I loved high school – until I didn’t. So I left to study art. I loved studying art…until I realised I had no idea how I could make a living from it, so I got a job working in a stationery store. 

Having grown up visiting my mother on film sets (she worked in the art department), I quickly saw that the hair and makeup artist got to sit down a lot more than anyone else – and there was even an opportunity to be quite creative at times. That suited me. 

I vividly remember the “meeting” between my parents and me about leaving art school to study makeup & hair instead. My mother said, “if you do this, you have to finish it!” My father said, “You do whatever makes you happy.” That meeting was a very defining moment. I did both.

The Cape Town film “season” was primarily a summer affair, which meant, in the winter, I had to find temporary work with built-in flexibility for the sporadic shoot. I worked for my aunt’s corporate fundraising business for many years. I started out licking and stamping envelopes and eventually co-authored (my aunt did all the writing, I just did a lot of the research and illustrated the book cover) an e-book with her on how to fundraise on the internet. At Papillon Press and Consultancy, I learned how to research and develop working systems within an organisation.

Another year, I followed in my father’s footsteps and qualified as an estate agent. We specialised in selling vacant land to people who dreamed of building their own homes rather than making someone else’s space their own. Here, I learnt office management and how to read and write contracts. While this brief foray in sales was profitable and afforded me European travels, it didn’t resonate enough to give up hair and makeup.