Why makeup costs what it costs

Only one of these happens in front of you, which is why the other four are invisible and why the figure looks like an hourly rate when it is not.

• The appointment itself
• Travel in both directions
• Packing and disinfecting the kit beforehand
• Product consumption — everything in the bag is being used up and has an expiry date
• Washing and maintaining brushes and tools afterwards

This is the part clients see least and it is a real, recurring cost. A professional kit holds dozens of products, and each one has a shelf life once it has been opened. Mascara is the clearest example: roughly three months from opening, regardless of how much is left in the tube.

That means a proportion of the kit is consumed by time rather than by use. A foundation shade that suits few clients still has to be carried, still expires, and still has to be replaced — because the alternative is not having the right shade for the person who needs it.

This is not unusual. It is the same arithmetic as any trade where the tool is consumed in the work, and it is spread across appointments in exactly the same way.

Travelling to you saves your time, which is the entire point of an on-site service. It spends the artist's time, and outside Tbilisi it can spend more of it than the makeup does.

A trip to Kakheti is four hours of driving for one hour of work. A trip across Tbilisi is forty minutes. Charging one average price for both would mean a client in Vake paying for a road to Telavi she is never going to use.

So travel is calculated by distance and stated as its own line. It is quoted before you book and it does not change afterwards — including if the day runs long, which is the point at which surprise charges usually appear elsewhere.

A single fixed figure is bad for both sides. One person's everyday makeup and a five-person wedding morning are different quantities of work, and pricing them identically means one of the two is being treated unfairly.

What is fixed, and published, is the starting point: 150 GEL. Everything added to it is itemised and explainable — the occasion, the number of people, the travel, whether a trial is included.

And all of it is said before you book rather than on the day. A price you learn about when the artist is already in your living room is not a price, it is a negotiation you cannot leave.

Technical skill, and — probably more than that — decisions. Which shade for this skin under this light. Which base will survive twelve hours rather than two. How strong the eye needs to be for this particular photographer's lighting rather than in general.

Those decisions are what cannot be learned from one video, and they are the whole difference between makeup that collapses after two hours and makeup that is still intact in the photographs taken at midnight.

It is also worth saying what is not being bought: a face that is not yours. The job is to make a specific face work in specific conditions, and any price discussion that loses sight of that has stopped being about value.