Kristina Isailovska

I studied architecture. Four years in drawings, calculations, and lines that have to serve a purpose. What I learned there I never left behind — proportion, the relationship between parts, the way light falls across form.

Makeup had always been there. From my teenage years — on friends before graduation parties, on my sisters before family celebrations. I never decided to become a makeup artist; I just kept doing what I was already doing.

Training with Sim Saltirova taught me something a book cannot — when to stay quiet and look before you touch a face. I still return to the studio for individual projects.

After I finished my training I stayed on at the studio. Brides, editorials, campaigns. Those were the years I learned the most about speed — how to make a decision in fifteen minutes and not revisit it until the end of the shoot.

Today I work on my own — for more than four years. Skopje and Gostivar — in clients' homes, in apartments, in hotels, on set. I'm looking for the right location for a studio, but for now the fact that I come to the client is part of how I work.

I'm a wife and a mother to two beautiful daughters. It's the sentence that needs the least explanation.

Architecture left me with something I hadn't expected: patience with form. Makeup showed me the same rule applies to a face — respect what is there, then add to it.