In 1953, Marilyn Monroe asked her longtime makeup artist Allan Snyder to sneak into the hospital where she was briefly admitted after filming “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” so that he could powder her nose. According to Snyder, Monroe also asked that he do the same after her death, and gave him an engraved money clip to remind him to get to her while she was “still warm.” In 1962, Snyder touched up Monroe’s visage for her funeral, and served as one of her pallbearers. Not long ago, Mario Dedivanovic, who has spent twelve years painting the face of the reality-TV mogul Kim Kardashian West, and who considers Snyder a spiritual mentor, texted me an article from a women’s magazine revealing Snyder’s “eight beauty secrets.” He noted that Snyder had used Vaseline as a highlighter—Dedivanovic does, too, though he prefers another emollient jelly, Elizabeth Arden’s Eight Hour Cream, which is the color and consistency of linden honey. Snyder was known to dust the tip of Monroe’s nose with blush in order to give it the impression of being more snubbed; Dedivanovic often engineers a similar trompe l’oeil on West’s nose, applying dark powder onto either side—part of the process known as contouring—to make it appear narrower. “Omg the similarities are uncanny,” Dedivanovic wrote. “I often wonder what it was like. I can imagine actually what it was like.”
West, who has a hundred and eighty-six million Instagram followers (only five people, including West’s half sister Kylie Jenner, have more), has inspired countless women to sport the “soft glam” look that Dedivanovic first gave her in 2008: airbrushed skin, sculpted cheekbones, peachy-pink blush, a “bronzy eye,” long false eyelashes, and dewy highlighter, all “baked”—an industry term for setting with loose powder—to a matte finish, like the shell of a cage-free egg. Dedivanovic’s method is a twist on a practice that dates back to the Elizabethan era, and that was later adopted by the drag community. Contouring was ideal for black-and-white film, a medium of light and shadow, and was used in early Hollywood by makeup artists such as the Polish beautician Max Factor (né Maksymilian Faktorowicz). It also proved, a century later, to look great on Instagram. West started using the app to post selfies in 2012, and her signature look seemed to replicate spontaneously on the site: countless mini-Kims with pouty nude lips (dubbed, with no small amount of snickering misogyny, “duck face”), beige on every surface, and hair pulled back into a bun so severe that it doubled as an eye lift.
In 2015, contouring was a “priority category” at Sephora, which began to sell a wide variety of contouring “palettes,” featuring powders and creams in tones from vanilla to espresso bean. Some kits came with instructions: paint stripes of dark color on features you want to recede (jowls, hairline, chin) and light color where you want to draw focus (cheekbones, the bridge of the nose, the philtrum), then furiously blend. The backlash came swiftly. The legendary makeup artist Bobbi Brown said in an interview in 2015, “When I see contouring on people’s faces, it looks like dirt.” That year, Pati Dubroff, a makeup artist for Charlize Theron and Dakota Johnson who now works for Chanel, posted a picture on Instagram of a contoured face in progress, which was striped like the skin of a lionfish, and wrote, “i would NEVER SUFFOCATE THE SKIN or create a MASK LIKE CREATURE like this.”
The Kardashian family face continued to flood the visual field. (With the exception of Kendall Jenner, a high-fashion model, West’s sisters all wore the look.) Previously, makeup artists had worked almost in secret; Dedivanovic soon found himself in an unexpectedly public position. West seemed genuinely fascinated by Dedivanovic’s ability to mold her face into different shapes, and she spoke often about his work, to anyone who would listen, with the giddy enthusiasm of a college student who has just discovered existentialism. When Dedivanovic would casually mention a product in an interview, such as Ben Nye’s “banana powder,” a pale-yellow talcum mixture from a theatrical-makeup brand that has been in business since 1967, it would sell out, or quickly triple in price. (Dedivanovic, for his part, uses banana powder less than he once did, having found that the daffodil color, on certain skin tones, turns slightly garish when illuminated by flashbulbs.)
Dedivanovic, who is 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 soft-spoken and, by his own admission, sometimes insecure. He is prone to crying, particularly when talking about his mother. For years, he hated the way his nose looked, and contemplated rhinoplasty. He did not talk at all in interviews or videos about his private life, and maintained the same discretion with his celebrity clientele. “Mario is probably one of the only people that I could trust—like really trust, like ‘Oh, my God, don’t tell anyone I’m pregnant’ kind of trust, you know?” West told me last year by phone, from Los Angeles. “I’m not pregnant, by the way,” she added.
