Celebrity make-up artist Monika Blunder has worked with A-list celebrities that include Britney Spears, Gisele Bundchen and Jennifer Lawrence. She is also host of a YouTube series in which she teaches her followers how to recreate some of her more memorable looks. But Blunder wasn’t always part of the fashion scene. In fact, as a child in Austria, she rarely watched TV and cared little about what celebrities were doing.
It wasn’t until she was 14-years-old that her interest in make-up artistry was sparked. Her older brother would take her to the sets where he was working as a director and she was exposed to actors and models. She thought about becoming a special effects makeup artist so that she too could work on movie sets.
She found after completing high school that there were no schools for make-up artistry in Austria so she moved to Germany and received a scholarship to help pay for her studies.
Blunder’s move to Germany also allowed her to meet a famous German make-up artist, Norbert Cheminel, who later hired her as his assistant. This was to be the beginning of her brilliant and glamorous career.
As her brother’s film career took off, he moved to Los Angeles and Blunder visited him frequently. Soon she became immersed in the Hollywood scene. In 1996 she met Rebecca Romijn and struck up a relationship with her. Romijn became her client and she worked for her for almost six years, building up her status as a make-up artist.
Soon other celebrities came to her to do their make-up and she began to book bigger jobs, so she decided to move to LA and take her career to the next level.
These days she averages two clients per day and keeps busy with her YouTube channel. She said she enjoys connecting with people from countries across the world and sharing her knowledge with them.