Pro Makeup: Salon Secrets of the Professionals (PRO (Firefly Book))
By Kit Spencer
In this comprehensive guide, makeup artist Kit Spencer shares the beauty secrets and tricks that are essential in creating the perfect look. She advises on all aspects of makeup application and makeup kit essentials, including brushes, sponges, tweezers and eyelash curlers.
Amazon Sales Rank: #37016 in Books Published on: 2009-08-24 Original language: English Number of items: 1 Binding: Spiral-bound 256 pages
About the Author Kit Spencer is a makeup artist and hairstylist who works in television, movies and music videos, creating special effects for a range of clients. She is the author of two other books on hairstyles and makeup. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction I have been a makeup artist for over 10 years. During this time I have worked on every combination of face shape, skin tone, and age of woman possible. It still surprises me how unconfident the majority of women feel about choosing and applying their own makeup. Makeup is not only exciting and creative, but it also has an amazingly empowering quality. It is not difficult or time-consuming to apply natural, daytime or evening makeup when you know how to do it properly. It is right to feel frustrated that you wear the same shade of lipstick day and night, whether you're shopping for groceries or going to a party. Now is the time to update your makeup techniques, give your makeup bag an overhaul, start looking at new colors, and invest in decent brushes. Makeup can make you look and feel better. Its purpose is to enhance your face and features, not disguise them. Makeup, when applied well, blends flawlessly into the skin tone. There are no hard edges, and all the features are balanced. All the individual elements -- eyes, lips, and cheeks -- work with each other. Badly applied makeup sits on the surface of the skin, looks patchy, and is aging. The key to achieving success is learning how to apply makeup properly, starting with the basics such as selecting and applying foundation, using concealer, and contouring. Once you've mastered the basics, you can achieve whatever look you desire, because you'll have the confidence to start experimenting. About This Book As a professional you must have the skills to apply makeup to anyone and everyone. As an individual, you just need the knowledge and skills to apply makeup to the one face you know the best -- your own. Through teaching and observing women doing their own makeup, I know the common pitfalls and mistakes that women encounter, and I will teach you how to avoid them, using clear step-by-step instructions and pictures of real women. This book will help you develop a makeup routine that can be easily adapted to whatever time you have available, whether it is 10 minutes in the morning or 30 minutes before a party or big event. By breaking your routine down into separate elements such as base, blush, mascara, and eye looks, you should be able to pick and choose elements to fit the time available. The more you practice, the quicker you will get. The skills required and the basic steps followed for applying natural eye makeup and a dramatic smoky eye, for example, are the same. Sometimes even the same colors are used, but the intensity of color may be different. The key to success is mastering the basic techniques and becoming competent at a few key makeup looks that work for you. If you are planning to do your own makeup on your wedding day, in the bridal section (see page 182) you will find looks to suit all skin tones and ages, as well as tips and advice on how to do makeup that will look great from a distance. This is how many of your guests and initially the groom will see you, so your makeup must work in photographs without being too much when the guests and groom are close by. Also covered in this book are tips and suggested looks for doing makeup on others such as children's face painting and costume parties, and advice on taking makeup further as a career or hobby.
Great tips but iffy makeup application I was waiting for this book to come out and while I'm not let down I'm not entirely pleased either. What I really love about this book is that its quite helpful for those looking to become makeup artists, all the tips are geared towards putting makeup on a variety of people including yourself. The book presentation is perfect, instead of being a paperback book which you might have to hold open if you want to follow along, it is a hardback spiral book that is easy to keep open. The pages are durable and easy to turn. Not that this is important but it was a nice touch. The author also used real people, not perfectly airbrushed young pro models, this made it more realistic to the reader. The book begins with tools and tips to aid you narrow down what it is you need in a makeup kit. The breakdown of tools needed was quick and to the point It still gave you all the information to allow you to get what you need not what they tell you to get. Next it goes into foundation and picking the correct shade and type for your skin, also a quick how to on skin care tips. The author really broke down the different facial shapes and how to apply blush the right way as well as how to contour the face. She also had tips of applying eyeshadow to all different eyeshapes to flatter them in the best way possible. Lips was quite basic, there wasn't too much information on it besides using lipliner and differences between day and night time lip looks. Now for the disappointing part of the book, skin color and tone. When it came to lighter skin tones, she had about 5 different types like ivory, fair, golden and caramel. What is interesting is that they were all very similar in color then suddenly it jumps to dark and there is nothing in between. A person who is the color Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys, Liya Kebede, or around that area was completely left out of the book. This was saddening, it was as if that tone doesn't exist and dark simply implies anyone with a deep skin tone. She does mention that dark includes a wide range of shades but I guess she felt she didn't need to show them. Her makeup applications were at times poorly executed, the blush applied on almost every person looked spotty. The section on false eyelashes was a joke, a model had on a full set of lashes and they were crooked and not completely attached. And honestly some of the eyeshadow applications were of poor execution as well. Overall the book is good in terms of giving information for those who want to become makeup artists and to those who just want to learn to apply makeup better.
