For Mónica Martínez, professional makeup artist and Beauty Coach, makeup starts long before the first touch of colour. It starts with observing the skin.
That was precisely where her conversation with Pedro Catalá began during our Madrid pop-up, championing an apparently simple idea: Skin First. The skin comes first. The encounter was conceived to bring together her practical experience and Pedro’s formulation perspective, before taking the conversation into a live demonstration.
The Skin as a Canvas
For Mónica, there is no single starting point. Dry, oily, dehydrated or mature skin each presents a different canvas to work with.
And that is precisely why observing the skin before applying makeup matters: its condition shapes what makeup can achieve afterwards.
Preparing the skin is not simply the step that comes before makeup. It is part of the final result.
Preparing the Skin Before Makeup
The conversation soon moved from theory to practice. Mónica invited one of the attendees to be her model and started from the beginning: cleansing, hydration, eye care and, finally, colour.
To remove the makeup she was wearing, she chose Dara's Cleansing Water, followed by lightweight hydration with Fresh Bio-tech Moisturiser.
For the eye area, she used Rapid Eye Treatment, accompanying its application with a gentle massage before moving on to makeup.
And then came colour.
Makeup Without Too Many Rules
This was perhaps the part that best captured Mónica’s approach: knowing products well enough to allow yourself to play with them.
During the demonstration, she used Tint & Glow Tangerine Crave to add colour and Stellar Aura Bronzer to contour the face.
But Tint & Glow did not stop there. Mónica also applied it to the lips and eyelids with her fingers, allowing the same texture to take on different roles across the face.
Rather than following a rigid routine, it was about observing, understanding textures and experimenting with them. That was one of Mónica’s master lessons.
Skin First
By the end of the demonstration, we had somehow returned to where the conversation began.
The skin comes first.
Skincare and makeup are much more closely connected than we sometimes think. Preparing the skin properly changes the starting point for makeup and allows us to see it not as something that conceals, but as something that complements.
Because when the canvas is prepared, everything we build on it changes too, completely transforming the final result.