How to Find a Makeup Artist Using Instagram

If you are a professional makeup artist that is set up to take their own clients, you MUST be on Instagram. Whenever I get invited to speak or do work in a new city for my work with theblerdgurl, I immediately go to Instagram and begin looking up makeup artists that work in that location. As a someone who works a lot of live events, I can tell you it’s hard enough booking gigs where a makeup artist is provided, much less finding someone who is experienced with working on darker skin tones on camera. I have always had better luck (especially when I have to cover it myself, which is almost always), using local professional talent. Outside of your local Sephora, Instagram is THE PLACE to find makeup artists and stylists.

Under Instagram’s search engine, if you type in #mua for “makeup artist” or #hmu for “hair and makeup artist you’re going to get back millions of hits. Too many to search through quickly. (I don’t want to spend more than 15 minutes on this entire process). So what I do is narrow it down to hashtags by city. For instance, when I was invited to do on-camera work for an event in Chicago, I searched for #chicagomua and then scrolled through the results until I found a few posts of women who matched the look I was going for as well as my skin tone. I then bookmarked the posts I liked and did another search, this time for #muachicago. I repeated the process one more time using #hmuchicago and #chicagohmu and #chicagomakeupartist until I had a pool of a few people who’s work I liked.

Here’s an example of a search I did useing the hashtag #muachicago

Using multiple hashtags is important! I got different reseults using #chicagomakeupartist

From there, I narrowed it down to those who had email addresses and websites listed in their profiles and then contacted each about rates, whether they would travel to my hotel, etc. This practice has worked out great for me!

(By the way, if you’re in Chicago, check out @latoyahowardbeauty she does a fantastic job on all types of skin tones!)

For a list of other makeup artists I use in different cities that I have instagram pages CLICK HERE and look at who I mention at the bottom of the post!)