Karen Rovinovitz, the founder of Purple Lab and creator of Huge Lips, Skinny Hips lip gloss, dishes on the trials and tribulations of creating your own makeup line. Read her all her Beauty bLab columns here.

Every season, fashion designers have a look book, curated to perfection, to showcase their collection to prospective buyers and clients. It's not something beauty brands would typically do, but being that I'm such a fashion girl at heart, I was a little jealous! I wanted one!

So we decided to launch our very own.

I asked some of our favorite bloggers and F.O.P.L. (friends of Purple Lab) to strike a pose, and we turned my apartment into a photo studio.


The kitchen was the Dolce Gusto coffee and muffin "craft station" as they say on movie sets.

The living room is was saved for hair and makeup. Turns out that Britt, our multi-tasking maven (a.k.a. intern) who also wound up in one of the pics, is genius with hair! To give you a sense of the mayhem - 11 models, 3 makeup artists, Sharon and a team of 4 interns, 2 Dolce Gusto girls manning the cappuccino, 1 photographer, and me.

Our makeup artists rocked! Thank you to Stacie Ford, Ani Hovhannisyan and Donna Beretsky-Neidecker, who are so talented and able smoke out an eye like nobody's business! And then there's Ana Schecter, photographer (or as I like to call her, photographess). She is sooooo talented, it hurts.

We carefully plotted which look would be right for each model. Extreme and edgy red liner (Huge Lips Skinny Hips in Red Sole doubled as shadow for the day) for Karen Blanchard of "Where did U Get That" - she has such a downtown vibe that we knew she could pull it off (not everyone in the world can, but we also gave her a natural look).


Meanwhile, my husband Todd was on the roof deck, morphing it into a photo ready studio. We hung a white blanket on the fence between our deck and our neighbor's (for a stark white background), removed the table, chairs and grill and set the stage.

The lovely Audrey of "Homerun Ballerina" has such a natural glow about her so it was fun to get enhance it with the highlighter of Luxury Squared.

Now, Virginia Nam of "Lovely 20s" and "The Examiner." She looks like such a perfect little porcelain doll so we had to go with it for a very Asian-inspired look, using Huge Lips Skinny Hips in Lychee Martini on the eyes (it really works well as a shadow but you do have to let it dry!)

P.S. We're working on eye shadows, BTW! Coming somewhat soon-ish!

Christine from "My Style Pill" pulled off a really out-there, runway-ready eye - words won't do it justice. The rest of the face was super natural so that the eyes were the main attraction. Drool worthy.

It took a while to perfect the heavy rock star eyes for Anne of "The Jet Set Girls." I love the contrast of the dark, dark eye on her fair skin. And that red hair! She was so fierce, I couldn't stop kvelling all over her! And a very pregger Mildred from "Beauty Logic Blog" turned into a Nubian princess with super exaggerated rose-colored cat eyes.

Noelle and Joelle of "The Owls Are Not What They Seem," brought the glamour - each with two looks. And F.O.P.L. included a cute contest winner, who, along with her mom, became a friend, thanks to Twitter; the brand's resident pole dancing teacher, Barbara, and Britt, one of our interns who rocked a side braid and a hippie chic look that was simply divine.

Behind the scenes pics are on our Facebook page. And there's a great video as well, so do check it out!




Mwah!

Karen
Purple Lab Creatrix