Shraddha Naik is a celebrated bollywood makeup artist making it big in Bollywood with her spectacular talent and skilled expertise. With her passion and sheer dedication, Shraddha has carved a niche for herself in the makeup world. She manages to blend elements of individual personalities and curating sartorial looks for them. While she excels in creating stunning looks majorly for Shraddha Kapoor, she has also spun her magic on Alia Bhatt, Yami Gautam, Athiya Shetty, Deepika Padukone, Kriti Sanon, Katrina Kaif, Jhanvi Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Kriti Kharbanda, Divya Khosla Kumar to name a few.
Shraddha Naik’s reassuring journey as a Bollywood makeup artist is a tale of many daunting experiences and numerous heartening moments.
Coming from an educated middle class family, Shraddha was very introvert as a child who was average in studies. While growing up, she had interest in hotel management as she was always awe-struck with big hotels & luxurious rooms. Her dream, however, was shattered when her mom told her that to begin her career in hotel management, she had to clean toilets and make beds. Thats when Shraddha changed her mind.
While Shraddha was in college, her mother started a salon. She took up a small beauty course in hair & makeup, to help her mom alongwith her college. That’s when she realised she really liked doing makeup & thought of pursuing it as a career. But her parents insisted that she finishes her studies before pursuing a career.
After completing her graduation, Shraddha decided to give makeup career a shot but she was given a year’s time by her family to achieve something in the makeup industry or she would return to pursue her MBA.
Luckily, she soon got an offer through a friend to do Marathi film as a hairstylist. However, Shraddha and her parents were very hesitant because no one in her family had ever worked in the film industry.
Shraddha says, “I was this 20 year girl who had no idea what a film set is about. We were shooting in Satara that time and I was supposed to do hair for 8 women and the head hairstylist didn’t show up. So I had to manage everything on my own.”
But for Shraddha, like many other female makeup artists in the industry, the journey ahead was full of roadblocks. Back in those days, women were not allowed to do makeup in bollywood industry. Women would only do hair & men were the ones who did makeup. There were unions who supported this. So during her initial years in the film industry, Shraddha used to have a male assistant with a union card on the sets to keep the union guys away.
She adds, “We had days when we used to hide off set - in vanity vans, when people from the union used to conduct raids. Luckily, things have changed now. The supreme court has given the judgement that girls can do makeup. It’s funny that we had to involve the supreme court to prove that girls can be makeup artists.”
“To all the male make-up artists who feel insecure about women being legally accepted as make-up artists, I just want to tell them that if you are good at your work you are going to get your due. If you are a girl and very bad at make-up, no one will hire you – and the same goes for men! I mean, there are so many areas where men are dominant. Cooking, for instance, is said to be a female thing but men are superb at it, right? And we don’t get insecure… They are good and that is the reason they are there. Degrading someone because of their gender is not a nice thing.”
The turning point for Shraddha was when she got an opportunity to work with Asin for a few South Indian films. Soon she made her big breakthrough in Bollywood as a makeup artist for Asin in Salman Khan starrer film Ready.
She went on to work with many of bollywood’s leading actresses including Alia Bhatt, Yami Gautam, Athiya Shetty, Deepika Padukone, Kriti Sanon, Kartina Kaif, Jhanvi kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Kriti Kharbanda, Divya Khosla Kumar and even Shraddha Kapoor - with whom she has been working for over 12 years now ever since her first film ‘Teen Patti’.
Shraddha says, “As I succeeded as an artist, the person in me grew too and that opened the doors to a lot of opportunities.”