Hair and makeup at home in Lisbon

At home means wherever you are staying. For a resident of Lisbon that is usually a flat in Campo de Ourique, Estrela or Alvalade. For a visitor it is more often a rented apartment in Chiado, a short let near Avenida da Liberdade, a hotel room in the Baixa or a villa above the coast at Cascais. All of them work the same way, and none of them needs anything unusual.

The appointment happens in the room you already have. The artist arrives on foot with a case, sets up in a few minutes near a window or a lamp, works, packs down and leaves the room as she found it. Nothing is fixed to a wall, nothing is wheeled through a lobby, and no furniture has to be moved out of the way beyond pulling a chair away from a table.

This is a different thing from a salon appointment done badly at your address. It is a service designed around the room: the kit, the lighting and the sequence of the work all assume that the mirror is small, the light is warm and there is no basin. If you want a hotel room specifically, that page goes into the concierge and timing side in more detail: hair and makeup at your Lisbon hotel.

A full professional kit comes to you. That means hot tools and a dryer, brushes and combs, pins, grips and setting products for hair, and a working makeup kit with primers, complexion products across a range of skin tones, eye and lip colour, and setting spray. Brushes are cleaned between appointments and disposables are used where disposables belong.

The artist also brings her own light. This matters more than anything else on the list. A hotel room lit for the evening, or a Lisbon flat with one south-facing window and heavy shutters, is not a place you can judge foundation by eye. A portable mirror light removes the guesswork, and it is the difference between makeup that looks correct in the room and makeup that also looks correct outside it and in photographs.

What does not come is a basin. Hair is worked dry or from a wash you have done yourself, which is the standard way on-location hair works everywhere. Colour and wet cutting are salon procedures and are not offered at your accommodation, for the plain reason that they cannot be done properly without plumbing.

Central Lisbon is straightforward. Chiado, Baixa, Príncipe Real, Avenida da Liberdade, Alfama, Estrela and Campo de Ourique are all a short journey from one another, and the arrival time is rarely the thing that goes wrong. Belém and Parque das Nações sit further out but remain ordinary appointments.

Cascais and Estoril are roughly 30 to 40 minutes from central Lisbon on a normal day along the A5 or the coast road, and slower on a summer weekend afternoon. Sintra is around 45 minutes, with the qualification that the road up the hill into the historic centre carries a full day of tourist traffic from late morning. For an early Sintra appointment that is a non-issue. For a mid-morning one it is the main planning constraint, and it is why we always ask for the address before we agree a time.

Tell us where you are when you enquire and we will confirm the travel time and any supplement before you commit to anything. Nothing about the location is left as a surprise on the invoice.

Send the date, the hour you need to be ready, the address and whether you want hair, makeup or both. We reply within 24 hours with availability, a realistic duration and a price. No card is taken to enquire and no deposit is held while you decide.

Everything is confirmed in writing before the day, including the arrival time and what the room needs. If we cannot do what you have asked for, at the standard you would want, we say so rather than taking the booking. The questions page covers the rest of the practical detail.