Job Of The Day: Cosmetics Still Life Stylist

Smushing lipstick for money.

Beauty editorials in the magazines I read at the nail salon feature tight shots of product, smashed and smeared and crumpled, nice and close, so you can see the texture and consider what they would feel like on your skin. For years, I was convinced that an intern spent hours before a shoot, dutifully emptying out eyeshadows and gamely crushing them with a tiny ball peen hammer or enjoying the singular satisfaction of expelling a bullet of lipstick from its casing and smearing it artfully on a white table. Now I know that there are people that do this, just like there are people who style the glossy Thanksgiving turkeys on the cover of food magazines.

From Racked, we have a charming interview with Marissa Gimeno, a makeup stylist whose job it is to make the lipstick smush in a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

Meet the Woman Who Smashes Makeup for a Living

In case you were wondering whether or not your current career path is right for your newly-envisioned future as a cosmetics still life stylist, never fear.

Styling was not Gimeno’s first career ambition. She majored in math in college and says she was on track to become an actuary until she met a fashion stylist when she moved back to her hometown of Miami after graduation. She says her aesthetic was “crazy club kid,” and he said to her, “You’re fabulous. Come work with me.” He worked at MTV Latino, where he did styling.

Fate, it works in mysterious ways. There are also a lot of juicy tidbits in here about the process and the tools used to make these images. It turns out basically everything you’d need to try and do this yourself you can get at a drugstore or a hardware store.

A lot of makeup styling involves deconstructing the actual product. Gimeno has a heat gun that she uses on the underside of eyeshadow palettes to melt the glue and pry pans out. Acetone also works to dissolve glue, and she’s become an expert at using an X-acto knife to slice product out of pans. She says she loves to make lipstick smears and eyeshadow compositions.

Unlike most of us, Gimeno’s job will probably not be rendered obsolete by technology.

Gimeno’s never been worried about losing her job to someone skilled in computer graphics or retouching, because photographers always need something to physically shoot. “I always try to get as much as I can in reality in order to make the photographer’s life easier.”

A solid all-around philosophy for work, there: do whatever it is you can to make other people’s lives easier, for yours will be too.

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