The Fairy Godfather of Makeup

Kevyn Aucoin points his handheld camcorder at Cindy Crawford and she whispers, “Oh, so pretty,” as they prep for their first Vogue cover shoot. The year was 1986, the photographer was Richard Avedon. Vogue Fashion Editor, Polly Mellen, pops into the makeup room and asks, “How long do you need for makeup?”

“Well, how long do I have?” replies Aucoin.

“No darling!” Mellen retorts. “How long will it take for Kevyn Aucoin makeup?”

Such was the power Aucoin ( oh-kwa) wielded in his heyday, captured via his personal video archives in the 2017 documentary Beauty & The Beast in Me. Mellen would give him 10 hours, if need be; he was revered by fashion and beauty editors for how he changed the face of makeup.

Aucoin railed against looks of labored excess that dominated the 80s, trailblazing a less-is-more makeup ethos. In an earlier cover shoot for British Vogue, Crawford was slathered in cakey foundation; in the U.S. Vogue cover shoot, Aucoin went the other way, unleashing the radiant, next-level supermodel glow that defined her in the 90s. In Beauty, Allure Editor-in-Chief Linda Wells recalls that against the overdone heaviness of the decade, “Kevyn’s gentle treatment was positively groundbreaking.”

Aucoin had a gift for seeing beauty in any face and drawing it out in makeup, an adoration for individuality that flourished in his childhood. “Trying to conceal the fact that I was a gay child in south Louisiana would have been like trying to hide Dolly Parton in a string bikini!” wrote Aucoin in the preface to Making Faces, his second book in 1997. While British Vogue airbrushed away Crawford’s mole, Aucoin accentuated it with highlighter, and it became her superpower. For the first time, the world saw makeup as a vehicle to enhance, rather than to cover.

Naomi Campbell says Aucoin championed diversity, the first to discern that one shade of makeup just doesn’t cut it on dark skin. “I was fighting to get accepted,” she mused in Beauty. “He did black skin so well.” Aucoin also fought for gender nonconformity, notorious for quietly sneaking in male models made up as women, and turning Brooke Shields into a bearded man on the cover of Paper in 1990, considered sacrilege at the time.

“Kevyn invented so many things that we look at today as stuff that just exists,” says designer Isaac Mizrahi in Larger Than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story (2014). Aucoin’s iconic techniques and unmistakable signatures brought makeup artistry into mainstream consciousness. “He gave our craft credibility in a way no one had before,” explains celebrity makeup artist Rachel Goodwin.

At the end of the Vogue cover shoot with Crawford, Aucoin videos Mellen flitting around the room in joy, as she croons, “Kevyn, the eyes are fan-TAS-tic!” Aucoin didn’t shroud Crawford’s eyes in makeup; rather, he gave her subtly lined eyes, natural eyebrows and pillowy lips. He let her beauty speak for itself – and he knew that was what her face needed. That, is Kevyn Aucoin makeup.

Sources

Rachel Goodwin – rachel@makeupmuseum.com

Aucoin, Kevyn. Making Faces. Little, Brown & Co, 1997

Kaye, Lori. Jul 7 2017. Kevyn Aucoin Beauty & The Beast In Me

Bartok, Tiffany. Nov 16 2014. Larger Than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story