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For Love Crush Beauty clients safety has always been our number one priority. As the owner (Gretchen), I can boast that our our standards prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were very rigid, but not we must take even more drastic measures to ensure our clients and team both stay as safe as possible.
Our original standards have always been to create an almost "touch-free" makeup application experience for each client. What does this mean? Let me give you a little history...I've worked with an extensive list of networks and well known people (Click here to see who I have worked with) and what this means is there is a whole other level of safety and sanitation precautions that are expected of an artist on set. First and foremost the makeup applications have to be as "touch-free" as possible, which means your hands should not meet the clients face or hold the top of their head or face in any way (that's a big no-no)! In the beginning, learning to work like this was challenging but it also made me an even better, more efficient artist, and allowed me to pass that onto our team of professionals. Second, disposables were then, and will always be standard for any makeup application.
Here is a list of disposables and how we use them:
Wedge sponges: (latex free, one per client, and disposable). Let's talk about beauty blenders (yuck!). Though they are a great at-home tool for makeup applications they are one of the most bacteria-harboring things a makeup artist can use and reuse. No matter how they are washed they cannot be sanitized. These should be for at-home use only. Wedge sponges can be used similarly to beauty blenders to apply foundation, blend, and can also be used to apply moisturizers (again...a touch free application is best)
Lip Wands: (See demonstration below...we use a spatula to chip the lipstick out of the tube and place it on a pan) A Disposable lip wand should be used on each participant for makeup. Germs, illnesses, and diseases can be spread from lipsticks and lipglosses used straight from the tube.
Mascara Wands: This should be standard...one disposable wand per face and it should never be double dipped!
Disposable Palettes: We reuse/recycle our false lash packaging to use for our disposable palettes. As you can see in the photo below...everything is placed on a palette from concealer, to lip colors, to eyeshadow pigments, eyeliner and loose powders. This keeps all of our jars, palettes and compacts free of germs because we are transferring them to a clean palette that gets thrown away after each face.
Everything above has always been our standard. So now how are we going to amp this up to even greater standards? Keep reading....
What we will be asking of clients is that they give us more time per face than our standard time which is 35 minutes for bridal party, and up to an hour for the bride. I am going to be asking for up to 45 minutes for each bridal party face (until we get used to working under these improved standards), and for the bride up to 1 hour and 15 minutes for makeup. So what's changing?
We will be wearing masks until we feel that the risk is minimal. Or who knows maybe this will be an indefinite standard!
We will be wearing rubber gloves (not for hair-ouch!). This is one thing that will slow us down for sure...we are artists used to working with our brushes in hand (without a barrier) so this will start out a little awkward for us. Of course we believe in hand washing...but I'm not sure that's enough right now.
We have always used 91% alcohol and to clean our brushes in between faces, however...is that enough? We can't be sure since little is known about the virus at this time. We will continue to check the CDC guidelines but at this time we don't have that answer. So what will we do to fill in the gaps? We are offering our clients a few options: A) They can purchase a brush set from us and we will use it only on their face. Hey that can double as a great bridesmaid gift too! We will be having them manufactured and they will come in a set of 5-7 brushes. We are working on that now so pricing will be announced when we determine which set is best. B) They can purchase a disposable brush set from us which will be more cost effective at $20 + tax per set. *All sets need to be pre-ordered 2 weeks or more prior to wedding date.
We can use our own brushes and standard sanitation procedures at the client's discretion. We do bring a fresh brush set for every new bridal party, and then 91% alcohol will be used to sanitize the brushes in between each client.
The client can bring their own makeup brushes (we will provide a list of 5-6 standard brushes we will need) and they can bring their own makeup (shadow palettes, powders, etc...but we will use our own products that do not require us to dip in with the clients brushes such as concealers, foundations, etc...). This is the least desirable option for the artist though because we are not used to working efficiently with someone else's makeup products. We know what works best from our kits.
We will be using more pigments than palettes until we know more. See below...they can be scooped out and placed onto our palette! We can also use our finishing powders from the pan by using a mascara wand to turn them into powder...see below.
I hope that this information is helpful to our currently booked brides as well as our future brides! So though we are out of work for now, we are working on things like safety and more! Keep safe out there and hopefully we will see everyone soon!
