Interview With Reeve Artistry
Reminiscent of a pin-up girl, Reeve Micheal is a timeless beauty. With her luminous porcelain skin, impossibly dark hair, and doe eyes, she possesses the perfect face to paint with makeup. Reeve a self-taught makeup artist from Salt Lake City harbors a bold aesthetic and a sense of authenticity that is often lost in our digital world. Her Instagram @reeveartistry displays several glamorous and striking looks that are further detailed on her YouTube Channel of the same name. Recently, Reeve graced us with her presence and talked to Salt Lily about makeup, social media, and mental health.
Q: When did you start doing makeup?
A: It’s kind of a weird story because last February I had serious knee surgery. During my recovery I had a whole whirlwind of stuff happening. I got my first real panic attack which felt like a stroke and there was so much going on. I guess I just needed something to focus on during that time, so I started watching YouTube tutorials. I started to watch this girl called ‘It’s likely makeup’ and I just fell in love with her aesthetic and everything. When you have knee surgery they put you on pain meds. I was on Percocet and there’s like a side effect of it where you spend a lot of money. So, I remember I bought some ‘Lime Crime’ pallets just to kind of test out. I’ve always been kind of interested in makeup. I did special effects in high school and I was in theater so I did make up for stuff, but I had never been interested in all the colors and the blending. The YouTube makeup world was completely new to me, and when I bought those pallets I kind of just started messing around. Then in June I posted a picture and made Instagram. I was like ‘why not let see if this gets anywhere’ and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Q: What is your creative process like for creating new looks?
A: Honestly, I want to say the looks that get the most attractive and I'm most proud of are like me sitting down with absolutely no idea with what I’m going to do. Every single time I have a preconceived idea in my head, I swear it goes wrong and I end up not liking it. My strategy is to just completely let myself do whatever I feel when I sit down to do it. I will sometimes look at color schemes beforehand and decide what I want to use. Honestly, I just kind of have fun with it.
Q: Who would you say are your inspirations?
A: It’s ‘Likely Makeup’ she is my girl. I adore her. All of her looks are just so cool. She is probably the main person I follow. I’m not too interested in the big beauty gurus like James Charles, Jeffery Starr, and all those people. I like more people like her [Likely Makeup] or some Instagram artists like ‘Grave Moth’. Real people who do the weird editorial type of stuff, and that’s kind of where I got my inspiration when I was doing a lot of photoshoots.
Q: You just started a YouTube Channel, tell us more about it?
A: My Youtube Channel currently has four or five videos on it. My first video was a complete mess I want to delete it. I got on the Anastasia Beverly Hills PR List just like out of nowhere. They sent me an email and I felt like I had an obligation to focus on the makeup. Not just their makeup but makeup in general. It was a reality check of ‘oh this brand wants to work with you’ so like let's get this moving. I had people messaging me to make a YouTube channel but I’m awkward in front of a camera. I didn’t know how it was going to go. For my first video, I did a full review of the ‘Alyssa Edwards’ pallet that was a collaboration with Anastasia. After that, I went and looked at my mistake and figured out new lighting and a new background. The next video I did was turning myself into a Lisa Frank sticker book. I’ve been trying to really fun things. I did a full review of the ‘Jeffree Star Jawbreaker’ pallet that came out. I just focus a lot on new releases, tutorials, and my honest thoughts on the product. I feel like there are so many people out there who do makeup that will lie because they want to get sponsorship deals or money. I just want to be someone who can be completely transparent. In a lot of my videos if there is an eyeshadow or concealer I’m using, I’ll straight up be like ‘this sucks, don’t buy it’.
Q: Where do you see your makeup career going
A: I’m on the social media route, but I would like to do YouTube. I have intense social anxiety, but for whatever reason, I have fallen in love with videos. Not necessarily making the videos themselves, honestly sitting down to film is torture for me. I constantly feel like I’m saying the wrong thing, spitting over my words, or if the makeup doesn’t look good on camera, it’s all this weird pressure, but looking at footage and editing it, I just feel so in my element when I’m bringing it together. For me that’s kind of where the passion lies, just doing makeup and seeing where that goes. I’m not fit for a 9-5 job. I have chronic pain issues and a lot of other mental health stuff. Every time I’ve tried to work it just hasn’t worked out for my mental health and my physical health. This makeup thing has been this amazing creative outlet, and I’m lucky that I have the support system that I do. My boyfriend and my mom are amazing. They just want me to follow my dreams and hustle on it. I’m just trying to grow right now, grove my account, and grow my YouTube. I just like reaching out to people and talking to them as well. I like building a community.
