Reflection 2 – Themes
My Better Lives topic choice was Make-up Breakdown. Walking in for the first of technical classes, I did not necessarily know what to expect. The room filled with make-up stations and unknown faces filled me with moth excitement and insecurity. The tutor briefed the entire group, explaining we will be dealing with experimental design for fashion practice, covering theory and practice of make-up application. A key point of focus would be innovation in the form of creative mistake implementation to develop an original technique, both compelling and delivering social change.
This topic essentially caused mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, I realized that my perfectionist mindset may cause difficulties in creating imperfect works. On the other, I realized it was an amazing opportunity to overcome this weakness. Because of this, I started to treat Make-up Breakdown more like mental training than technical learning of make-up skills, additionally considering my previous experience and advanced skills so far.
Such perception motivated me to undertake this challenge and actively participate in classes, showing engagement and gradually acquiring shifted viewpoint. For this reason, I volunteered as a model during the first workshops, covering the aspect of foundation matching. Such an approach was new for me as I usually tend no to stick out too much. However, in my everyday practice as a stylist, I recently noticed that sometimes it is better to be looked over than to be overlooked. Thus, I treated this task as a perfect opportunity to start doing so.
Next workshops discussed the technique of face contouring. To analyse it more in-depth, students were supposed to map each other’s faces contours using bold colours. This was challenging because of the pairing with a person of different origin, which involves working with different face features than those I was used to. Additionally, the colours were easily transferable and problematic to work with. Happily, both I and my classmate enjoyed the creative process and bonded while conducting it. Additionally, this task informed my practice as a stylist, inspiring me to think more inclusively in future practice.
Last workshops introduced the smokey eye look, brief asking to create make-up that involved devy skin and smudgy eye. Tutor advised a simple method that involved a black pencil and blending brush, saying that it does not require too much minuteness and can be created quite freely/carelessly. Those tips were a complete opposite to information I acquired during my make-up training which was particularly focused on symmetry and details. Still, I decided to follow my tutor’s advice and let my creativity take a lead. Even though such an ethic of work was completely against my habits, I enjoyed the effect created. This inspired me to express the ideas more freely in my styling practice, keeping in mind that sometimes an accidental outcome may be more satisfying than a primary assumption.
Overall, I believe that the topics of Better Live workshops I attended caused shifts in my mindset, showing me that perfect does not always mean the best. This way, I started feeling much freer in my creative practice and gained loads of motivation to undertake experimentation in my future projects.