Dedivanovic came up in the industry before the advent of “beauty influencers”—online personalities who present cosmetics tutorials on platforms like YouTube and TikTok—but he is arguably at ground zero for contemporary Internet beauty culture. Arabelle Sicardi, a journalist who is currently writing a book about the concept of “beauty as terror,” described Dedivanovic to me as “the Venn-diagram middle point of Internet and celebrity.” His client roster has expanded beyond West to include other famous women, such as Kate Bosworth, Naomie Harris, Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, and Demi Lovato. He did Lovato’s makeup for the most recent Grammys, where she shed a single tear during her performance. Dedivanovic, who was watching her on a monitor from about twenty feet away, told me that he briefly feared that his “career would be over” if her mascara ran. It stayed put.
Dedivanovic is perhaps best known for the Masterclass, a live event attended by aspiring makeup artists, who pay as much as seventeen hundred dollars (when West sits as the model) to observe him doing makeup for up to eight hours. A natural pedagogue, Dedivanovic told me that he feels his main purpose now is to educate other artists on how to pare back the excess that he himself partially inspired. He uses contouring only sparingly these days, and never, he told me, on very pale skin. Earlier this year, he taught a group of students in a small workshop in Chelsea. “My goal was to get them in there and see the type of work that they’re doing and then help them to sort of elevate a little bit,” he said. “And I literally, you know, I went one by one to all the students, like, ‘No, don’t contour her nose. No, don’t contour her chin.’ I probably redid ninety per cent of the eyebrows.” Makeup can be a form of personal expression, but, for a professional makeup artist, one of the allures of the job is the ability to have total control—over how a person looks and over products that require precise implementation. What bothered Dedivanovic most about watching the contouring trend explode, he told me, was that it “took on a life of its own”—one that he could not contain.
In November of last year, Dedivanovic accepted the Artistic Achievement Award at the second annual American Influencer Awards, in Los Angeles. West, dressed in a scarlet Dior gown with a high neck, presented him with the prize. “We’ve worked together for eleven years,” she said. “Eleven years of fights. You guys, we fight like, you don’t even understand, we fight like brother and sister. But he’s created some of my most magical memories, and really, I believe, made me who I am today.”
In his speech, Dedivanovic came out in public, calling himself “a proud gay man.” He said that, in the summer of 2018, he had purchased a plot of land in rural Montenegro, where his father was born. “But I can’t build the home that my father dreams of,” he said, weeping openly, “because I still feel ashamed when I set foot on that land.” The revelation might have seemed a relic of another time—but, the following month, Dedivanovic told me that it had changed everything. “I was always ashamed,” he said, as we sat in his office space in midtown. “In my mind, I was in a prison.” He no longer wanted a nose job. “I love my nose right now—I would never change it,” he said. “And I would go naked right now, honestly, in the middle of the street, and not give a shit. My life has opened up. Every block that I had built, every defense mechanism that I’ve built from the age of two or three, has just one by one been coming down.” His sister had given him a pumpkin pie, and he offered me a slice. “I eat pie now,” he said.
He was also ready to realize a dream that he had been harboring for two decades: to launch a makeup line of his own. While some have suggested that the beauty market is so saturated that even a major name like Dedivanovic’s could have trouble drawing customers, he explained to me that what would make his line stand out was his almost maniacal attention to detail. Dedivanovic had spent years testing and refining products. Most laboratories allow the brands they work with to make three tweaks on a product before it is manufactured. Dedivanovic told me that he had far exceeded that number, often asking for dozens of tweaks.
The packaging for his brand, Makeup by Mario, had been finalized when, in March, New York City went on lockdown. Overnight, Dedivanovic, who lives on the Upper East Side, found himself without an income. He cancelled his celebrity bookings and scuttled the remaining Masterclass sessions on the calendar. The industry was in chaos. It seemed ludicrous to painstakingly dab on concealer that would be covered by a mask. Still, he believed that there was a need for a line that would enable beauty enthusiasts to do their faces like professionals. When things are chaotic, order and ritual become even more crucial. “I’m creating a legacy brand,” he told me. “Every product is going to help people out there to fix things and to clean things up.”
The Masterclass is run by Dedivanovic’s older sister Marina, his cousin Diana Benitez, and another cousin’s wife, Gina Dedivani. On a sweltering day last summer, Dedivanovic met them at the Bronx home of his parents, to discuss an upcoming class in Chicago. The house, which is ranch style, in a suburban neighborhood called Country Club, smelled of potpourri and fried sausages. Lula, Dedivanovic’s seventy-three-year-old mother, a petite woman with a chestnut bob, had set out a full Albanian buffet, including a bowl of boiled beets and a tray of pickled cabbage.
