Creative
There is a version of my work that never walks down an aisle at all. It lives on a moodboard, in a stylist's garment bag, behind a photographer's lens, in the quiet hours before a shoot when the light is still being tested and nobody has decided exactly what the face should say yet. That is where my creative and editorial work happens, and it is the part of my practice that keeps everything else — every wedding, every bridal trial, every quiet Sunday morning appointment — feeling alive. Editorial makeup is where I get to ask "what if" instead of "what usually," and Asheville, with its mountain light and its wild, textured landscape, has turned out to be an unexpectedly perfect home base for that kind of question.
Where the Idea Starts
Every editorial look I build starts long before I open a kit. It starts with a conversation — sometimes with a photographer who has a single reference image and a feeling they can't quite name yet, sometimes with a stylist who has built an entire narrative around one vintage dress, sometimes with a model who wants to see herself in a way she never has before. I ask a lot of questions in those early conversations. What is the story? What season, what mood, what texture is the wardrobe leaning into? Is the skin the star, or is this a shoot where the eyes or the lips are meant to carry the whole frame? I would rather spend an extra twenty minutes on the phone before a shoot than show up and guess.
From there, the moodboard becomes a shared language. I pull references from fashion editorials, from botanical illustration, from old film stills, from the exact color of a particular flower in a particular season here in Western North Carolina. I am always looking for the detail that will make a look feel specific rather than generic — a smudge of color that echoes a dried hydrangea, a dewy finish that mirrors morning fog over the Blue Ridge, a texture on the cheek that reads more like watercolor than powder.
An Aesthetic Rooted in Place
My personal style leans toward the natural, the dewy, the a-little-bit-undone — skin that looks like skin, texture that catches light instead of flattening it, color that feels grown rather than painted on. That aesthetic didn't come out of nowhere. It comes from living here, surrounded by the layered greens and softened light of these mountains, where nothing is ever one flat color and everything has depth if you look closely. When a creative team asks me to push further into concept — deeper color stories, more graphic linework, more sculptural texture — I still find myself returning to that same instinct: even the boldest editorial look should feel like it grew out of the skin rather than sitting on top of it.
Floral references show up constantly in my creative work, not always literally. Sometimes it is an actual pressed-petal texture translated onto a cheekbone. More often it is something quieter — the way petals layer and overlap, the way color deepens toward the center and fades at the edge, the way a single bloom can hold five different shades of the same hue. I try to build that same layered complexity into skin and eye color, so that a look photographs with dimension instead of going flat under studio strobes or open shade.
What I Bring to a Shoot
Collaboration is the whole point of editorial work, so I try to show up as a genuinely useful creative partner, not just a kit and a chair. In practice, that means:
- Arriving with a range of textures and finishes prepped in advance, so we can adjust in real time as the light or the concept shifts
- Building looks that hold up under continuity — full days on set, changes of setting, multiple wardrobe swaps
- Thinking in terms of the final image, not just the face in the mirror, since a look that reads beautifully in person can behave very differently under a lens
- Staying flexible when a director or photographer wants to push a concept further mid-shoot
- Documenting each stage of a complex look so it can be referenced, repeated, or adapted for reshoots
I love the problem-solving side of this work almost as much as the artistry. A last-minute wardrobe change, a location that turns out to have completely different light than we planned for, a concept that needs to flex halfway through the day — these are the moments where experience actually matters, and where I feel most useful to a creative team.
Working With Photographers and Stylists
Some of my favorite projects have come out of long-running relationships with photographers and stylists here in the Asheville creative community. There is a particular kind of shorthand that develops after a few shoots together — a shared vocabulary for texture, color, and mood that lets a whole team move faster and take bigger creative risks. If you are building a styled shoot, a lookbook, an editorial story, or a personal branding session and want a makeup artist who will engage with the concept rather than simply execute a checklist, I would love to be part of that conversation from the earliest planning stages.
Individuality Over Formula
If there is one belief that runs through all of my creative work, it is this: a formula is a starting point, never an answer. Every face has its own architecture, its own history, its own way of catching light, and the most interesting editorial work honors that instead of overriding it. I am not interested in making every model look like a version of the same reference image. I am interested in finding where a concept and a specific person's features meet, and building something in that overlap that could not have happened with anyone else in the chair.
That philosophy carries over into every corner of my work, from weddings to full editorial concepts, but it is on creative shoots where I get to explore it most freely — without the constraints of tradition, without a single "right" answer, with room to experiment and occasionally surprise myself. If you have a concept brewing, a moodboard half-built, or just a feeling you haven't quite put into words yet, I would love to hear about it and help figure out where the makeup fits into the story you are telling.