Product Description

He was the makeup artist of choice for every major movie star, pop icon, and supermodel around; presidents and princesses knew him by name; and his work appeared on countless catwalks, red carpets, and magazine covers. While his life was a dizzying mix of fame and glamour, Kevyn's goal wasn't simply to make beautiful people even more alluring. Inspired by his difficult childhood in a homophobic Southern town, he chose to see beauty everywhere, in all people, and to help them see it in themselves. It's no wonder his books, The Art of Makeup, Making Faces, and Face Forward, were immediate bestsellers.

Kevyn Aucoin: a beautiful life chronicles the magical journey of this makeup guru as seen through the eyes of his family, friends, lovers, and fashion-industry insiders. It traces his beginnings in a Louisiana orphanage to the mysterious illness that tragically ended his life at age forty. Here, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Janet Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears, Tina Turner, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Hilary Swank, Christy Turlington, Isabella Rossellini, and dozens of other luminaries reveal in exclusive interviews what made Kevyn so talented, funny, fiercely loyal, and ultimately irreplaceable.

Also included are the makeup techniques that made Kevyn so legendary, accompanied by easy-to-follow step-by-step photos. He refined these signature tricks throughout his career and relied upon them to turn every face into something extraordinary.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81752 in Books
• Brand: Kevyn Aucoin
• Published on: 2004-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• Details Kevyn's childhood, adolescence and rise to makeup artist super stardom
• Features interviews and muses from Kevyn's friends and family
• Highlights the a-list celebrities who knew Kevyn best
• Also includes the techniques that made Kevyn the legend he is
• Perfect for fans of Kevyn and any aspiring makeup artist

Review
"Kevyn helped me to see that it's okay to open up and express yourself and that doing so will take you to new places."

Review
CosmopolitanA makeup must-read.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: 1962-1977. The Foundation Years.

"I understood early that beauty was power."

"I made a crash landing here on earth on February 14, 1962, in the Shreveport Catholic Charities Home for un-wed mothers. The infamous Bonnie and Clyde lost their lives just miles from where I was born. Like outlaws ourselves, my birth mother and I were on the run from the day she found out I was part of her."

As an adult, Kevyn Aucoin led the kind of glamorous, fast-paced life that can only be imagined. He tended to the face of every A-list star, penned bestselling books, met princesses and presidents, and commanded thousands of dollars for a single day's work. Few could have predicted this incredible rise given his heart-wrenching childhood.

The complications began well before Kevyn was born. His mother, Nelda Mae Sweat, was a scared, pregnant sixteen-year-old with strict Baptist parents. His father, a handsome football player named Jerry Burch, didn't believe that the baby was his. When Nelda's parents discovered her condition, they shipped her off to St. Ann's, a home for unwed mothers in Shreveport, Louisiana, where she lived for three months. Nelda went into labor on Valentine's Day and almost died during the delivery when her blood pressure dropped precipitously. Her parents forbade her to see the baby boy, but she managed to slip into the nursery each night and rock him to sleep. She named him Scott Kevin.

Right before she was discharged, Nelda made one last secret visit to the nursery. She clipped off the baby's ID bracelet and returned home, heartbroken about the child she was forced to leave behind. She had no idea if she would ever see him again.

Across the state in a town called Lafayette, Isidore Aucoin, Jr., a telephone company manager, and his wife, Thelma, had filed an adoption request with the Catholic Charities and were put on a waiting list. The couple, childless after a decade of marriage, desperately wanted a baby. A month later, while Thelma was washing dishes in their modest home, the phone rang. A newborn was available.

The Aucoins named him Kevin James. (Almost twenty years later, Kevyn would change the spelling of his first name.) Thelma doted on her baby, and he grew into a plump, jowly toddler. "When he was two, he was so fat his legs would rub together until they were raw," recalls his aunt Laura Bourgeois. "The pediatrician made Thelma put him on a diet, and Kevyn cried and cried."

By this time, Kevyn had a baby brother named Keith, who also came from St. Ann's. Over the next eight years, two adopted girls rounded out the family -- Carla, gregarious and feminine, and Kim, tomboyish and introspective. The girls shared one bedroom and the boys another in the red brick house that Isidore had built years earlier in the middle-class neighborhood. The Aucoins had a carport, a big backyard, and one bathroom. The monthly mortgage payment was $74.66.

