A middle-aged man staggers through the door of a shop in the Auckland suburb of Morningside, gulping for breath as he clutches his racing heart. “Bloody hell!” he gasps. “I wasn’t expecting that!” Poor Dennis had come to makeup store BodyFX only to get his face painted. But in honour of Halloween, the entrance has been transformed into a haunted cottage, where a masked staff member leaps out at unsuspecting customers.
It’s a bold business move to terrify your clientele before they’ve spent a cent. But it’s not the only surprise within these walls. Co-owner Julian Bartram leads Dennis through the retail store, past stands offering vials of fake blood, werewolf fangs, horns that can burst from your forehead. Bartram is wearing spooky contact lenses with fake pupils that make his eyes appear to be going in different directions, which will be no comfort to the still-recovering Dennis.
In the next room, Julian’s wife and BodyFX CEO Yolanda – an internationally recognised body painter – is among a line of makeup artists transforming ordinary Aucklanders into a ghoulish cast straight out of your nightmares. Soon, Dennis’s bald head has a siren-red gash carved through it, the Zombie prosthetics indistinguishable from his skin. The skeleton beside him tries to open her phone and her Face ID doesn’t recognise her. Yolanda airbrushes snake-like scales over a woman’s neck with incredible precision, and the woman gasps at her metamorphosis into Medusa.
The Bartrams would have been content with this life as purveyors of fright and fun and suppliers of special effects, cosmetics and kit to makeup and film industry professionals. But their business has taken an unexpected turn into a new frontier.
Step through the next door and you enter a vast warehouse where BodyFX becomes MedicFX. It’s here that things get deadly serious. In the area they refer to as “the lab”, five technicians are moulding latex and sculpting silicone into human faces, babies, and an unnerving range of wounds. They will be used for medical simulation – helping train nurses, doctors, paramedics and soldiers here and around the world.
“It’s like, from face painting little kids to selling stuff to the army in France. How did this happen?” says Yolanda. “It’s a nutty, different world. I come from a very fantastical background and I love making whimsical things and beautiful artwork, but the simulation industry can actually help save lives.”
It was the Plan B they’d never considered for their original business, which suffered in the pandemic years when retail was closed and the TV and film productions they serviced were on hold. MedicFX sprang to life in 2019, when Yolanda’s mother, sculptor and dollmaker Nicole Heydenrijk, took a call from a staff member at Wellington Hospital. Could she make a female face for a training mannequin? The hospital so liked the realism of what was provided that it ordered more. Then the University of Auckland asked for “a whole bunch of limbs” for its medical school’s surgical training needs and the business they never sought began to take off.
Heydenrijk, who had been working with her daughter and son-in-law for BodyFX, saw the potential in this new area – she is now MedicFX’s managing director.
“Nicole has always been one who jumps in with anything. She’s got a lot of balls,” Yolanda says. “She’s like, ‘Sure, we could do that.’”
“If you asked her to fly a plane, she’d go ‘I’ll try that,’” Julian adds. “We were freaking out, like, ‘Oh my god, this is becoming serious!’”
In the sticky room
The MedicFX process begins in a mould-making area, where Yolanda designs every-thing from pregnant bellies to premature babies. In the “sticky room”, the silicone is poured and technicians trim, shape and cut. A row of elderly male faces look like they could start talking. Intestines spill from a model stomach, spongy and slimy to touch. Trays of fake bedsores wait to be painted.
It’s not for the faint-hearted. “Every time I walk into the lab, I’m like, ‘ugh’,” says Julian. “Honestly, big respect for nurses if that’s the stuff they have to deal with.”
“Because I know it’s silicone, it doesn’t gross me out,” says Yolanda. “But it’s always a good measure – if other people get grossed out by it, it’s hit the mark. It looks real enough.”
They describe themselves as an “alternative Wētā Workshop”, employing graduates from art schools and the Cut Above Academy’s makeup artistry courses.
In the “hairy area”, Nicole is meticulously punching individual strands of hair into the mask of a fully-bearded Aboriginal man called Jarrah. He’s one of 70 different characters of various ages, gender and race they create, all with names, to make more “real-life” simulation mannequins, or manikins as they’re called in the training game.
“The manikins are amazing things,” Julian says. “They’re like robots that can breathe, they can blink, they can even talk, they’ve got speakers in them. But they looked like crash-test dummies, so we’ve created facial overlays that can change the character. So instead of going, ‘Imagine there’s an 87-year-old person who’s had a stroke’, we’ve got an 87-year-old man who looks like an actual stroke victim. It’s a lot more realism.”
There are no corners cut when it comes to realism – MedicFX models have chipped nails, bulging veins, nasal hair. And the insides of the models can be just as detailed: they produce silicone babies with anatomically correct airways so trainee paediatricians can do full birthing scenarios, practising intubation and ventilation. At expos around the world, medical experts are surprised at their authenticity.
“They’d pull out their laparoscope and stick it down into the baby and be like, ‘Oh, I can see the epiglottis, and past the larynx! These internals are, like, wow!’ That’s pretty awesome,” Julian says.
Yolanda’s background is in art and Julian’s is in sales, so the couple admit they can get lost in meetings with surgeons, where they frantically take notes about biology and the medical procedures being discussed.
