never been given a little cookie before. It was the same barista as usual and it was obvious he didn’t recognise me because I didn’t take sugar. I ate the cookie with relish. It did feel good to be beautiful.

All those makeover montages we’ve seen in too many movies hinge on one fraught concept: the benefits of beauty are legion. We’ve all heard the phrase, “(S)he’s out of your league,” but research shows that dating leagues do exist and, of course, beautiful people play in the Premier League of dating. “Attractive” students are also more likely to get higher grades and “attractive” adults more likely to get the job and more likely to make more money, out-earning their plainer peers by 10-15%. Even less conventionally good-looking criminals suffer, with their fines being approximately four times as high as beautiful lawbreakers.

Daniel S Hamermesh writes in Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful: “We trade beauty for additional income that enables us to raise our living standards… and for non-monetary characteristics of work and interpersonal relations.” Beauty, according to this logic, is a social currency and the more beautiful you are, the more money you have to spend. As a makeup artist, I told myself I was helping people get the most out of life. Who knows? Someone could be making bank because I painted their face before a job interview.

Once, I asked a client to send a picture of her desired look and she sent a photo of Halle Berry. She clarified that she didn’t want the type of makeup Halle was wearing; she wanted to look like Halle herself. Nothing about my client resembled Halle and I told her gently that there’s only so much makeup can do. But even when clients weren’t asking to look like one of the most beautiful people on the planet, they often sent heavily edited images. Once, I received a photo where the model had been so Photoshopped that her skin was smooth as marble. I told my client, “You know that even the model doesn’t look like this in real life.”

The client didn’t care. “I want to be the best version of myself,” she insisted.

“Why is the best version of yourself completely wrinkle-free?” I asked.

My client looked at me as if to say, what do you think you do, exactly? Your job is to fix faces, not promote self-love. I wish it had been a personal revelation. The truth is, I said it because I knew I couldn’t completely erase her wrinkles.

The more I worked in beauty, the more I realised that certain requests were universal. It didn’t matter if the makeup was for a wedding, Carnival, or a corporate shot. Can you make my nose slimmer? My eyes bigger? My crow’s feet disappear? My cheekbones pop? Clients asked me to do the same things I felt compelled to do to myself. So many of us wanted to conform to these incredibly narrow, often Eurocentric, beauty standards. And that realisation began to crush me.

I couldn’t unhear the ways self-hate crept into my clients’ briefs. One woman wanted my contouring to whittle her nose to a blade, because she’d been cursed with her father’s massive honker. Another said her boyfriend never complained about her looks, but she still wanted her makeup to blow his mind at a work function (and, clearly, her regular face wasn’t doing the blowing).

Older people often talked about how much more beautiful they’d been in their youth. Brides were always trying to lose weight. And I chimed in to let them know they weren’t alone. I hated my nose, too, I’d say, and my teeth and a myriad of other things about myself. I wish now that we’d bonded instead over the parts of ourselves we loved.

My speciality was no-makeup makeup: an impeccable face that looked like it could be the real you. I thought of the look as celebrating natural beauty. I was still spending an hour per face – it just didn’t look like it. Sometimes no-makeup makeup clients were afraid of a new partner seeing their naked faces for the first time. They’d seen videos where men claimed to be catfished by people who seemed beautiful, but – sans makeup – were adjudged to be hideous. Was the solution to wear makeup in perpetuity? At the 2015 Instyle Awards, Kim Kardashian introduced the makeup artist of the year, saying, “Charlotte Tilbury is my hero because she has never let her husband see her without makeup on. She sleeps with her makeup on. She’s my idol.”

For a long time, it all seemed normal to me. Social media, traditional media, the multi-billion dollar beauty industry, my own beauty education all said the same thing. Beauty is work. Beauty is pain. So what if I needed an hour’s notice before I could leave the house because I had to put on my face? So what if I swallowed a painkiller before my regular Brazilian wax, dreading it every time, but never thinking I could stop? As my waxer reminded me, you need to keep your eye on the prize. Think of Kate Moss’s old mantra, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” and everything it represents: you need to sacrifice to transform yourself into someone beautiful.

According to cultural philosopher Tetiana Danylova, writing in the Mental Health: Global Challenges Journal: “Exposure to visual media depicting idealised faces and bodies causes a negative or distorted self-image.” People can suffer from low self-esteem, anxiety, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, depression and a host of other complications that come from feeling compelled to conform to unrealistic beauty ideals.

And the history of makeup is often the history of the dreaded patriarchal gaze. The Roman philosopher Plautus wrote: “A woman without paint is like food without salt.” More than 2,000 years later, I was essentially taught the same thing. In the literal definition of toxic beauty ideals, Renaissance-era women used skin lighteners made with lead and other chemicals to attain the alabaster skin that was so lauded by the great male painters.

But the history of makeup is also a history of the radical realisation of self. Makeup originated 6,000 years ago in ancient Egypt, where all genders painted their faces, believing beauty was next to godliness. Makeup palettes were even found in ancient Egyptian tombs, further emphasising the spiritual component of beauty.

Trinidadian Carnival had its roots in resistance to slavery; masquerading and makeup were the early Caribbean people’s way of decolonising their bodies, subverting expectations and celebrating the deepest parts of their creative selves that could never be enslaved.

It can be tempting to think that the solution to problems inherent in the beauty business is not wearing makeup. But that would be denying the ways that makeup can be a source of personal power. Besides, telling us not to wear makeup is just another way to police our bodies. Makeup can make us more confident and happier. If it’s being employed to help us more authentically express ourselves, it helps us to look like the people we want to be instead of who the genetic lottery determined we should be. And maybe some of those reasons are messed up, but it’s still our choice what we put on our faces. What matters more is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves when we’re wearing it.

I’ve long ago hung up my brushes. Ultimately, I was never sure whether working in beauty meant I was doing more good by helping clients find joy in their appearances or if I was doing more harm by inadvertently reinforcing damaging and limiting beauty standards. I still have a complicated relationship with myself and with beauty. These days, I’m more likely to be makeup free, although I still swear by a good pore minimiser. But I love makeup and I’m trying to love it without feeling obliged to wear it.

Recently, I caught up with my former client who asked me to do her revenge makeup. I asked whatever happened to her guitarist ex. Reader, she married him. I wondered, was it the makeup? Did he profess his love after seeing her makeover? He did not. Instead, they worked through the issues that led to the breakup. Gradually, they started to trust one another again. In those Hollywood romcoms, when the character undergoes a dramatic makeover, their life instantly improves. Then the beautiful character encounters new challenges before learning a valuable lesson: beauty may be nice; but it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

The God of Good Looks by Breanne Mc Ivor is published by Penguin Fig Tree at £14.99. Buy it for £12.31 at guardianbookshop.com