Like other little boys, Kevyn liked to climb trees and run around barefoot. But he also loved to dance, draw, and listen to songs (such as "Raindrops Keep Falllin' on My Head") over and over. "I was a regular little boy who also enjoyed things that girls did," Kevyn told the producers of Oliver Button Is a Star, a documentary based on the 1979 children's book Oliver Button Is a Sissy. "I was a tomboy and a sissy boy." Kevyn wore bright green patent-leather loafers on his first day of school and regularly rearranged the living-room furniture -- both with his mother's approval. "She was very supportive of me being who I was and understood my femininity," said Kevyn. "That gave me the impetus to be who I am today."

By the age of six, Kevyn realized he was different from the other kids, but, he said, "I didn't know what gay was. There was no such thing when I was growing up. I knew I had crushes on boys, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with that until I started to hear about it from the other kids in school." Even the local Catholic priest ranted about evil homosexuals during his sermon every Sunday. Kevyn thought he was destined to become a rapist or a child molester. He first considered suicide at the age of eight.

He tried to fit in, but it was tough in a town like Lafayette. Located in the heart of Cajun country, it wasn't a progressive or tolerant place by any stretch. At its best, it was a tight-knit society that embodied the joie de vivre of the Cajuns. At its worst, it was a population of small-minded, insular folks, wary of anything or anybody different.

At the age of eleven, Kevyn tried to bury his feelings about boys and found a girlfriend named Karen. They wrote love letters back and forth and talked about getting engaged. "If my family ever moved out of this city, I'd run away and come back to you," wrote Karen on her baby-blue notebook paper.

Kevyn played baseball to please his father, who coached Kevyn's and Keith's teams. He was a Boy Scout, but the crushing separation anxiety he suffered when apart from his family made the required camping trips an impossibility. He was an accomplished saxophonist with the school band until his instrument was stolen. The Aucoins could not afford a new one, so his music career came to a halt.

Gangly, effeminate, and artistic, Kevyn became a target for his classmates. The physical and verbal abuse began around the fifth grade. "We'd be at the bus stop, and they would use words like faggot and queer," says his brother, Keith, who today is a welder and a father of five. "I didn't know what these words meant, but I knew they hurt him. They would spit on him, slap him across the head, and punch him. I didn't understand what was going on, but Kevyn was crying, and I needed to do something. I'd jump on somebody's back and get my ass beat, and Kevyn got beat, and then we'd walk home." Isidore Aucoin remembers the day Keith tried to rip through a screen door to get at some boys who had been taunting Kevyn.

Many of the teachers in Kevyn's elementary school turned blind eyes to the torture or even participated in it. One male teacher "made a habit of bringing me in front of the class, taking my pants down, and spanking me, which was sexual abuse, basically," Kevyn said. "It's something that I look back on and just cringe. It was a horrible, horrible experience." To add to the humiliation, Kevyn often was summoned to a speech therapy class -- via a schoolwide intercom announcement -- where a young female teacher tried to eradicate his lisp.

Things at home were as stormy as Louisiana's subtropical weather. "Fights with my father were really quite brutal," said Kevyn. "I would not live his vision. I would not become who he wanted me to be. Everything I did was criticized. I would spend three months drawing something and show him, and he would look up from his paper and just look back down. I got no approval from him for anything I did that was creative."

On top of all this, his parents were alcoholics. Looking back, Isidore says he didn't realize how his drinking or his behavior affected his son. "Kevyn seemed to think I was an alcoholic, and I guess I was," he says, sitting at the kitchen table in the family home. "I'm not going to try to deny that. I did drink, and I drank almost every day. Thelma and I both drank. I didn't go to bars. Nothing like that. But I did drink at home. I don't think it affected my relationship with the kids. I might have thought I was doing all right, and maybe I wasn't."

Despite Thelma's drinking, Kevyn adored her, as she was more understanding of her oldest child than her husband was. "If they had both been unsupportive, I'd be in a mental ward right now -- or maybe not even here," Kevyn once said. Thelma's biggest issue regarding his apparent homosexuality was safety, and she thought she could scare him into changing his sexual orientation for his own well-being. Whenever the local newspaper sensationalized a gay-related beating or murder, Thelma clipped it out and left it for Kevyn to see.

