Vilina Ahuja can transform you into a zombie

For creative make-up artist and body painter Vilina Ahuja, ‘You can be anything you want to be,’ isn’t just a mantra, it’s a way of life. An engineer by day, this Instagram sensation (she’s got 40,000 followers and counting) transforms herself into real and imagined characters daily through body art and make-up. When she’s not engineering creativity into her busy life through dance or art, Vilina enjoys subverting people’s notions of beauty and noshing on pizza.

Like any other person working a full-time job, I constantly look forward to the weekend. For five monotonous days of the week I’m a tendering engineer at a construction company but on Fridays I am my own boss and without any constraints, I plan things out, work on turning my dreams into reality. My Friday starts very early with an hour of yoga followed by early lunch, after which I head out for a shoot because it’s the only time I get daylight for my photos. I use the rest of the day to work on a make-up look, edit all my pending Instagram videos and go to the gym. If I’m not shooting outdoors, I’m probably out shopping for crafts and backgrounds, fitting in an extra make-up look to do, or getting my nails done somewhere.

My parents are originally from Mumbai, India but I have never lived there. I was born and brought up in Dubai and I live here with my family.

I have been an artist for as long as I remember. I used to enjoy painting [hyper]realistic cucumbers when I was a four-year-old; my ultimate goal at that point was for someone to mistake my painting as a real cucumber (it never happened). My house is filled with paintings – some I despise looking at, but they’re proof that I could never get my hands away from those brushes. I only got into make-up when I was around 14, owning about four make-up products at most. I enjoyed doing all my friends’ make-up for school parties and functions. I was the only odd one who knew how to apply eyeshadow – I did a trashy job.

Because I was always doing several things to make some income as a school and university-going girl, I started face painting at freelance events – it was fun and I got free food and by word of mouth, it started to seem like I was the only student face-painter around. Come Halloween 2014, I was watching make-up and face paint tutorials to be able to do an ace job on my clients, and while watching someone who I can proudly call my No.1 inspiration, it struck me. Why am I not doing this, too?

I don’t know if I can fully enjoy a process if it comes easy. In short, [being a make-up vlogger] is not easy at all. I remember doing a 100 days of make-up one and a half years ago and because I was so active I gained a decent audience in just 100 days. Ever since, it’s been a decent upward leap in terms of improved skills but that also means constant work alongside my job and I just can’t be as active as I was back then. Which means I lose several followers daily and it does discourage me sometimes but it also encourages me to do better, and that is my ultimate goal: Improvement, to be inspired, and eventually inspire, and to broaden my horizons.

Art has always been therapeutic to me but on myself or someone else, it makes me feel like I have the power to transform, even if it’s for a little while, and that to me is pretty cool, which is why I chose the body as my canvas. For a commercial, I once transformed three people into full-body zombies – complete with fake teeth, empty eye sockets and slashed bleeding skin and all in an office space. Staff and employees were running, screaming, hiding under the tables and weren’t even able to eat when we were at the office food court. It was hilarious. So in short, make-up, face and body art gives me the perfect little combination of thrill and peace.

There isn’t anything specific besides working on my art and myself that I do during the weekend. I like to hit the gym and get some yoga done, but that goes on throughout the week. This weekend, if everything works out, I am visiting the beach with some of my closest friends, and I can’t wait to enjoy the sun, sand and waves before it gets too hot.

I can confidently say that several books have affected the way I live and think, but if I had to specifically name one that’s floating right on top of my head at this very minute, it’d have to be Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone. I think the title says it all.

Dancing is another hobby and talent of mine. I started dancing when I was 6; I was a professional dancer for four years and am a trained and certified Zumba instructor, but I would need a clone to pursue dancing professionally, too. Life would be so much better if I had a cloning machine.

The majority of [my body art projects] go wrong. I must have [only] posted 60 per cent of the work I’ve actually done for the world to see and scrapped the other 40 per cent with no traces of them to be found anywhere. The worst one was probably my entry to the NYX Arabia FACE (Fine Artistry of Cosmetic Elites) Awards Finals in 2017. I had to make a crown for the Statue of Liberty, which took me six attempts over three days and I used the most illogical material – air-drying clay, which gets heavy and fragile after it dries – to make it. The body paint also took me two attempts and I wasn’t happy after the second one either. However, I was one of the top six finalists and it was amazing. I had only just entered the world of creative make-up on social media, and that gave me the push to continue my make-up and face paint journey.

I enjoy eating almost anything and I eat healthy most days of the week but if you ask me to have pizza or offer me some double-chocolate ice cream, there’s absolutely no chance I’m turning that down. I’m a simple girl, I prefer my Papa John’s takeaway over most things.

Sigh, make-up. Fortunately, I just use the same clothes to paint in again. In fact, I use the same two tops and one very stained pair of sweats while doing all my make-up looks, so I haven’t had to spend on clothes.

There are lots of places I want to travel to but I’m dying to see the Northern Lights, so Finland and Iceland are on top of my list right now. If I had a time machine, I’d go back to Edinburgh, my favourite place in the world – I studied architectural engineering there between 2014 and 2015 at Heriot-Watt University.

My brother gifted me a DSLR two years ago on my birthday and my life changed. I always enjoyed clicking photos of nature and animals, but my digital camera never gave me the satisfaction I wanted. Besides being able to click better photos of everything, I was finally able to showcase my art and make-up well and build a quality portfolio. I would honestly be devastated if something happened to it.

The three people I’d invite to my dream dinner party are Barack Obama, Sophia Amuruso [founder of NastyGal] and Jade Thirlwall [from the girl group Little Mix]. This might get awkward.

I tried to sound interesting but I’m going to give an answer as everyone does: Beauty lies within. I don’t understand the [conventional] concept of physical beauty. Even though my make-up and art has so much to do with showing my face to the world, I try to be kind, polite, and genuine and share my knowledge, more than concentrate on trying to look physically beautiful. I hope one day, ‘beautiful’ won’t be the first descriptive term for a woman. The best compliment I received was: ‘I don’t know how your mind works the way it does, or how you manage to cope with so many things, but I hope to read a book about it one day… and you look like Princess Jasmine’.

If I could transform a celebrity into an animated character through body art I’d probably transform Seth Rogen into Homer Simpson and I honestly have no idea why.

I have too many ideas and too little time. In a month, I usually come up with 40 looks and get around to doing 10. Most of my inspiration comes from existing art – music, literature, movies, nature, paintings, drawings and more. If words move me, I instantly start visualising the words in the form of images. After all, originality is nothing but undetected plagiarism (this quote is stolen, too). My artistic influences are make-up artists Jordan Hanz and Pat McGrath and Harumi Hironaka, a Peruvian-Japanese painter and illustrator.