“It’s so funny,” Julian says. “We go home and Google it to figure out exactly what they mean. We’ll paste a transcription into ChatGPT and go, ‘Dumb this down for 12-year-olds’.”
They do have expert help. Middlemore Hospital anaesthesia technician Pete Higgins helps the team ensure what they create is as real as possible. He says their work is a “total game changer” for simulation.
“It’s so drastically different as a participant now, looking at a real face,” says Higgins. “Adding that extra layer of realism really gets you involved. Everyone needs a safe environment to learn skills and make mistakes safely. It’s a really forgiving way of learning.”
Orders have come in from Hato Hone St John, the Police and the Defence Force here, and Ivy League university medical schools in the US. The US Department of Defense is a client, as is the French military. The Korean army recently ordered 800 gunshot wounds for medics to practise with.
“It’s essentially like a slab of meat with a bloodline and some bone. And then the task is to obviously pack the wound as fast as possible to stop haemorrhaging,” Julian says.
They’re scaling-up fast – the team making moulds around the clock to meet demand. The couple joke that Yolanda is struggling because “there’s no glitter”. She says her artist mother doesn’t enjoy the uniformity a bulk order demands. “She loves to go, ‘Oh but this baby looks nicer with this colour hair!’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, but the distributor ordered this one and you can’t change that’!”
An artistic mess
The Heydenrijks emigrated to Wellington from the Netherlands in 1999, seeking adventure. Nicole had made dolls, painted and sculpted from her home studio she dubbed the “artisooy” or “artistic mess”. She was also involved with theatre makeup and face and body painting.
Sensing a gap for their skills – Yolanda had also developed a practice as a body painter – mother and daughter opened a studio in Wellington in 2001, teaching what they knew.
Yolanda met Julian when he hired her to work at a GE-free protest he was organising in 2001. He wanted a “mutant human” on display and hired Yolanda to bring it to life with body paint.
“That’s when we fell in love. Well, that’s when I fell in love,” he says. “I ran home to my flat of boys and said, “I’ve met my future wife’.” They were engaged three months later.
Julian embraced the creative world of the Heydenrijks. He was Yolanda’s model at the 2008 World Bodypainting Championships, for which she spent seven hours turning him into a Chinese stone dragon with a long spiny tail and a front of finely detailed painted red floral brocade.
Yolanda: “He comes from quite a conservative family, so for him to come into my family and see all this nakedness and crazy transformation stuff, it would have been quite an interesting new world for Jules!”
They moved to Auckland, where Yolanda and her sister Myrthe realised their dream of opening a “candy shop” for face painters on New North Rd.
“Yolanda came home and said, ‘I’ve signed a lease for a retail shop’,” says Julian. “And I was like, ‘How much?’ It was $100,000 over three years. I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Yolanda was like, ‘If it fails, we’ll just live in it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, fair enough. Let’s go! Yeah, let’s do this!’”
Julian joined the business and the family poured everything into its success, the Bartrams living about the shop for eight years with their two young children, Layla and Sam. With Myrthe and Julian managing the retail business, Yolanda worked on commercials, films and TV shows, including New Zealand’s Next Top Model and Lord of the Rings. She has transformed celebrities from Tiki Taane to Richard Branson and Grace Jones into fantastic creatures.
Those sort of gigs, she points out, are not all hard work. “I was wiping Grace with baby oil to take her body paint off and, you know, drinking Cristal champagne at the same time.”
As the business and their children grew, Heydenrijk and her husband Titus swapped Wellington for Waiheke Island. Keen sailors, they built a workshop on their yacht so Nicole could keep creating.
We’re not millionaires, but we’re millionaires in life.
Today, Myrthe runs BodyFX while Heydenrijk and the Bartrams focus on MedicFX. And they’ve welcomed the next generation into the business.
Layla, 20, is administration assistant for MedicFX. “She has always been very good at organisation. As a toddler, she would line up all her toys,” says her father.
And 18-year-old Sam has also joined the team as a 3-D modeller, a growth area for MedicFX. Not that Julian thought he should walk into the role.
“Nepotism’s shit!” he says. “As a parent, I want him to struggle and find a job and eat onions and potatoes, because I think that’s character-building, right?
“But we interviewed lots of people for this job and he’s the only one who – through being our kid – had learnt the mould-making process, and then through just being a geek had learnt all the 3-D stuff. He’s actually a bit of a genius in that department.”
More than money
From its start as “a little face-paint candy shop, with all the family earning $3.50 an hour” to a staff of 14 and 30-40% growth year-on-year, Julian envisions MedicFX becoming a $50 million entity. But money has never been the motivator.
“The thing is, we haven’t borrowed a cent. Has it been a slog? Hell yeah. Have we earned any real money? No! But it’s been fucking fun!”
“I’ve always felt like I never worked,” says Yolanda. “Like I always am just having a really fun time in my life, and I’m doing things I really enjoy doing. Even if I dropped dead tomorrow, I would still be very happy. It’s a pretty amazing life, running a business with this guy.”
Julian agrees. “We’ve done so many cool things. We’ve travelled the world and we’ve painted heaps of naked people! And then partied with them. We’re not millionaires, but we’re millionaires in life.”
