Opinion Piece – Who’s a MakeUp Artist?

Recently one of the well known, incredibly talented women I follow on instagram posted a meme of sarcastic Willy Wonka.

As you can expect it created a shit storm. I’m not going to dive into the dogpile that was the comments, I am going to say why I disagree with her.

For starters MUA stands for Make Up Artist. Anyone who considers what they do art can call themselves this. Art is a subjective matter and therefore it doesn’t matter if the only face you do is your own. If you’re doing art using make up, you’re a MUA. You don’t need a professional to call yourself an artist. You can spend all day working in a shop or being a stay at home mum, if you then create art on your face, you’re a MUA. These are the people the meme targets. It’s wrong.

Now she freely admitted afterwards that this was a dig at, and I quote ‘instafamous people who think 384573828 followers, overly edited selfies and endorsements from big companies who only care about the follower count make them a pro.’ Okay so not the people above. The problem here is some of them she’s aiming at are professional. A professional is someone who makes a living doing what she states above. There are people that manage to do this. They can make a living off only doing their own face and posting it to the internet. Some of them have even managed to create their own make up line. So she’s wrong. They are pros. It might annoy her intensely but that doesn’t make them not pros.

So do you agree with me? Or her?