Beauty Director
Cosmoplitan

Inge V

I’m Inge V, I’m the beauty director on Cosmopolitan. We write all the beauty copy, we shoot all the beauty copy. So we do stories – visual stories – photo shoots. We get launched to… you know, there’s product launches, you know, every day, so we go to the product launches, and then we constantly come up with ideas for visuals for copy. Those are the biggest parts of the job, so running around town, looking at new products, writing about them.

00:00:35 I wanted to write – that’s all I knew – and I didn’t know in what kind of capacity, but then I thought journalism would be more fun than writing books, so I kind of, yes, I went to uni and I did a degree in, which is part journalism, and part history of the arts, part languages, so I was thinking in that direction. There were one or two things I wanted to do. It was either going to be writing or I wanted to work in the music business, and I tried to combine those, and TV was part of that because that was like a combination of those things.

00:01:11 It’s very scary as a young person to choose your dreams, almost your hobbies. I always wrote as a child, but that’s like a hobby, that’s not like a job, and it takes quite a bit to realise that your hobby can be your job, you know, and it’s a scary choice to make.

00:01:26 It wasn’t until I went to do internships and realised that that… I really do think it’s very important. That was the way to go. I realised there was a way into these fun jobs. Once you go and do that, and my internships were at MTV, you know, you suddenly realise that it’s kind of got nothing to do with what you’ve studied, you know. You’re making tea, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all about being there. It doesn’t… I mean, I’m really happy I studied, but frankly it was completely pointless because everything I do today is down to having worked for a long time for no money whatsoever and learning the ropes by being there, and I think especially in media careers it’s everything.

00:02:12 I just decided whatever, I just want to work at MTV. I don’t really know in what capacity. I actually won a competition at some point, and that’s… and I did that on purpose. I entered this competition on purpose because I thought that’s a way in, that’s how I can get in touch with people at MTV. Very embarrassingly, it was you could present a weekend on MTV, and there was me and three others that kind of won that competition, but it turned out that the person who chose the winners is now my husband. He didn’t choose the winners for any talent or anything, which I hate him… He chose me because he saw me on videotape. It’s so embarrassing, but it led to everything that came after.

00:02:54 And so eventually a job finally came up, and I had been elbowing and trying, and when it came up I just had to go. It was only for three months originally so that was quite scary, but I knew enough people in London. I knew people at MTV, so I just thought I had to, you know, take a chance.

00:03:12 I’d idolised this rock star Prince in my teens and in my twenties, and I wanted to meet this man. I was a girl in a village in Holland and he was like the most famous man in the world so it was impossible, but it happened, and I made it happen because I was quite persistent. But the thing about it was that I realised a dream that seemed impossible, and from that point onwards I was like ‘Frankly, you know, you can do everything.’ I know people say that ‘Oh, you can do anything,’ but unless you experience something that you didn’t think was possible it doesn’t quite click, and that really made it click for me.

00:03:50 So it really taught me that if you work on things hard enough, you know, you go about it in a clever way and you push yourself, that you can make things happen.

ENDS