Beyond the wedding day

This part of the portfolio is everything that is not a wedding. Bridal work has its own gallery, because a bride is photographed all day in changing light and a model on a set is photographed for twenty minutes under one. The looks are built differently, so they are shown separately.

What each gallery shows

Events and exhibitions

Makeup made to survive an evening: a room that gets hot, hours of standing, direct camera flash from people who did not ask first. These looks are stronger than daytime makeup on purpose — the eye holds its shape after five hours, and the skin still reads as skin rather than powder when a phone flash hits it from a metre away.

Backstage and education

Work from shows and from teaching. Backstage is the opposite discipline to a wedding morning: the same look, repeated exactly, on face after face, against a clock that does not move. The education photos come from one-to-one lessons, where the work is not to do the makeup but to take it apart slowly enough that someone else can repeat it on themselves.

Photoshoots and editorial

Looks built for one camera, one lens and one lighting setup, often in collaboration with a photographer who already knows what the frame should be. Editorial makeup can be stranger and more graphic than anything worn in real life, because it only has to be true for the photograph.

Why non-bridal work is here at all

Because it is where the technique comes from. Shooting under flash teaches what a foundation does on camera; backstage teaches speed and consistency; editorial teaches how far a shape can be pushed before it stops being flattering. All of it comes back to the wedding morning, which is the quietest and the least forgiving job of the three. Elena works on location across Veneto and the rest of Italy, in English, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian.

Permanent brows have their own before-and-after gallery, and private lessons are described in full on their own page.