Q: How do you feel like you’ve built a community with your platform?
A: It’s kind of interesting, at first I felt kind of silly being like ‘Hey Guys’ it almost felt weird talking to an audience. I’m at a thousand something [followers] right now and numbers don’t mean anything. You can be talented and have twenty followers or not be and have fifty-thousand followers. When people started to message me and be like ‘Hey, I want to buy this thing’ or ‘I need a new foundation, do you have any that you can recommend’ or ‘I have this skin problem what should I use’ I get those messages occasionally and just like makes me feel so good that I have this influence to help someone, and they look to me like this is what I need. I try to help people out. That’s been cool with the community aspect of it. Also, meeting other makeup artists. There is a girl named Liv, her Instagram is @personabyliv, I met her literally through makeup. She lives in Utah, we have mutual friends, and I had no idea until like we followed each other on Instagram. It’s just cool to like meet other makeup artists and also teach people who don’t know a lot about makeup like anyone can do makeup. I can show people the products that I like and I can recommend more affordable products to people.
Q: What is it like being a makeup artist on a set?
A: I’ve worked on a couple of different photos shoots with a couple of different photographers and models. One thing I learned is that every location is different. Everyone you work with is different. I’ve had some great shots and really bad shoots. The first shoot that I ever did was with this company. The inspiration the photographer gave me was a picture of Rihanna with a metal eyepiece, and she was like we are going to go with this as the concept but make it your own. I built this metallic eyepiece with little seashell jewels. I turned out cool. I painted it silver and then I put it on my model. The pictures turned out great. That was so fulfilling to me like wow I did this, it only took me three hours but I did this. Getting those pictures back was cool and for a long time I just really wanted to keep doing photoshoots. I love editorial stuff, but I started getting more regular make up jobs. Those are fine, but for me, it wasn’t doing well on my page. There are a billion smokey eyes and you know normal makeup which is beautiful. It was not enough for me to get mutual benefit from that, because I was doing a lot of trade work. I have smokey eyes on my page already and that’s not what people want to see, exposure wise. I think especially local photographers and stuff, really everyone is different. I did a hair photoshoot that was insane and the guy in charge of it was in charge of everything. It was crazy. I’ve done some nice photoshoots with some cool people. The first photoshoot I was talking about, that model and I are now friends. She’s having twins it’s pretty cool. It’s been cool to meet people like that. I do freelance makeup not very regularly, but I’m certified to do that. I can touch other people’s faces, I can do weddings, I have wedding contracts, so if you need that hit me up.
Q: What makes your makeup style different and unique?
A: I feel like we are at a point where everyone has done everything. Everything I do is taking inspiration from things that I see whether that’s another makeup artist, or nature, a picture, anything. I feel like for me, how I feel like I’m different from other makeup artists, is that I’ve brought forth a personality if that makes sense. I’ve seen these accounts on Instagram that are like incredibly talented but they all look the same. Like it’s just a picture of an eye and the eye makeup can be completely beautiful, but it’s like all the same. Something that I do different and I’ve seen other people do differently is put your personality into it. I do videos and I just have more unique facial features and maybe that draws people to my page. I don’t know, but I feel like just embracing who you are and just showing that side of you. Rather than just ‘hey guys, this is my fake persona and this is my Instagram eye’. I feel like that kind of sets me apart from a lot of makeup artists, but at the same time there are a lot of people who come in are like who do it as well.
Q: What are the pros and cons of using social media as your main creative outlet.
