Hair and Makeup Artist: Do I Need a Professional for My Headshots?

Three Reasons To Use a Professional Hair and Makeup Artist

1. Your regular everyday makeup application is not ideal for photography. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with the makeup or that it looks bad for day-to-day use. But especially when you’re being lit, every subtlety that goes unnoticed in everyday wear show up in your images

What many people think is just enough for everyday wear may be read as too heavy in a photograph. Base, blush, liner, and shadow may have too much or too little contrast. Slightly too much or too little can change your entire look. A professional makeup artist, specifically one who is experienced in prepping people for headshots, knows exactly how to work with a photographer’s preferences and lighting to make sure you look your best in front of the camera.

2. I always recommend that you have your hair and makeup artist in the studio for easy adjustments and corrections. The hair and makeup artists I work with are here when you arrive and immediately begin collaborating with you to understand how you want to look. We’re then able to camera test to make sure everything looks good under the lights. For example, brows may look great under room light. But when photographed under studio lighting, a part of a brow may look thin, or liner on one lower lid may be a bit too heavy. This isn’t always easy to correct when there’s no makeup artist in the studio with you.

3. My stylists work on both your makeup and hair. Though this isn’t always as critical as makeup, they are able to make sure everything looks just the way you want it to and, again, a camera test can reveal areas that need adjustment. That could be hair just slightly over the face causing unflattering shadows, normal gaps in the styling that allow the background, especially lighter ones, go be visible, etc.

What You MUST Avoid

I strongly recommend you do not go to your local department store’s makeup counter for a free (or even paid) hair and makeup artist. People who use non-professional hair and makeup artists usually come into the studio with way too much base and makeup applied. That’s because most people who work at makeup counters typically apply much more makeup than is what is practical for being photographed. I’ve asked people remove their makeup or reschedule their session because they have shown up with too much makeup applied.

You need to remember that people who work at makeup counters are primarily SALESPEOPLE tasked with selling as much product as possible. They may tell you they’ve been “trained”. But that typically means they have attended a product’s training session and applied it on some of the other participants. But most salespeople are not trained hair and makeup artists.

If you want to wear makeup in your headshots, having a hair and makeup artist on hand for your headshot session is well worth the investment. If you still would prefer to do your own, you can always access my current headshot guide for some tips for applying your own.