Makeup for mature skin in Melbourne
Lifting technique, light textures and colour that puts light back into a face. Made so that you look like yourself on a very good day, and not like someone wearing makeup.
What changes on mature skin, and what does not
If you are in your fifties, in your sixties or well beyond, and you have started to feel that beauty counters talk past you rather than to you, this page is for you. Makeup on mature skin is a different piece of work, and the difference is not more product. It is built with lifting technique: shape placed so that the face reads lifted, an accent only where it earns its place, and shades chosen because they bring light back into the face rather than sit flat on top of it. Textures stay light, because skin that is finer or drier does not want to be loaded up, and a heavy base is what actually ages a face. Every step is worked more delicately than it would be on younger skin, and each layer is laid on more lightly, so that nothing sits on the surface asking to be noticed.
Done that way the result is delicate and expensive rather than done, which is the phrase most of my clients reach for afterwards. A good number of them also tell me they look younger than when they walked in, and that comes straight out of the technique.
What does not change is everything else. This is not a separate service with a separate price, it is the same makeup any other client in Melbourne books for any other occasion, and it holds the same way: through a long day, through photographs, through a room that gets warm. It also covers the same range, from barely there to a full evening look, and nothing on that scale is closed to you because of your age.
Mother of the bride, mother of the groom
The mothers are some of the people I most want to get right. A mother of the bride is photographed for the whole day, standing beside her daughter in almost every frame, and she has usually decided in advance that she does not want to look overdone. That is a solvable brief rather than a compromise: light textures, a lifted shape, colour that refreshes, and enough definition to survive a camera. How a wedding morning is timed, and how bookings work for a group, is set out on the bridal page, and mothers book at guest pricing.
Mature skin makeup portfolio
If you would like to see more of my work, or the other kinds of makeup I do, there is a fuller portfolio on the natural and soft glam page and on the glam page.
Online booking is for the studio in Middle Park. For a mobile booking, send an enquiry instead: travel time is planned by hand, and the start time and travel fee are confirmed first.
Daughters book this for their mothers more often than mothers book it for themselves. Send me the occasion and the date and I will set it up, and if it is meant to be a surprise, a gift certificate does the same job without spoiling it.
Good to know
Use less of it, and choose it for how it behaves rather than for how much it covers. A thick base is the thing that gathers and settles, so the work goes into preparing the skin first and then laying only as much texture as the face genuinely needs. I would not promise you that lines stop showing, because on some skin they always will a little. What this does is keep the makeup from making them more obvious, and it holds the base reading as skin for a great deal longer through the day.
No, and I would push back on whoever said it. What changes is placement, not permission. A line drawn in the same place it was drawn at twenty may not sit well now, so it moves, softens or turns into something denser at the lash root instead. A strong lip works beautifully as long as the edge is defined properly. Nobody has to spend their sixties in beige because a magazine said so.
Clients tell me so, often, and without being asked. What I work towards is a face that looks rested, lifted and unmistakably your own, and younger comes out of that on its own.
Regularly, and it is one of my favourite bookings. Both mothers are in the photographs all day and both usually arrive worried about looking overdone next to a room full of twenty year olds. The answer is the same technique described above, applied with a bit more staying power because the day is long. Mothers book at guest pricing on the wedding morning.
It is an advantage, because there is nothing to unlearn. Nothing here happens in one go: the face is taken up a step at a time, and at every step it is already finished rather than half done. You see it in the mirror as it goes, I ask each time whether you would like it left there or taken further, and anything you are unsure about gets explained rather than glossed over. The answer «that is enough» ends it immediately, at any point. Plenty of people who describe themselves as not makeup people end up somewhere they did not expect, and plenty stop early, and both are the right answer.
Yes. My studio is in Middle Park, and studio prices are the lower ones. If it is easier for me to come to you, I do that for one person as well when you are not far away, with travel charged by distance. A minimum number of services applies only to the more distant areas. How all of it is worked out is on the mobile makeup page.