Taliah Cortez was born in California, although the majority of her childhood she spent living in Costa Rica; her father owned a night club down there called Vertigo. Since moving back to Santa Clarita, Taliah had always felt as if she were the odd one out of the bunch. Art was easy to gravitate towards because there seemed to be no limitations under that umbrella. Her father would travel to tend to his business, and her mother helped him manage the club. Halloween was a main event at Vertigo, there were hardly any limitations as to what they would do in regards to decor and costumes. Her mother had introduced her to makeup for the very first time in October one year when she was practicing a zombie makeup for Vertigo's Halloween event; some Ben Nye face paint and liquid latex pulled at Taliah’s heart strings. Meanwhile, her older brother had discovered imovie and he rounded up herself and her sister to create movie trailers. Taliah borrowed some of her mother's makeup to turn herself into a zombie nurse for one of the trailers, and that was the first time she had applied makeup on herself. Moving forward to highschool, the extent of beauty makeup that she would experience was her older sister applying eyeliner and mascara on Taliah for special occasions. One Halloween in Freshman year, Taliah thought it would be a great idea to be Tate from American Horror Story with his iconic skeleton face paint. She looked up a tutorial on youtube and ended up replicating the look. That Halloween had passed, but Taliah’s addiction to makeup tutorials on youtube did not stop there. She would often frighten her family members by walking into the living room to grab something craft related whilst having “ bloody torn flesh” somewhere on her face. She had also stumbled upon beauty tutorials and was introduced to the world of beauty, often showing up to school with purple or blue eyeshadow looks. After high school, Taliah figured she was meant to be a makeup artist. She thought it made sense to learn about skin before going to makeup school, so she went out and got her esthetician license at Academy of Beauty in Culver City in 2019, and in 2020 she had been officially certified in makeup at Makeup Designory in Burbank. After many years, Taliah’s admiration and love of makeup is just as strong as it was when she discovered the power that it holds.