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The Makeup Artist at Ground Zero of Internet Beauty Culture
In 1953, Marilyn Monroe asked her longtime make-up artist
Allan Snyder to sneak into the health center where she turned into briefly
admitted after filming “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” so that he ought to powder
her nose. According to Snyder, Monroe also asked that he do the same after her
demise, and gave him an engraved cash clip to remind him to get to her while
she become “nonetheless warm.” In 1962, Snyder touched up Monroe’s visage for
her funeral, and served as one of her pallbearers. Not lengthy in the past,
Mario Dedivanovic, who has spent twelve years portray the face of the
reality-TV wealthy person Kim Kardashian West, and who considers Snyder a
religious mentor, texted me a piece of writing from a girls’s mag revealing
Snyder’s “8 splendor secrets and techniques.” He cited that Snyder had used
Vaseline as a highlighter—Dedivanovic does, too, although he prefers another
emollient jelly, Elizabeth Arden’s Eight Hour Cream, that is the colour and
consistency of linden honey. Snyder was acknowledged to dust the end of
Monroe’s nose with blush with a purpose to provide it the influence of being
greater snubbed; Dedivanovic regularly engineers a comparable trompe l’oeil on
West’s nostril, making use of darkish powder onto both side—part of the process
referred to as contouring—to make it appear narrower. “Omg the similarities are
uncanny,” Dedivanovic wrote. “I often surprise what it was like. I can believe
without a doubt what it was like.”
West, who has 100 and eighty-six million Instagram followers
(only five humans, such as West’s half of sister Kylie Jenner, have more), has
stimulated limitless ladies to game the “smooth glam” look that Dedivanovic
first gave her in 2008: airbrushed pores and skin, sculpted cheekbones,
peachy-pink blush, a “bronzy eye,” long fake eyelashes, and dewy highlighter,
all “baked”—an enterprise term for setting with loose powder—to a matte end,
like the shell of a cage-unfastened egg. Dedivanovic’s technique is a twist on
a practice that dates again to the Elizabethan generation, and that became
later adopted by the drag network. Contouring become ideal for black-and-white
film, a medium of light and shadow, and was utilized in early Hollywood through
makeup artists which include the Polish beautician Max Factor (né Maksymilian
Faktorowicz). It additionally proved, a century later, to look remarkable on
Instagram. West began the usage of the app to publish selfies in 2012, and her
signature appearance seemed to replicate spontaneously at the website:
limitless mini-Kims with pouty nude lips (dubbed, with out a small quantity of
snickering misogyny, “duck face”), beige on every surface, and hair pulled back
into a bun so intense that it doubled as an eye fixed lift.
In 2015, contouring became a “precedence category” at
Sephora, which started out to sell a wide sort of contouring “palettes,”
featuring powders and creams in tones from vanilla to coffee bean. Some kits
came with instructions: paint stripes of dark color on functions you need to
recede (jowls, hairline, chin) and light shade wherein you want to draw
recognition (cheekbones, the bridge of the nose, the philtrum), then furiously
mixture. The backlash got here hastily. The mythical makeup artist Bobbi Brown
stated in an interview in 2015, “When I see contouring on people’s faces, it
looks as if dust.” That year, Pati Dubroff, a makeup artist for Charlize Theron
and Dakota Johnson who now works for Chanel, posted a photo on Instagram of a
contoured face in development, which became striped like the pores and skin of
a lionfish, and wrote, “i would NEVER SUFFOCATE THE SKIN or create a MASK LIKE
CREATURE like this.”
The Kardashian own family face continued to flood the field
of regard. (With the exception of Kendall Jenner, a excessive-style version,
West’s sisters all wore the appearance.) Previously, makeup artists had worked
almost in mystery; Dedivanovic quickly determined himself in an unexpectedly
public position. West regarded really curious about Dedivanovic’s ability to
mildew her face into unique shapes, and she or he spoke regularly about his
paintings, to absolutely everyone who might listen, with the giddy enthusiasm
of a university pupil who has simply observed existentialism. When Dedivanovic
would casually mention a product in an interview, such as Ben Nye’s “banana
powder,” a faded-yellow talcum mixture from a theatrical-makeup emblem that has
been in business when you consider that 1967, it might promote out, or quickly
triple in charge. (Dedivanovic, for his element, uses banana powder much less than
he as soon as did, having found that the daffodil color, on sure skin tones,
turns slightly garish when illuminated by using flashbulbs.)
Dedivanovic, who's thirty-seven, grew up in the Bronx. His
parents are Albanians from Montenegro. He has an angular, lupine jawline and
the bifurcated mustache of a young Errol Flynn. He is tender-spoken and, by
using his very own admission, now and again insecure. He is vulnerable to
crying, particularly when speaking about his mother. For years, he hated the
way his nose looked, and contemplated rhinoplasty. He did now not speak in any
respect in interviews or movies approximately his private life, and maintained
the equal discretion along with his celeb consumers. “Mario might be one of the
most effective people that I may want to consider—like sincerely accept as true
with, like ‘Oh, my God, don’t tell everybody I’m pregnant’ sort of consider,
you realize?” West advised me closing year by way of smartphone, from Los
Angeles. “I’m no longer pregnant, by using the manner,” she introduced.
Dedivanovic got here up within the industry before the
arrival of “beauty influencers”—online personalities who present cosmetics
tutorials on systems like YouTube and TikTok—however he's arguably at ground
zero for modern-day Internet splendor lifestyle. Arabelle Sicardi, a journalist
who's currently writing a e-book about the idea of “beauty as terror,”
described Dedivanovic to me as “the Venn-diagram center factor of Internet and
celebrity.” His patron roster has improved past West to encompass other
well-known women, which includes Kate Bosworth, Naomie Harris, Jennifer Lopez,
Salma Hayek, and Demi Lovato. He did Lovato’s make-up for the most recent
Grammys, wherein she shed a unmarried tear throughout her overall performance.
Dedivanovic, who changed into watching her on a display from about twenty toes
away, advised me that he briefly feared that his “career could be over” if her
mascara ran. It stayed positioned.
Dedivanovic is possibly first-rate recognised for the
Masterclass, a live occasion attended by aspiring make-up artists, who pay as a
good deal as seventeen hundred bucks (when West sits as the version) to examine
him doing makeup for up to 8 hours. A herbal pedagogue, Dedivanovic told me
that he feels his major reason now is to train other artists on how to pare
again the extra that he himself partly stimulated. He uses contouring simplest
sparingly nowadays, and by no means, he advised me, on very pale pores and
skin. Earlier this 12 months, he taught a set of college students in a small
workshop in Chelsea. “My intention turned into to get them in there and see the
kind of paintings that they’re doing and then help them to type of raise a
little bit,” he said. “And I literally, you realize, I went one by one to all
the college students, like, ‘No, don’t contour her nostril. No, don’t contour
her chin.’ I probably redid ninety in keeping with cent of the eyebrows.”
Makeup can be a shape of private expression, however, for a expert make-up
artist, one of the allures of the activity is the capacity to have overall
control—over how a person looks and over products that require unique
implementation. What Dedivanovic maximum
approximately watching the contouring fashion explode, he advised me, was that
it “took on a life of its very own”—one that he could not contain.