Kevyn Aucoin - Career

Career

When he first arrived in New York, Aucoin was putting makeup on test models for free to build up his portfolio before he was discovered by Vogue. For the next year and a half, he worked daily with Vogue photographer Steven Meisel. In the three years following his first Vogue shoot, he did a total of 18 more. In 1984, he collaborated on Revlon's Nakeds line, the first line based solely on skin tones. However, his Vogue cover shoot with supermodel Cindy Crawford in 1986 took his career in a new direction. During 1987-89, he did nine Vogue covers in a row, and an additional seven Cosmopolitan covers. At his peak, he would often be booked months in advance and could command as much as $6000 for a makeup session.

I work in an industry with some of the meanest people who have ever walked the face of the earth, who live and die for the surface. But the way I see it, I have a responsibility to do the most I can do, the way I know how. Since I know how to apply makeup, that's what I do and use it as a platform.

His motto was that it was far more important to help a woman feel beautiful no matter what, and that makeup was simply his tool for helping her discover herself. A proponent of the philosophy that every woman is beautiful within, he was one of the best-paid celebrity make-up artists in history. He began writing a column for Allure. A comment he made in a 2000 column, calling members of the National Rifle Association "morons" drew a record amount of mail for the column and a few death threats. He would refuse to do the make-up of models he felt were too young.