I began my aesthetic career as a makeup artist. Inspired by the training I received from one of the finest skin care schools in the United States, I felt very confident on my first day at work apprenticing as a makeup assistant for a national hair magazine. What I quickly discovered was that everything I had been taught was the antithesis of what real life makeup application was about.
Many aesthetic schools do not provide their students with an education that prepares them to work on a variety of ethnic skin types. Unfortunately, the same holds true for makeup training which, more often than not, is skewed to a European standard of beauty. For example, many instructional diagrams on how to create the perfect eyebrow still advise students to measure from the outside edge of the nose.1 However, applying that technique to a client with a wide nose would result in the eyebrow beginning at the center of the eye.