The time I did
makeup in Paris

How Paris happened

Paris was not something I planned years in advance. Like most things in a freelance makeup career, it came through a connection — a photographer I had worked with in the UK who had been commissioned for a project in the city and needed a makeup artist she already trusted. She asked if I would come. I said yes before she had finished the sentence.

I had been working professionally for several years at that point, building up experience across editorial, bridal and events work. I knew my craft. But Paris felt like a different kind of test — a city with its own particular relationship to beauty, to fashion, to the idea of what a woman should look like. I wanted to see how my work held up in that context.

The work itself

The project was a fashion shoot for a European brand — several days in a studio in the Marais, working with models, a creative director, and a team of people who took every detail seriously. The brief was precise. The light in the studio was beautiful — that particular northern European light that photographers talk about, soft and even, very forgiving if you know how to use it and unforgiving if you do not.

I worked long days. We started early, broke for lunch the way the French actually do — properly, unhurried — and went back until the light changed or the creative director was satisfied. There was a rhythm to it that I had not experienced quite like that before. Everything felt considered.

The makeup itself was relatively restrained by editorial standards — clean skin, precise eyes, very little colour. The kind of work where the skill is invisible, where you are enhancing rather than creating, where a wrong choice stands out immediately and a right one disappears into the photograph. That is actually the hardest kind of makeup to do well.

What Paris taught me

The biggest thing I brought back from Paris was a renewed respect for restraint. French beauty culture has a very different relationship with makeup than British culture does. Less is not laziness — it is a deliberate choice, and making it confidently requires real skill and knowledge of the face in front of you.

I also learned something about pace. Working in Paris, I felt less pressure to fill every moment with activity. Good makeup takes the time it takes. Rushing a foundation application, pushing through when a model needs a break, skipping steps in the skincare prep — these things show up eventually, on the face or on the photograph.

I came back to York with better eyes. More patience. A slightly different sense of what beautiful actually means.

How it shapes the work I do in Yorkshire today

Every experience leaves a mark on how you work. The Paris project changed how I approach skin prep — I have been more thorough ever since, more willing to take the time to get the canvas right before I pick up a single product. It changed how I talk to clients about their faces, about what suits them rather than what is trending.

When I am doing bridal makeup in a York hotel room at seven in the morning, or teaching a makeup lesson in the studio in Strensall, or working on a shoot in Leeds — those days in Paris are in the room with me. Not in any grand or dramatic way. Just in the small decisions, the instincts, the eye.

That is what experience does. It accumulates quietly and shows up when it matters.

A note on working abroad as a freelance makeup artist

If you are a makeup artist thinking about seeking out work abroad — even just a trip or two — I would encourage it. Not because foreign experience is inherently more valuable than local experience, but because working in a different environment with different people and different expectations forces you to adapt in ways that staying in your comfort zone never will.

You learn what is universal about your craft and what is culturally specific. You learn which parts of your kit you actually need and which are just habit. You learn to communicate clearly across a language barrier, which sharpens your instincts around nonverbal communication more than anything else I have found.

It is worth doing, even once.

"I came back to York with better eyes. More patience. A slightly different sense of what beautiful actually means."

Based in York. Available across the UK.

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