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epitome of incomprehensibility
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On the radio tonight, someone was talking about her documentary on Kevyn Aucoin, famous makeup artist.
I looked him up, misspelling his name in the process, and he seems like a rare thing in a famous person: actually nice. Good at his job, too. Past tense for being in the world; he died in 2002. Wikipedia has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevyn_Aucoin
Next thing was image search, as the documentary-maker had been gushing about his skills. He made nice faces, though the face of one young woman in a before-and-after scenario had her freckles smoothed out and features too streamlined - she looked better before. I don't know whether that was just part of the product line or whether he actually did the makeup.
His face was square-jawed, with his jaw getting bigger as he got older. It didn't look so bad, but it was a symptom of a pituitary tumour throwing his growth hormones out of whack. The Wikipedia article suggests he died from painkiller addiction, but that's connected to the disease. (Why am I saying "but"? It seems there's still a link between morality and health in public discourse which is a bit weird. So I wanted to bring up the idea that doing unhealthy things isn't automatically evil.)
Anyway. One more thing I wanted to show. This is from his book Making Faces, where people are made up to look like old-school Hollywood stars, Audrey Hepburn and earlier (yes, Hepburn is a point in time; why not?): http://www.themakeupgallery.info/various/photo/lookalike/kastars.htm
I dunno what happened to the eyebrows of the women imitating the 1930s stars! Maybe they were just covered in foundation rather than shaved into super-thin arcs. It'd look a bit odd going around like that today... but if they did really raze those eyebrows, the eyebrow-havers could've penciled the shapes in for a while.
You'd have to be somewhat makeup-committed to bother; I'm more laissez-faire about face things. But I respect people who are good at cosmetic arts, especially if they seem like cool people.
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