Lianne Farbes is the Founder and Editor in Chief of TheMakeupGirl™. She is a Professional Makeup Artist with over 20 years of experience working with makeup and skincare. She has held every retail beauty position from sales girl to counter manager. Lianne grew up in sunny Southern California and the chilly Midwest. She was interested in makeup and beauty products at an early age and got many of her beauty secrets from her mother and “Nana.” She has been addicted to Bonne Bell Lip Smackers since she was 9 (she had the one that hung around her neck…), at 13 she graduated to Maybelline kissing potion, then at 16 it was the bigger brands like Max Factor, L’Oreal and Lancôme. As she navigated her way through the world of beauty, she noticed that something was a little off.

It was only after she began modeling as a teenager that she discovered the art of custom blending from the makeup artists she worked with on a daily basis. That is when she began her quest for the perfect match and the perfect colors. She began experimenting with mixing foundations as she was finding that there was never ONE shade that matched her perfectly. in 1983, she landed a job working at an avant garde makeup store in trendy the trendy Central West End section of downtown St. Louis called Barone where she gave makeovers to the 80’s New Wave crowd. She learned all about contouring and use of color from a makeup artist’s point of view and she was off to the races. She left the safe haven of home to attend Parsons School of Design in New York as soon as she graduated high school. While there, she studied Color Theory and Fashion Merchandising. After college, she eventually became one of the first custom powder blenders for Prescriptives, a pioneer in that area. Lianne has also worked for beauty giants Lancôme, Clarins, and Borghese. She has trained with the best and has a wealth of knowledge in both skincare and makeup.

Lianne founded TheMakeupGirl™ in April of 2006 and it has since become one of the most popular beauty blogs on the web. A self confessed “product junkie”, Lianne has grown her site to an average of 75,000 unique readers monthly and it has been featured in About.com’s listing of the best beauty blogs, Glamour.com, The SassyBean & Woman’s Day Magazine. Lianne has leveraged social media sites like Twitter, Bebo and Facebook to increase her readership and blog traffic by 300% in the first year alone. In the summer of 2008, Lianne was honored by Natural Nail Polish company Zoya with a shade in her name. Currently, Lianne is also the editor of b5 Media’s Aging Fabulous Blog, a guide to looking your best over 30.