Beneath the Surface

By Michele Orecklin

Kevyn Aucoin has never wielded an implement more menacing than a wand of mascara, yet this past summer, the fashion world's pre-eminent makeup artist found himself dueling with some well-armed opponents. In his monthly column for the beauty magazine Allure, in which he typically dispenses a mixture of grooming tips and inspirational aphorisms, Aucoin took a swipe at the National Rifle Association: "Everyone knows me and sports are like the N.R.A. and intelligence--it's an oxymoron (and boy, are they morons)." The resulting volume of mail suggests there are a lot of people who subscribe to both a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment and a publication that seeks to arm them with the appropriate shade of lipstick. Among the letters were several death threats.

In an industry in which Vogue editor Anna Wintour's decision to wear fur in defiance of animal-rights protesters constitutes a courageous political act, Aucoin's recent assertion that he would never ply his brushes on the face of a right-wing Republican because it would be like "a Jew doing makeup for Eva Braun" marks him as something of an anomaly. Over the past decade, he has worked on more magazine covers than anyone else in his field. On Oscar night, his ministrations are coveted by Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Kidman. Yet he has proved himself as likely to make pronouncements on government policy as on pressed powder. In the introduction to his new book, Face Forward, he decries the 1980s for its elitism and calls for racial harmony and gay rights. He assures women that the tips proffered are suggestions rather than rules, studiously avoids endorsing specific brands and points out that seasonal makeup trends "are just ways to get you to buy more product."

Aucoin's iconoclasm has long met with resistance, and his encounter with the N.R.A. is not the first time his life has been threatened. This week he will receive the key to his hometown of Lafayette, La., but growing up there in the 1970s--openly gay, conspicuously tall (he is 6 ft. 4 in.) and unapologetically nonconformist--he was "the No. 1 pariah at school," recalls Aucoin, now 38. "Kids threw rocks at me, told me I was ugly and left death threats in my locker." He dropped out of school at 15, he says, when two classmates tried to run him over with a car. He left Louisiana at 21 after the man behind him in line at a gay bar was struck over the head with a baseball bat. After years of applying makeup to his younger sister and misfit friends ("I figured if I could make them feel beautiful, I wouldn't feel so ugly myself"), he set out for New York City. Within a year, he did his first job for Vogue and soon attracted advocates like Tina Turner and Cindy Crawford. In 1997 his book Making Faces debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

As he did in Making Faces, Aucoin devotes several pages of his new book to portraying his celebrated friends as Hollywood icons from the past: Winona Ryder as Elizabeth Taylor, Calista Flockhart as Audrey Hepburn and Martha Stewart as Veronica Lake. Yet the rest of the book shows Aucoin's makeup wizardry on women of all ages, ethnicities and body types (including a transgender friend). The goal, he insists, is to "empower women through showing them possibilities, not making judgments."

That Aucoin endeavors to promote individuality and a feminist viewpoint in a field notorious for imposing a largely uniform standard of beauty is a contradiction that's not lost on him. "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," he says. "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."

He has refused to do shoots with models he deems too young, and once, in an editorial meeting at a major American fashion magazine, protested that every model in a fall preview spread was white, blond haired and blue eyed. "I said, 'Last time I looked, we didn't live in Sweden.' People stared at me as if I were speaking Latin." Aucoin retains the same passion for his trade that he had when he started 18 years ago. Still, he proclaims, "if all it says on my gravestone is DID GOOD LIPSTICK, I'd rather it say nothing at all."