Fashion never came easily to me. At my height, almost everything needed altering, adjusting or quietly giving up on. Trousers were too long, sleeves swallowed my hands, and the dress on the hanger never looked quite the same on me.
Makeup was different. It didn’t need taking up or letting out. It worked with my face exactly as it was. For the first time, something in the world of beauty and style felt like it had been made to fit me.
I know that hasn’t been true for everyone. For a long time, makeup didn’t fit a great many people, and the most obvious example sat right there on the shelf, in foundation ranges that stopped long before they reached every skin tone. The industry has come a long way since, but that’s a story that deserves its own space.
For me, though, makeup was where I first felt at home.
It didn’t come easily, either. I grew up before YouTube tutorials, before Instagram, before anyone could watch a makeup artist work in real time from their bedroom. If you wanted to learn, you learned by doing, and by getting it wrong. Foundation chosen from the back of a hand under shop lighting. Powder that settled into everything. Techniques copied from magazine pages that showed the finished face, but never how to get there.
Trial and error was the teacher, and it was a slow one.
Eventually, I enrolled in professional beauty school, and for the first time, it all started to make sense. Colour theory. Skin types and undertones. Face shapes and proportion. How light and shadow work on a face. Why one product blends and another sits on top. It wasn’t about following steps. It was about understanding why the steps worked.
Years later, I returned to beauty school to teach, which is where I learned something else. Formal education moves slowly. Curriculums take years to update, and makeup doesn’t wait. New formulas, techniques and ingredients were arriving far faster than any syllabus could keep up with.
So I stepped out of the classroom and onto the shop floor, and worked alongside the brands themselves. That’s where my real education continued. I learned how products were formulated and why, which techniques professionals were actually using, and how to help one person at a time find what genuinely worked for them. It was the forefront of the industry, and I’ve never stopped learning from it.
Today, the problem is almost the opposite of the one I grew up with.
There is no shortage of teaching. There are endless tutorials, celebrity makeup artists sharing their secrets, and influencers testing every new launch within days of its release. It’s wonderful, in many ways. But it can also be overwhelming, whether you’re just starting out or coming back to makeup after years away.
With so much information, it’s hard to know what to trust. The product everyone is using might not suit your skin. The technique that works on one face might not work on yours. And trends move so quickly that it’s easy to keep buying the next big thing without ever quite finding what works for you.
What’s often missing is the part I was lucky enough to learn in the classroom: the foundations.
That’s what I want to bring back here. Not a list of the products everyone is talking about, but an understanding of why makeup works the way it does. How to find a foundation that suits your skin. How your undertone, your colouring and the structure of your face shape which colours and techniques will work for you. What the words on the packaging actually mean.
I’d love to take you behind the shelves, too. Every beauty hall is built from rows of gondolas, as we call the display units in retail, each one designed to catch your eye with the newest launch or the most-talked-about product. Knowing how to navigate them, and how to see past the trend to what you actually need, makes all the difference.
Because once you understand the principles, you don’t need anyone to tell you what to buy. You’ll be able to walk up to any counter, look at any formula, and know whether it’s right for you.
That’s the kind of makeup I believe in. Not the trend of the moment, but something timeless, that feels like you. Makeup that fits.
