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Make-Up needn’t be seen as a corrective or something to hide behind. I see it as another form of expression and acceptance, even pleasure, of being in one’s skin, in all it’s diversity.

Dear reader,

With this blog I hope to entertain, inform, and if I’m really lucky, inspire.

I also wish to create a platform for ideas that are not necessarily what you’d expect from ‘a beauty blog’ and I love having guest posters gathered from the wonderful tribe of free-thinking women I’ve been fortunate enough to meet along the way.

Beauty represents many things to may people. I love exploring these themes. I love challenging conventional ideas of beauty and how women are portrayed by, and within the media. For instance, I believe we are living in an increasingly narrow physical female archetype, an example of, in my opinion, a move towards a more regressive woman to the one that inspired me to think outside the box. I am very inspired by those who seek to create a more expansive and liberated world for us. Women who are not frightened to be called a feminist for fear of losing their ‘femininity’ and appreciate what feminists have done to give us liberties that we must never take for granted,

I could never define my ‘makeup signature’ as I’ve worked through so many periods of strong trends, completely different faces, points of views and cultures. I’m most proud of the difficulty in pigeonholing my career and it’s diversity and I wish to pass on the experiential knowledge and discuss fashion, beauty and the heritage of style whilst trying to incorporate the stuff beneath the surface from time to time too.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Moving back to the surface, trends, to me, are about random collective consciousness, in the best cases inspired by the slightly subversive.

The FUN part. To create or report trends it’s kind of essential to have a genuine interest in 20th/21st century film, music and photographic references that could range from anything like Truffaut, Bunuel, Avedon or Helmut Newton to Grace Jones, Francois Hardy or Cindy Sherman. Make-Up is just paint pots. In order to get anything interesting out of them it’s important to know about references and be a geek about detail, from the texture of an actress’s skin in a particular film to the shape of her lips in another. The best artists I’ve met in the industry naturally absorb these finite details simply by osmosis. Or maybe they’re just bonkers like me.

Being a make-up artist in fashion is about re-interpretation, re-creation, taking lots of ideas and putting them together in as original a way as possible. This is what helps keep fashion fresh, exciting and ever-evolving. In the words of one Italian fashion editor “you have to bring something to the shoot’.

Further reading ‘How to become a make-up artist‘ click here

Hope you enjoy the blog, come back again soon!

For anything work related contact: www.dandvmanagement.com

Regarding features on www.kaymontano.com (all whom are gracious are welcome)

email: kay@kaymontano.com