In the dining room, Marina, a forty-year-old former nurse, with straight ash-blond hair and wire-framed glasses, sat at the head of a cherrywood table in a black cardigan, taking notes on a laptop. Dedivanovic sat across from her in a white T-shirt and baggy black athletic shorts, stroking the tiny skull of a Chihuahua perched on his lap and worrying about the quality of the projector at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre. Next to Marina sat the Masterclass’s social-media manager, Bana Beckovic, who is not related to Dedivanovic (although, he told me later, “she is also Albanian”). Beckovic was the only person at the table wearing the type of heavy makeup, including false eyelashes, that evoked West’s. In the living room, Dedivanovic’s father, Tom, a tall, gruff man with a woolly mustache, sat on the couch watching Fox News.
Lula took a seat next to Dedivanovic. “Mario is the best child,” she said, beaming. “The best one.” Lula grew up in a shepherding family in a mountain village called Tuzi, in Montenegro, a tiny country wedged between Serbia and Albania. She did not go to school. She knew of Tom, who worked as a mail carrier, through a cousin. She saw him when he came to ask her father for her hand in marriage, she explained, and “maybe one other time, in church.” The next time she saw him was on their wedding day. The Dedivanovics emigrated in 1974. Tom eventually found work as the superintendent of an apartment building in the Bronx, where he, Lula, and their three children—Mario is the youngest—occupied a small apartment. When Mario was three years old, Lula went to work as a cleaner in Manhattan, in lavish Upper East Side homes and at the corporate headquarters of the cosmetics conglomerate L’Oréal. Lula didn’t wear makeup—she still doesn’t—but she often brought free products home from work for her two daughters.
Dedivanovic remembers an early attraction to the L’Oréal swag. “I would see a product in the bathroom or somewhere in the house when I was alone, and I would pick it up and feel it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have dared to touch my face with it, but I definitely swatched and touched and felt them.” When he was in elementary school, he often asked his father to drive him north of the Bronx to see “the beautiful gardens in Westchester,” which he liked for their symmetry. “My dad wasn’t really fond of it,” he said. Dedivanovic was twelve when he got his first job, bagging groceries. His next job was at the Bronx Zoo, where he sold pretzels and was later promoted to manager of the hot-dog stand. He then began busing tables on the weekends at a red-sauce restaurant in Little Italy. In 2000, when he was seventeen, he and his mother walked past the tri-level Sephora flagship store, on Fifty-first Street and Fifth Avenue. The French multinational beauty chain, whose black-and-white striped exterior resembles a travelling-carnival tent, had opened its first outlets in Manhattan the year before. It was a novelty concept: half department store, half professional supply cabinet.
That day, Dedivanovic applied to become a Sephora “cast member.” (Sephora’s terminology has an operatic quality: the store is known as “the stage,” the shelves are called “gondolas.”) He got a job in the fragrance department of the Nineteenth Street store. Cast members at the time wore a single black glove; female employees had to wear red lipstick. Dedivanovic bleached his hair and got a fake I.D. so that he could go to downtown clubs like Limelight and the Roxy with his new co-workers. Karina Capone, who now works in product development for cosmetics companies including Estée Lauder and Revlon, worked in makeup—what Sephora calls the “color department.” Dedivanovic, Capone recalled, was “this slick, skinny blond kid who kind of looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, but super nice, you know?” She continued, “Slowly, I could see makeup was pulling him in. Always, when we had a shortage of staff on the floor, he was very excited and willing to help the customers that were looking for the foundation.”
Dedivanovic brought home cosmetics samples from work and stashed them in a Nike shoebox under his bed. One day, his oldest sister, Vicky, showed the box to his mother, and the result was a family argument. “I was unhappy,” Lula said. “Because we don’t know nothing about makeup. Not those days. I said, ‘No, honey, you have to do something. You have to finish school.’ ” Dedivanovic ran away from home, staying in Stuyvesant Town, at the apartment of a friend he had made while hanging around the restaurant Cafeteria, in Chelsea. When he returned to the Bronx, two weeks later, he shoved the shoebox back under his bed, and his parents did not mention it again.
