Stealing beauty

A lesson at the Jemma Kidd Make Up School in Lancaster Road

Above: Making up with Jemma

Jemma Kidd, sister of supermodel Jodie and very much one of the Beautiful People, comes from a long line of good breeding. There’s no other explanation for such long limbs. Born in Barbados,she grew up in Notting Hill and is married to Arthur Wellesley, Earl of Mornington,which makes her officially the Countess of Mornington. She’s incredibly tall and very beautiful, with a laid back casualness and a transatlantic-edged west London drawl that clearly marks her out as aristocratic. And typically for a make up artist, she’s not wearing very much make-up at all. Not visible make-up anyway.
“Make-up is a very powerful tool, much more powerful than most people imagine,” says Jemma. “Suddenly you can have cheekbones or different shaped eyes. But it’s not
a mask and shouldn’t be used as one.
It’s a tool to enhance your beauty.” In 2003 Jemma founded a make up school in her Notting Hill basement, initially as a training institute for professional make up artists. Last year it moved to a big studio in Lancaster Road and devised a much bigger programme, including a new branch of classes for non-professionals, teaching people of all ages how to use make up for themselves. Jemma’s own range of well-designed and beautifully packaged products is used at the school and sold at Boots, and now she has plans for another school in the States. Make-up clearly is powerful stuff.
Unusually, you might think, for a make-up guru, Jemma says she was never very girlie. Not for her those mini make up kits for six year-olds. She started modelling as a teenager but couldn’t cope with the criticism and hated it. “You’ve got to be so tough and so confident,” she says, and able to separate your own identity from the image being made of you. So she abandoned it and moved into styling, which she loved, though she found herself hanging out with the make-up people at every show. “I just loved colour and loved working with people,” she says. Then teaching came naturally when she found herself very able to explain things that she had learnt.
As well as teaching and running the school, Jemma still does the fashion shows and her sister Jodie is one of her favourite make up subjects. “She’s like a blank canvas. Her face is sort of… flat above her eyes.” This may be an odd description of beauty but it’s not just any old kind of beauty that makes a model. “A model needs to have the kind of face you can do anything to and it will still look great,” says Jemma. Most people will need the right make up to make them look good but a good model can handle any type of look.
So, what about a few tips for those normal individuals who need to get it right? “It’s important to create beautiful skin, like an artist preparing a canvas,” says Jemma. Blending foundation is very important, apparently. “I’d rather be complimented on my skin than anything else,” says Jemma. “I’m on an endless quest for perfect skin. Stealth make up is the key.” And you have to change your make-up every decade. “You should wear nothing in your teens, then experiment in your 20s and 30s, then wear less make up the older you get. I’m not a big fan of chasing eternal youth.”
One of the things that has surprised Jemma most dealing with what she calls “consumers” – the real people who come to her classes for themselves – has been the degree of dependence on make up people have. Especially teenagers. “I see these beautiful girls who are addicted to fake tan. They’re brainwashed and honestly think they look good, even though they’re orange and streaky.” Catching people young enough to avoid the onset of orange can be key and the school offers mother and daughter sessions as well as “coming of age” classes that are popular with women wanting to ensure that their teenage daughters
get off on the right foot at the start of their make up careers with a bit of proper guidance.
I am here to “get the look”. This is a lesson that starts with a tear sheet. They tell you to bring one because it’s very difficult to get people to describe the look they want with any degree of clarity, since talking about make up is even more difficult than applying it properly. Especially since some of the best make up looks are essentially invisible, leaving little to even talk about. Anyway, the sheet I produce shows a look that is immediately identified by tutor Sylwia Krupa-Murray as “smoky eyes”. She says this in a way that makes me think she’s seen sheets like mine before. “Smoky eyes are sort of the holy grail of make up,” says David Horne, the school’s Director of Education. “Everyone wants them and everyone has experienced the awful panda look when you get it wrong so we spend a lot of time putting people right.” So, smoky eyes it is for me then. “What do you think they’ve used in this picture?” Sylwia asks me. Um, eyeliner? Several shades of eyeshadow? Actually, it’s just the one colour, grey, a lick of pencil and a tonne of mascara, expertly applied with brushes (never put eyeshadow on with your fingers). And most important of all, says Sylwia, echoing Jemma, is skin. “There’s no point having lovely make-up around your eyes if the rest of your face is a mess,” she says. So she produces Dewy Glow, one of Jemma’s own products that’s designed to add subtle highlights to strategic parts of the face and it really works. A final touch of glitter on my eyes and I emerge looking very glamorous and not much like me at all. My smoky eyes are a great look, admittedly more suited to a party than an office, but glamorous nevertheless.
So if make-up is a mystery to you, give a course a try. There’s a wide range of options, ranging from fun champagne-fuelled evening group classes to specialist individual sessions, all designed to give you a new confidence and a new look. Nature might not have been as kind to you as to the Kidd sisters, but there’s nothing a bit of slap can’t fix.

Pendle Harte

Jemma Kidd Make Up School
0870 428 9037
www.jemmakidd.com