Kevyn Aucoin

When we think of the late, legendary makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, a few things come to mind. His incredible attention to detail, his overwhelmingly positive reputation, or how about that time he successfully transformed Martha Stewart into Veronica Lake for a tutorial in his third book Face Forward? What really stands out to us though is passion, in the strongest sense. A passion not just for beauty, but for life.

Before the days of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, Kevyn was just one of many gay young people facing a very scary reality—a world of people who simply didn’t understand him. Louisiana in the ’60s and ’70s was not the ideal place for a boy to be perfecting his makeup techniques, or starting a Barbra Streisand fan club, or sneaking around his first girlfriend to spend time with a handsome senior boy during high school. But he did all of those things. Truth be told, the young, soon-to-be top dog makeup artist faced so much physical and emotional torment in school, that he eventually dropped out. Kevyn didn’t get his diploma until the mid-’90s.

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