Beauty Two of the assistants I share a kit with have a beauty box landing on their doormat every month, and neither of them could tell me what was in the last one. That stuck with me. So I went back through the subscriptions I have actually used, and the ones I keep...
Beauty The question I get asked most on outdoor shoots has nothing to do with foundation. It is whether SPF is going to wreck the makeup, and the honest answer is that it can, if you use the wrong one or apply it in the wrong order. That is worth solving, because...
Beauty Wedding shoots taught me this the hard way. The bride is in my chair at seven in the morning and still being photographed at eleven at night, and nobody is willing to sit through a second full face at six in the evening. Everything I know about carrying a...
Beauty I rebuilt my kit around vegan formulas over about two years, and the most useful thing I learned had nothing to do with how the products perform. It was that the word on the front of the box and the promise people think it makes are two different things, and...
Beauty A client in her fifties once told me she had spent about four hundred pounds that year on anti-ageing products and still could not go outside without squinting, because she did not own a sunscreen. That conversation stuck with me. It is a fairly precise...
Beauty I get sent selfies with the message "which one of these do I order?" roughly once a week. The honest answer is that I cannot tell from a photograph, and neither can the shade finder on the website, because a phone camera has already made three decisions about...
Beauty A model once sat down in my chair with a red, angry patch along her jaw and told me her new foundation had wrecked her skin. It wasn't the foundation. She had dabbed neat tea tree oil on a spot the night before, the way half the internet tells you to. That...
In today’s fast-paced world, self-care is often reduced to a quick necessity rather than a mindful practice. However, what if your daily beauty routine could be more than just a set of tasks? What if it became an intentional ritual of gratitude—an opportunity to...
Beauty Every January I have the same conversation about foundation clinging to flaky patches around the nose, and it is never really about the foundation. Winter in Liverpool means walking from wind and drizzle straight into a studio with the heating on full, twice a...
Beauty I have prepped a lot of faces at seven in the morning, and the ones that look best under a light are almost never the ones with the biggest shelf of products. They belong to people doing about six boring things consistently. Here are ten of those things, in the...
Beauty A fortnight ago I emptied my kit onto the kitchen table and read the back of every bottle, because a labelling deadline had just come and gone in the EU and I wanted to know what my so-called organic products were actually declaring. What I found says a lot...
Beauty Most of the homemade face masks doing the rounds are harmless and quite pleasant. Two of the most popular ones can leave a mark on your face that lasts weeks, and they are the ones I keep having to talk people out of the night before a shoot. The DIY face masks...
Beauty I am not a hairdresser. I am the person sitting at the other end of the same trestle table for eight hours, watching one, and after enough shoots you notice that the gap between salon hair and home hair has very little to do with the products in the basin....
Nature has endowed you with a magnificent head of hair, so you are one of the luckiest! For others with less keratin, don't be discouraged. Even if your natural hair does not allow you to have the hairstyle you dream of for the moment, there are alternatives. The...
It's difficult to feel confident and self-assured when you can't depend on your smile due to tartar, stains or other dental imperfections. However, this by no means impossible to fix, and a few simple steps is often all it takes to get that movie-star smile back...
Beauty Half the faces I prep in a morning come with the same apology: sorry about the eyes. And nine times out of ten the person apologising has been buying the wrong thing for years, because nobody ever told them that under-eye shadows come in different kinds and...
Beauty There is a particular moment in a long shoot day when someone starts discreetly pressing at their scalp through their hair, hoping nobody notices. I notice, because I am the one standing behind their head. It is one of the most common complaints I hear, and one...
Beauty There is a sentence in the first version of this article about frankincense and myrrh helping to cure cancer. It should never have gone up, and taking it down is the whole reason I have rewritten the piece rather than tidied it. Frankincense and myrrh are...
FAQ
A simple and effective routine includes cleansing, toning, moisturizing, and applying sunscreen in the morning. At night, double cleansing and using a nourishing cream or serum helps your skin repair.
Most skin types benefit from exfoliation 1–2 times per week. Over-exfoliating can cause irritation, so always listen to your skin’s needs.
Not necessarily. Natural products can be great, but the most important thing is that they are dermatologically tested and suited to your skin type.
A serum delivers active ingredients deeply into the skin (hydration, anti-aging, brightening), while a moisturizer locks in hydration and creates a protective barrier.
Use a primer before applying makeup, set with a translucent powder or setting spray, and choose long-lasting formulas for foundation and lipstick.