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Jessa Jaguar performs at PoleCon 2024

A Professional Makeup Artist Taught Me This

Y’all. I am the worst at being femme. I have little patience for discomfort these days so most often you’ll find me in 100% cotton loose fitting clothing, braless and shoeless. I have aspirations of doing aerial performance gig work, which means I really need to figure out this makeup thing.

For years I followed the instructions on the smokey eye pallet I bought for junior prom and that was the only way I knew how to do makeup. I was using the wrong color foundation, I had no idea how to contour.

So, I had a private consultation with a professional makeup artist to figure out my face.

The Basics

At the very beginning of the lesson, they stated makeup is essentially oil painting but on someone’s face. You’re probably going to have to mix foundations to get the right color for your skin. If your skin is the same color as a bottled foundation—I’m envious of you. We used a mix of their Ben Nye cream foundation, which is really what you need for stage, and my whatever the hell I had liquid foundation to get the right color for me. They then showed me how my finishing powder (which I thought just helped seal the make up in) shifted the color of the foundation a bit lighter.

For the best coverage, you want to dab the makeup on, not streak it across your face. If you’re using a brush, it’s gotta be a big one with lots of fluff to it for dabbing, if you’re using a sponge, make sure it doesn’t have harsh edges. My makeup artist took the basic wedge sponges and ripped it up to get to the textured inside.

Masc Vs. Femme Make Up

The makeup artist I hired does it all–bridal, beauty, cosplay, burlesque/drag, stage, film. So, we started with talking about what makes a look more masculine and what makes a look more feminine. Masculine makeup will have more sharp angles, like every part of the face is made of triangles: the cheekbone highlight will be triangular, the temple shadow will be triangular, the jaw line will be sharp etc. Feminine makeup will be softer, like everything is made of circles and gentle curves. We went with a femme look for the first lesson.

Contouring 101

Contouring is not as hard as the internet makes it out to be. My makeup artist likened it to how you’re taught to shade a spherical object in elementary school—figure out the light source, highlight the areas the light will hit first, shadow the areas the light doesn’t hit. If we imagine the light source is directly in front of us, that means the light will hit the center of the forehead, the tip of the nose, the apple of the cheeks, and maybe the center of the chin—those are the areas that get a lighter color.

The areas that will be shadowed will be the jaw line, just under the cheekbones, around the hair line, and the temples–those areas get the dark color of your contour. The thing that really blew my mind was for the shadow contour, after tapping the makeup on in circles, they blended more by doing short strokes the way the shadow would go (so down my neck, down my cheeks) which made it look way more natural.

The Eyes Have It

Next, we moved on to eyes. They stated they usually do eyes first because the fall out (pigment falling off the eyelids) is annoying to handle.When doing makeup for the stage, they said there is no need to do a crease in the eyelid–the goal is to make the eyes look bigger so why cut it off? Goodbye smokey eye palette. You were probably full of bacteria anyway. I showed them the eye shadow I had, which isn’t much, and they decided to do a gold to a dark purple. Step 1: prime the eyelid. If you’re going to use a powder, there has to be some kind of creme under it so the pigment will stick. After priming my eyelid with some of the foundation, they started blotting the eye shadow on to my eye, then brushing away the excess. For the gold color, the did the inner ⅔ of my eyelid. Then we switched to the dark purple and they did the outer ⅔ or my eyelid. Again, pressing the powder into the creme foundation and brushing away the excess. Blending seemed to happen naturally.

To make the eyes look bigger, they went all the way to my brow and also brought some of the color to the bottom lid, which had a better effect than what I had been doing before (which was a line of white eye liner with a line of black eye liner below that).

We didn’t get to talk lashes, but I love falsies—which they said is a great choice, especially for the stage. You can get some massively large lashes that will read better from across a room.

Practice, Practice, Practice

For the lesson, the makeup artist only did half my face. At the end of the lesson, they hung around and watched as I tried to recreate their masterpiece on the other side of my face. They said I have the concepts down, I just need to work on the precision. I took this as a complement. I now feel like I know what I’m doing, but like all types of art it takes practice to make it great. The look we worked on was a basic beauty look for the stage, which leaves it open to use as a foundation for any character I choose to put on.

Cora
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