North Bay Woman

36 NORTH BAY WOMAN | F A L L 2 0 1 6 By PJ Bremier W ho is a pretty girl? If you ask professional makeup artist and consultant and founder of PrettyGirl Makeup, Christina Flach, it's simple. "Every girl and every woman in my mind is a pretty girl," she says. Flach, who grew up in Fairfax playing tennis, riding horses and applying makeup to herself and friends, claims she was always "half-tomboy, half frou- frou" in her youth. "But, that's what pretty girls are," she says. "They're active and doing things. They're not just ornaments." Now married to Ken Flach, a gold medalist in doubles tennis at the1988 Olympics in Seoul (and owner of Best Lil' Porkhouse BBQ in San Rafael), the couple lives in Novato with two of her children from a previous marriage, Nikolai and Benjamin Friedman. Flach played in pro tennis events when she was only 16 years old, which led to a successful career in tennis as a clay court champion on the Avon Circuit in Mexico for several years. After she became pregnant with her first child, though, Flach needed a more flexible career, so she took over a friend's image consultancy in Marin that used a private label cosmetics line. "The problem is I could never find a lip gloss that lasted and lip gloss is my favorite product," she says. "I'd take one sip of water and the gloss would come off." In 1995, she decided to concentrate solely on makeup, closed the business, hired a publicist and an agent – first at Ford Models, then at the Look Model Agency – and accepted her first professional makeup job, an online catalog shoot for Gap. It was three years later, when she was vacationing with family and friends in Hawaii, that she finally got the Christina Flach Pretty Girls, We are all Wit and wisdom are part of the package Christina Flach, consultant and founder of PrettyGirl Makeup, grew up riding horses, playing in the dirt, and enjoying tennis. She knows that pretty girls aren't "just" pretty and every woman in her mind, is a "pretty girl." – Photo by Stuart Lirette – Photo provided by Christina Flach says makeup creator

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