Making Faces - hardcover

Kevyn Aucoin, make-up artist to people like Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts and Tina Turner, takes many different faces, including all physical and racial types, and shows in detailed step-by-step illustrations how to make the most of your beauty, and how to radically change your mood with makeup., The faces that Kevyn Aucoin has made are stellar and luminous: Cher, Tina Turner, Vanessa Williams, and Julia Roberts are but a few of the stars in Aucoin's galaxy of clientele. More than making do, making up is the art of achieving your own special look, and Aucoin insists that there are no hard and fast rules--except for the obvious ones, such as "Don't put lipstick in your eye."

The first section offers, in his own words, Aucoin's favorite ideas, tricks, and techniques for enhancing, defining, and altering facial features with makeup. You'll learn how to care for your skin, what foundation to use with your skin type, and transformational magic for that central player in the drama of beauty: eyes. Through his gallery of noncelebrity before-and-afters, Aucoin shows clearly how to use his fundamentals to achieve dozens of different looks.

The gorgeous final chapter reads like a list of exotic characters in a play--the Vamp, the Siren, the Diva.... In fact, such celebrities as Isabella Rosselini, Demi Moore, and Nicole Kidman pose as these dramatic, splendidly made-up characters. These sumptuous photographs are accompanied by full-page illustrations listing the "ingredients" required to create these looks as well as simple directions for achieving them. The introduction by the author, at once amusing and endearing ("...trying to conceal the fact that I was a gay, effeminate, hyperactive, adopted child with a serious lisp in southern Louisiana would have been like trying to hide Dolly Parton in a string bikini!"), and Aucoin's commentary throughout, makes Making Faces a unique reference book--beautiful, informative, and personal.