The Wahanda Blog

It’s amazing the difference a slick of make-up can make to the way you feel, but after the teenage ‘pout-and-blot’ tutorial with your mum, putting your face on can be a bit of a hit and miss process.

That’s why at Wahanda, we decided to book ourselves in for an hour-long lesson with a professional make-up artist at the cute, boutique Beauty Lounge just off Carnaby Street. Now, we love make-up and we’re no strangers to the odd experiment, but it’s easy to get stuck in a rut, always wearing the same uniform of liner, mascara and gloss. We were quite excited, therefore, that the Beauty Lounge make-up artists are seasoned professionals who spend their days creating the stunning looks you see in glossy magazines.

The Beauty Lounge is only small, with a boudoir-style waiting room downstairs and extremely “compact”, but quite smart treatment rooms upstairs. Who knew there was somewhere to pop up your swollen feet so close to the hustle and bustle of Regent’s Street?! We will definitely be dropping off there for a mid-shop massage sometime soon. For the make-up lesson, though, the space wasn’t ideal with muted lighting and only a distant wall mirror to see at your face in. Our make-up artist was ready and waiting though with her full kit of colours plus about a million different kinds of brushes, sponges and other tools of the trade.

She took us through two looks, one for the daytime and one for the evening, talking through the different products and explaining the easiest ways to apply tricky things like eyeliner and how to emphasise your socketline with deeper shades of shadow.

Having had the experience, we would say this is a great session for someone who is nervous about using products and doesn’t have much know-how in applying their make-up in the first place. If, like us, you’re an avid reader of girly mags, you’ll probably know most of the good advice the make-up artist has to give you – though it’s still good to see it in practice rather than on the page.

The best things we learned were probably how to push eyeliner in between our lashes with a small brush to get a better border around the eyes and how to use smaller eyelash curlers to just curl the outer lashes and avoid that startled look. The look we finished with was quite heavy and very conventional – a thorough run-through of the basics, but we would have liked our make-up expert to show us some weird and wonderful looks that would really turn heads. Then again, maybe outrageous face-art is best left to the professionals…

Find out more about The Beauty Lounge near London’s Carnaby Street.