Makeup Says Something About Your Personality

It was 8 years ago, when I looked up at the glossy urban Sephora sign anxious to step into the fragrance department and bring myself back to my childhood, a time when I cherished French perfume. This was my first day at the Upper West Side store in NYC.

I did the most amount of makeup I had ever done and my mascara, and my eyeliner, and my pink glossy lipstick, and my blush. I went to my first shift, standing in front of all those great beautiful bottles of expensive perfumes and shining out my pride, when my store director walked in. She saw me and rushed towards me a little faster, than I’d expected. I started to smile, picturing my beautifully made-up face, when she approached and without greeting asked: “where is your makeup?!”

I did not even know what to say. Where is my makeup?! It’s all on my face! After a deep sigh, she dropped sharp “take a minute to put a red lip” and left. My work at Sephora started.

Now, 8 years fast forward, when I became a certified makeup artist, a Sephora University Beauty Classes Facilitator, a Senior Skincare Advisor, I got why my boss was asking me where my makeup was. She wanted to see all 25 products required for perfect makeup ON MY FACE. Because we were a makeup store. We’d been representing makeup, we’d been walking displays – each of us.

But YOU are not. And you don’t have to.

How you can do very little to look like you have done a lot? We must face our face and study it. We have to be honest with ourselves about our faces and our features. And when I say honest, I mean some have to admit something needs to be corrected, something has to be enhanced, something has to be muted or faded.

When we learn our face, we learn a secret of how to work with it.

Once I had a special client, when I was working at my first Sephora on 76th and Broadway in New York City: A small, neighborhood Sephora, very understaffed and with a truly little number of customers…

This client had to shop for makeup for her own character that she was playing on stage!

Her character was obsessed with makeup and throughout the whole play somehow was either looking for makeup, playing with makeup, or applying the makeup.

In a very dramatic final scene, she had to pull a red lipstick, apply it and read a little monologue.

Knowing the power of red lipstick, I asked this client, how she wants her character to look in this moment: pretty, desperate, miserable, or funny…

Because a red lipstick can do it all, you know.

The answer shocked me. She said: “oh my god, I have not even thought about it!!!”

She did not know, how she wanted her character to look like, because she could not believe that makeup can talk too.

She did not know that makeup is a language.

The next 25 minutes we spent discussing her character.

In the end, the client left with a few red lipsticks, telling me that I helped her with not just buying lipstick, but understanding better her character.

Oh, that was a great day! I felt important. I felt like I co-wrote the play and co-played this monologue.

Makeup (and even the absence of it) is a LANGUAGE. But everybody speaks it in their own way, based on their own stereotypes and the environment they grew up in.

Let’s look at these passengers in a subway car, sitting in front of each other: a woman with red lipstick on, a random guy, and a makeup artist.

Girl: “I wear red lip because I am daring”

Random Guy: “she wears red lip because she is desperate”

Makeup Artist: “girl, you need a blue undertone, not orange!” …

Everybody reads you from their own perspective. So if you don’t speak your makeup language properly, you always will be misunderstood.