Dedivanovic’s first in-store makeover on a Sephora shopper took almost three hours. “I used this pearly-white eyeshadow,” he recalled recently. “And I remember my boss said, ‘Mario, it’s beautiful, but it took too long.’ ” Later, after transferring to the color department at the flagship location, Dedivanovic was recruited by a representative for Lorac, a cosmetics line founded in 1995 by the makeup artist Carol Shaw, whose clients included Nicole Kidman, Cindy Crawford, and Debra Messing. He became a kind of travelling salesman for the brand, visiting Sephoras all over Manhattan to push rosewood lip liners and tawny blush.
Dedivanovic’s makeup career outside Sephora began in 2001, when he assisted several established makeup artists, including Billy B., Isabel Perez, and Kabuki Starshine, who worked on “Sex and the City” and created the eccentric club-kid looks (Kiss-esque white greasepaint, spindly spider lashes, overdrawn, clownish lips) that the 2003 film “Party Monster” made famous. In the meantime, Dedivanovic gathered his friends in his apartment to take “test shots” for his portfolio. In 2007, he landed a part-time job doing touch-ups for the on-air talent at Fox News.
The female anchors on Fox wanted to look battle-ready yet feminine, with cheekbones that “popped” on television. Dedivanovic turned to a style of contouring, which he called his “glam look,” that requires a great deal of blending and buffing. He gained a reputation around the Fox News building for making women look lacquered and pristine. Julie Banderas, who was then the host of “Fox Report Weekend,” told me, “The first time he did my makeup, people thought I’d had a nose job. People thought that my cheeks were more sunken, that I had lost weight.”
Dedivanovic met West in 2008, on a shoot for the cover of the Hamptons life-style publication Social Life. She had grown up in the shadow of the O. J. Simpson trial; her father, the attorney Robert Kardashian, had been a longtime friend of Simpson’s, and her mother, Kris Jenner, had been a friend of Nicole Brown’s. The reality show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” had débuted on E! the year before. “I don’t really know how to explain it,” West recalled. “I just came alive when Mario did my makeup.” Immediately after the shoot, she asked Dedivanovic to walk with her through Henri Bendel to buy every product he’d used. In the next year, Dedivanovic did her makeup in a series of three fitness videos called “Fit in Your Jeans by Friday,” in which she did abdominal crunches in a latex bodysuit and silver hoop earrings. West also continued to hire him for photo shoots and press junkets in New York and Los Angeles.
Dedivanovic often tells the story of how, when he started doing West’s makeup, his booking agent told him that, if he ever wanted to work on a Vogue cover, he needed to cut ties with her. “I get it,” he told me. “At this time—and we’re talking eleven years ago—a reality star was not a known thing. They just knew Paris Hilton, that was it.” He and his agent parted ways, and he kept working with West. He went on to do her makeup for six Vogue covers, including one in which she posed in a cherry-red helmet, her lips glassy crimson. He was also the head artist for West’s wedding to the rapper Kanye West, in 2014, which took place over several days at Versailles and at an Italian castle once owned by the Medici family.
As West broadcast her life, she documented and promoted the people responsible for her image, such as her longtime hair stylist, Chris Appleton, and her brow expert, Anastasia Soare. In 2009, she suggested that she and Dedivanovic film a YouTube video together. In it, he re-created the biscotti-hued maquillage he had used on her for a recent cover of Vegas magazine. In the first moments of the video, Dedivanovic, with the gelled, spiky hair of a boy-band tenor, looks jittery, but he soon finds his rhythm, affecting a professorial tone. He grabs a hot-pink ovoid sponge. “This is called a Beautyblender,” he says, holding the sponge like a science teacher holding up an owl pellet. “And you can get it at places like Ricky’s or Alcone, in New York. You basically wet it, and you squeeze it, and it becomes fluffy, and it just really presses in the makeup and blends it beautifully.”
Shortly after the tutorial appeared on YouTube, Dedivanovic, who lived in Astoria, Queens, at the time, found his MySpace and Facebook pages flooded with messages. “Makeup questions like ‘I have dark circles. What do you recommend?’ Or ‘My highlighter runs. What can I do?’ ” He took to spending hours of every day answering the questions, and discovered that he had an aptitude for education. In 2010, he briefly moved to Los Angeles to be closer to West, and there he launched an early version of the Masterclass, which he called the Workshop. He did a second, similar course in New York. Lula made chicken and Albanian bread to serve as a buffet. The class grew into a full-time business, selling out theatres in Miami, Sydney, London, and Dubai. His largest class, at the Palace of Congresses in Tirana, Albania, had more than two thousand students.