Kevyn managed to find several escapes from the turmoil. At the age of eleven, he began making up his little sister Carla, inspired by the glossy fantasy world featured in his bible, Vogue. (Kevyn couldn't afford to buy fashion magazines, so he flipped through them at the local stores, behavior that only added to his reputation as a strange little boy.) He memorized the work of photographer Francesco Scavullo and makeup artist Way Bandy and transformed his barely six-year-old sister into a disco diva, Brooke Shields, or supermodel Rene Russo using a handful of props, some fabric, and a few cosmetics borrowed from Thelma's very limited supply. When Kevyn finished with the hair, makeup, and wardrobe, he tacked a rug or a sheet to the wall, positioned Carla in front of it, and took a Polaroid. The pictures and poses were amazingly mature for two kids at play.

Kevyn's other passion during his adolescence was drawing. "I was absolutely lost in love and life when I did my drawings," he said. "Time stood still." While Carla was his makeup muse, Barbra Streisand was his subject of choice for painting and sketching. Kevyn labored over dozens of portraits of her that he copied from Streisand's movie posters, album covers, and promotional pictures.

By the time his first year of high school rolled around, his obsession with Streisand was full blown. He kept scrapbooks filled with her press clippings, sent her cards on her birthday, and played her music every chance he got. (Isidore remembers hearing "The Way We Were" more than a hundred times.) He owned every album she released, even though he could barely afford them. "Records were expensive," says Keith, who preferred Led Zeppelin and AC/DC to his brother's beloved songbird. "We had to wash the car and mow the grass, rake everything, and then hustle some money around picking up cans and turning in bottles to get things like that."

Kevyn was an outsider among his fellow students, but he never hid what made him different. "There was absolutely no mistaking in most people's minds that he was gay," says Glenn Neely, Kevyn's first serious boyfriend. "Tha...

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, Touching & Extremely Inspiring!!!
From the first moment I saw Kevyn's first book, "The Art of Makeup", I was inspired and moved by his talent and passion for his craft. I remember staring at the huge pages of his first book and it was then that my creative juices started flowing and haven't stopped since. It was my older brother who had always supported my interest and passion for makeup and makeup artistry, and it was he who gave me 2 of 3 of Kevyn's books. All of them only making me crave more of him and wanting to aspire even more. My brother saw that it was the Beauty & Health section I ran to in bookstores to sit in the aisle and flip thru Kevyn's books.
With the sad passing of Kevyn, I believe that the fashion world lost such an immense talent and impressionable soul. I didn't have to know Kevyn personally to feel that he was a giving and sweet individual, his books and artwork showed me more. His closest friends share countless tales and how he had touched them in so many ways.

This book leaves us with his legacy of beauty, talent, art, love, his activism on numerous issues, and most importantly his life. It is a wonderful biography filled with photographs of celebrities he had befriended and worked with.

I most definitely recommend getting this book for those of you that were touched and inspired by him and his work...IT and Kevyn truly were a masterpiece.
Thanks Kerry Diamond for leaving us with a greater picture of a beloved soul.

An irreplacable shining star Kevyn Aucoin, He will be missed
This book incapsulates a genius and his gift of insight and ability to create such mind blowing beauty. The book tell of his childhood and goes through a multitude of experience that shaped his life and nurtured his personal creativity. It also shows a number of his clients and people he has worked with and they offer comments and goodbyes to Aucoin, who has died recently. It is well rounded and very hard to put down. I have all of the books related to him and recommend them all to anyone who is in advertising, fashion, beauty, and commercial art industry. His story is one of struggles and accomplishments. It is tragic that we lost this brilliant, intelligent, inspiring individual, it is evident that he was just getting started.

Kevyn Aucoin: A Beautiful Life
I just finished Kerry Diamond's book about Kevyn Aucoin and it's one of those books that I didn't want to end. Learning more about Aucoin's craft, the stars who depended on him and his language of beauty made for a wonderful read. While he is gone, his creative spirit will live forever thanks to Ms. Diamond's fantastic writing, the research that went into his story but most of all, she was able to create a very interesting and moving portrait of a great, great creative talent.