We here at The Make-up Mill definitely believe in the power of words, so much so our book shelves are fit to burst, full of all manner of make-up manuals, magazines and much more!
In a world where us Make-up Artists can find pretty much anything online, we often forget (rightly so) that what we are looking for, whether that be a reference to a specific period or a prosthetic technique that if you flick a few pages of a book, what you need can be just inside the pages.
When working our way down the shelves of our lipstick library, dusting off the cobwebs of some of our oldest editions we came across ‘Three Dimensional Make-up by Lee Baygan’. The pages curled at the edges, posit notes sticking out of every chapter and notes of keen young MUAS scrawled all over.
Many of the best MUA’s in the industry will say that they can trace their early inspirations to make-ups found in Baygans book.
Some of those Modern Make-up Artists out there may find the 1980′s latex and tissue burns makeup a little out of date and the laying on as something to be more scared of than inspired by but some techniques are timeless, such as the colour theory, something us artists often bypass when training and his use of light and shadow to create depth and height...remind you of a certain trend called ‘contouring’? Going back to basics with Baygan shows how many complex makeups, that may now require prosthetics can potentially be achieved with paintwork.
It is a time capsule of how professional make-up schooling began and where it is heading, with techniques that are still valued today.
We here at The Make-up Mill believe its time to move away from the laptop (once youve read our blog posts of course) and head to the library to have a read of the amazing Make-up books on offer.
