Award-winning celebrity make up artist Amrit Kaur and founder of the premier training institute ‘The Makeup School’ based in Pune and Delhi is a woman on a mission as beautiful as it is powerful: exploring the potential of makeup as a viable profession that contributes to women’s empowerment and doing away with the ‘frivolous’ tag attached to it.

When Amrit Kaur puts the finishing touches on a bride’s beautiful face and hairstyle, she knows she has not only made the lady gorgeous on the most important day of her life, but created a memory forever.

Look closer- beneath each stroke of the make-up artiste’s colorful palate is a world of grit, hard work and determination-especially to do away with the stereotypes attached to make up. “People, especially in India, tend to look at makeup as a frivolous pastime, meant only for the rich and the pampered,” shares Amrit. “But that’s far from true. Good makeup is an art and science-and a wonderful way of enhancing God-given beauty, irrespective of one’s age and status, thereby adding to a woman’s confidence quotient.”

It is also a serious profession that entails immense training and talent. “A well- trained to makeup artiste can make it big as a self-employed person as well as an entrepreneur. The advent of the median age has increased both the challenges as well as the opportunities before the artiste. The question is: how can you be the best at your work ?”

Back to the beginning; The awards jostling for space in her tastefully done up office bespeak triumph. But as she points out, it’s been 11 years of ‘blood, sweat, tears and endless hours of work’ that have built all this and more. That, and the courage to follow her own heart.

“It was in the final year of BBA that I finally accepted that I was an artist at heart. A conventional profession would have never made me happy,” she expresses.

Easier said than done though. Coming from a well-to-do industrialist home, the burden of societal expectations was immense. “People would wonder why I would want to pursue a profession such as this. At that time, the lack of know-how about make up was even more pronounced. Dealing with the prejudice attached to the profession, taking disappointments in my stride and starting everything from scratch has been hard. But I was convinced that I was making a difference-especially to the Indian woman’s understanding of the magic of makeup,” she says.

Thus, she founded The Makeup School a year later with a view to the training world-class makeup artists who are well-versed in both the art and craft of makeup.