In his early courses, Dedivanovic taught the method that he used on West when they began working together, starting with thick, Nutella-colored stripes across the cheeks. In the years since, he has stressed that this exaggerated application should be reserved for formal events. For the daytime, he prefers a subtler, sun-kissed glow—a deceptively “natural” effect that takes more than a dozen products and at least an hour to achieve. Still, at a Masterclass in Chicago last August, which began before nine in the morning, I noticed that most attendees had shiny blowouts and were wearing high-drama looks, including false eyelashes.
When Dedivanovic teaches, he works offstage, in the wings, while a cameraman films his hands, beaming the feed to a giant high-definition screen. This way, he can stand close to a large table, invisible to the audience, covered with under-eye concealers in every shade, lipsticks smooshed into clear tackle boxes, stacks of shearling-soft powder puffs, breath mints, and Wet Ones baby wipes. The Masterclass follows an unusual Socratic format: students are encouraged to shout out their questions from their seats. Dedivanovic answers, using a headset microphone, in a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I’m going to use a lot of makeup, a shitload of products,” he said to the packed room the day I attended. “But pay attention to my layering and blending. You are going to see in the end that, once the makeup is done, even though I’ve used so much product and so many techniques on this model’s face, in person she’s going to look softer, more feminine, not intimidating. Very doll-like.” The woman sitting next to me scribbled the word “doll” in her notebook and circled it.
He began the class by manicuring the model’s eyebrows. The trick for getting the brows to stay put, he said, is to use the latex adhesive Pros-Aide. A few members of the audience gasped. “This glue is very strong,” he said. “I don’t want you to all go out and buy this if you’re not used to it, because it will stay on your hands for days.”
Around hour three, he started applying eyeliner. “Do you want me to use brown or black?” he asked. Several people in the crowd yelled out, “Brown!”
“Oh, wow, why?” Dedivanovic said.
“Because it’s softer!” one woman yelled from the back of the theatre.
“You guys need to stop acting like you’re not all drag queens,” Dedivanovic teased; for all his emphasis on restraint, he is aware that something else made him famous. “I know what you guys wear, I know how you wear your makeup. You guys want to act all chic and natural but . . .”
Cries of “Black!” started to come from various corners of the room.
Dedivanovic laughed. “You see how the truth comes out?” he said.
In the years since Dedivanovic started doing West’s makeup, influencers have become some of the most powerful people in the beauty business. Zoella Sugg, a British “hauler”—a term used to describe people who show off their purchases in videos—has more than eleven million subscribers on YouTube. Jeffree Star, a rainbow-haired electro-pop musician, was a fixture on MySpace before he migrated to YouTube, where he now has more than seventeen million subscribers; since 2014, he has had his own line of Day-Glo cosmetics. Huda Kattan, an Iraqi-American from Oklahoma, started her beauty empire with a WordPress blog in 2010; she now has more than forty-seven million followers on Instagram. She also has her own gondola at Sephora, and, in 2017, Time named her one of its “25 Most Influential People on the Internet.” On TikTok, an even younger crop of stars has emerged, with their own hyper-specific skills: ethereal raver pastels inspired by the HBO show “Euphoria,” neon cut creases, cosplay cosmetics, makeup you can apply to your character in the popular Nintendo video game Animal Crossing. Just this summer, a group of TikTok-famous beauty influencers, including La Demi and Cole Carrigan, decided to move into a Beverly Hills mansion they call the Glam House, from which they will broadcast primping content around the clock.
As the Internet has opened up new avenues of experimentation and education, cosmetics have ballooned into a multibillion-dollar business. The makeup-line “drop” is akin to the release of a limited-edition sneaker or a pop album. When Rihanna released her line, Fenty Beauty, in Sephora stores, in 2017, the brand pulled in more than a hundred million dollars in less than forty days. KKW Beauty, West’s own brand, which launched in 2017 as well, sold $14.4 million in contour kits in less than three hours. Influencers get in on the action, too, releasing regular “collaborations” with brands including Anastasia Beverly Hills and Morphe. Sephora remains a valuable showroom for products, but newer, direct-to-consumer brands, like the minimalist line Glossier, have also flourished.
