Meet The Most In-Demand Makeup Artist In The World

Pat McGrath, makeup’s genius.

- Linda Wells

MAKEUP HAS ALWAYS been fashion’s poor cousin. It is secreted away in bathrooms and back rooms while fashion swishes out on the runways and red carpets. Makeup is self-absorption; fashion is self-expression. Makeup artists take the service entrance; fashion designers take a bow. Even the words makeup artist seem like a plea for respectability for a task that’s essentially an extension of basic grooming. Applying makeup is a pantomime of art, with its paints and brushes and palettes, not art with a capital A and a retrospective at the Whitney. If makeup is artistry at all, it’s akin to court painting, a vanity project if there ever was one. At the end of the day, or the evening, or the photo shoot, or the fashion show, the paint is wiped off with rarely a tug of regret.

Pat McGrath is perhaps the only makeup artist who lives up to the second word in the job title, the Velázquez of the beauty world. She can make a celebrity gleam for a magazine cover, then gather scraps of patent leather or lace and start cutting and gluing bits to a model’s face until she resembles a butterfly or an unspecified exotic bird.