A: Social Media is great but also really not great. I can get down on myself a lot of the time because I’ll look at these amazing works of art and I’ll think ‘wow I’ll never be able to achieve that’. I saw this guy who did the Mona Lisa on his neck, or people who draw angels around their eyes and they look like Michelangelo’s paintings. For me, I’ve never been someone who draws. I’ve never been good at detail work like that, so for me, that can bring me down. It’s the number game. I’ll think like ‘oh I lost twenty followers today’ or ‘my post didn’t do well’. I find myself compulsively checking my analytics and all that stuff. In a way it is a business that I am trying to grow, so it’s stressful and comparing yourself to other people is hard. At the same time, I feel like it’s a really good thing because I’ve gotten so many opportunities through my Instagram. There’s a clothing brand that I wear a lot, and the CEO of that company has seen that I’ve worn her clothing. It’s great for networking and meeting people. I really like the community aspect part of it, but the numbers are almost like the ranking system. It’s like if you have this many followers than your top tier and I don’t like that about it. It’s a classist, so I have a hard time with that. Also, everyone face tunes and it’s hard to tell what is real and what’s not. That’s why I think it’s important to show your personality. If I make a video of my makeup that shows that I’m not face tuning.
Q: What sets you apart from other influencers
A: There’s a couple of other influencers I follow on Instagram who lives with chronic pain issues. I live with chronic pain and it’s cool to almost inspire people to not give up, I guess. I feel everyone should be able to enjoy pieces of life no matter what cards you dealt with. I feel like being open about that has been amazing. I’ll talk about my anxiety. I have severe anxiety. I have panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. I’m very open about that. I’m open about being on medication and that sometimes I go on a two-week hiatus and I don’t post. I think that’s important because on Instagram we see the best parts of people’s day. We see what they want to see. In a way, I do that too, because I’ll be like ‘look how beautiful I look today’ when in reality like a lot of the time I don’t feel beautiful. A lot of the time it’s hard for me to even sit up and do a makeup look because my back hurts and all of these other factors. I feel like for me it’s incredibly important to be completely transparent about what I’m going through. Not just so I can vent or rant, but because I want people to understand that if they are going through something similar that they aren’t alone. Also, to the people who have no idea what I’m talking about maybe, they can some education from it. I would just love to see that more with people who have a following. I say that like I have a huge following but I don’t, I just have that small community. I pride myself in completely honest and wanting to open the dialogue.
Q: You mention having anxiety and chronic pain earlier, would you like to elaborate on that?
A: When I had my first panic attack, well I had anxiety, you have to understand that time of my life it was just being on that medication set me on a spiral of anxiety. Day to day I started having dissociative episodes. It was crazy, my mom and my boyfriend were my carers. I was just so mentally ill. I was going to the hospital every other day. They would just give me Ativan and I would leave. Now, I’m on Ativan which has been great to be able to have that every day and know that I’m going to be ok. It’s been awesome. It’s been many years in the making to find a medication that does something for me. Going back to that panic attack, I was in the car with my boyfriend. I lost feeling in my feet and then my hands, completely numb, locked in place and that, of course, scared me thousand times more. I turned to tell him that my hands were locked in place and I had like stroke talk. I actually couldn’t pronounce consonants. I thought I was having a stroke, because for me I can’t move my hands and now my face isn’t working as it should. Luckily, my boyfriend is a lifesaver and called 911. We were able to go to the hospital and it wasn’t a stroke it was an anxiety attack. After that happened to me I was like ‘I have the world’s worst anxiety’ because I had never heard of anyone else who had gone through that. I had even seen therapists that they would be like that’s extremely rare ‘blah blah’. Recently I had been watching a YouTube video or something and one of the guys on there was talking about how he thought he was having a heart attack, but it ended up being a panic attack. It’s like I want to see this more. I want people to be open about this because you do feel like it’s rare. You feel like you’re alone and everyone who else who is viewing you thinks you are crazy, or that you’re making it up and they don’t understand. Just to see people be able to come out and talk about those things openly. People with mental illness like myself included carrying so much shame unintentionally. I feel like I should be able to do more. I should be able to earn money and do all these things that normal people can do. The reality is that I have to accept that this is my life. Yeah, there are things that I can do that can make it better, but this is the cards that I was dealt with and it’s ok to talk about. There is nothing wrong with me. I can’t help that I have this mental illness. I can’t help that I have chronic pain. I just think it’s so important to be more open about that kind of stuff. I really do.