Dedivanovic claims not to be in competition with any other brand, but a stroll through Sephora on a drizzly afternoon last October told a slightly different story. As he walked past a glittery, highly pigmented eyeshadow palette, he took a swipe of an acid-green color with his finger and wrinkled his nose. He lingered over the Nars gondola, calling François Nars, a legendary makeup artist who launched his brand in 1994, an inspiration. Dedivanovic is most drawn to product lines developed by other successful makeup artists: Troy Surratt, Pat McGrath, Laura Mercier, Bobbi Brown. In late 2019, he hired Alicia Valencia, a beauty executive, to serve as his global president. Valencia had overseen the global expansion of McGrath’s and Brown’s lines, and worked at Estée Lauder for twenty-three years. She told me, “Mario is, to me, this generation’s Bobbi Brown. It’s, like, yes, he could glam it up so much more than Bobbi did, but, I mean, the reality is that he does things in a way where it’s easy to understand, and there’s a why to every product and technique.”
In December, Dedivanovic released a technical brush collection with Sephora; it was, a representative told me, the fastest-selling collaboration in the store’s history. What Dedivanovic is really selling, perhaps, is his proximity to celebrities and the trust they put in him. The new beauty influencers, by contrast, don’t need to touch stars’ faces; they are the stars. The hugely successful twenty-one-year-old YouTuber James Charles, who, at seventeen, became the first male face of CoverGirl, makes elaborate videos for his sixteen million subscribers, but, as he told me, he is neither a makeup artist nor a professional teacher. “What I do is make entertainment content that happens to be about the beauty topic,” he said. He admires Dedivanovic, he hastened to add: “I think it’s always important to, like, respect your elders.”
The beauty-influencer world is rife with cliques and feuds, scandals and dethronements. Dedivanovic has, for the most part, resisted such drama. He refused to put his Masterclasses online, even as the pandemic wiped out his live-event revenue; he was waiting for a way to stream that could catch the micro-movements of his brushes. He had never used himself as a model until quarantine compelled him to test out his product line on his own face. As he insists to his students, it is control and consistency, not gimmickry, that make for a sustainable cosmetics career. He opens every Masterclass by telling attendees that, above all, he wants them to be able to make money doing timeless, glamorous makeup for weddings or quinceañeras. He also warns them that it took him two decades to perfect what he is about to do. “I tell you that,” he says, “so you don’t give up on your dream, or on yourselves.”
There are fewer weddings happening during the pandemic. And yet, as Dedivanovic put it, “we all have more time now.” There is a savviness to his business model, which relies on the language of education and mastery. Time-intensive, absorbing hobbies—sourdough baking, calligraphy—give everyone what he called an “instant hit of dopamine.” It was the playful, addictive side of makeup that Dedivanovic learned from Sephora, where amateurs were given the opportunity to feel like professionals. “They used to have this gondola at Nineteenth and Fifth, right in the front of the store,” he told me last fall, when we were walking through the Sephora near his apartment. He shut his eyes, recalling the moment when he felt he had become an artist. “It was like a rainbow of lipstick. I mean, yellow, green, blue, any color you can imagine. And that was the area where a woman asked me to help her choose a lipstick.” He had selected a “reddish shade” for the customer, who tried it on and told him she loved it. “That was the first time I thought, I can actually do this,” he said, his voice breaking. “It was like an epiphany: This is it. This is what I want to do.”
A moment later, several salespeople—these days known as “beauty advisers”—nervously approached Dedivanovic to ask for selfies. One young brunette, with a bright streak of magenta eyeliner running across her lids, said, “I know you’re from the Bronx, and your parents are immigrants, and you really didn’t have much when you first started.” She took a breath. “I can relate to that. My parents are from Colombia, and I was born on Long Island.”
“Yes!” Dedivanovic said, nodding along emphatically. She told him that she planned to work for free, doing makeup at children’s hospitals.
“I worked for free for many years myself,” Dedivanovic said. “You have to take the job you have here and use it to your benefit. This will make you a stronger person, a stronger artist, a stronger woman.”
Another employee, with a slicked-back ponytail and understated makeup in a sandy shade, tapped Dedivanovic on the shoulder. “Is it really you?” she asked. He nodded, staring at her face. “How did you put together your look?” he asked.
“These are three-dollar lashes,” she said, giggling. Later, as the woman walked away, he pursed his lips and softly inhaled, a small gesture of delight.
“Her look was very editorial in her own little way,” he said. “Like, she’s a glam girl, with full coverage on. But she did it in a way which is almost reminiscent of how I like it, where she left a lot of elements out. No liner, no shadow.” He looked suddenly reinvigorated. “I love it. That’s what gets me excited.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a theatre in Chicago.
