Many of the stars who trust their mugs to him, from Vanessa Williams to Drew Barrymore, appear in Aucoin’s latest book, ““Making Faces,’’ published this month by Little Brown & Co. It’s a follow-up to 1994’s ““The Art of Makeup,’’ a $60 coffee-table book that sold a surprising 40,000 copies. The new one, at half the price, is a how-to guide peppered with anecdotes and startling celebrity makeovers–Lisa Marie Presley as Marilyn Monroe, for instance. It’s playful, like Aucoin; Jennifer Josephy, Aucoin’s editor, calls it ““a coloring book for grown-ups.''
In 1995 Aucoin won the only Council of Fashion Designers of America award given to a makeup artist. But that honor paled next to a certain assignment from Vogue. Asked to do Barbra Streisand’s makeup, Aucoin nearly melted like buttah. ““I had to convince myself that this was some woman from Long Island who just looked like Barbra Streisand,’’ he says. ““I kept running into the bathroom to cry.’’ (The man is in touch with his feelings; no wonder women love him.)
The self-styled Liberace of lipstick found his calling literally when other kids were playing with crayons. At 11 he began making up his younger sister to look like the models in Vogue. His adoptive parents were horrified at the ““Pretty Baby’’ setup. Defiantly gay, Aucoin was a pariah in 1970s Lafayette, La. His CFDA award, he likes to say, was really for ““getting out of Louisiana and surviving.’’ Today he is fashion’s most outspoken gay activist.
After making over his sister, Aucoin honed his skills by practicing on his friends, high-school outcasts like him. ““I wanted to make people see that these were beautiful people,’’ he says. ““If I could make them more beautiful, I could give them more power. I understood early that beauty was power.''
