Why Sam Visser—Bella Hadid and Kaia Gerber’s Go-To Makeup Artist—Is Primed to Be the Next Kevyn Aucoin
When Sam Visser was just 12 years old, he spotted David Hernandez—a longtime makeup artist of Courtney Love and Lindsay Lohan—inside a Make Up For Ever boutique on L.A.’s Robertson Boulevard. Visser recognized Hernandez from the makeup tutorial for Britney Spears’s “Hold It Against Me” music video and marched right up to him. Hernandez, noting his enthusiasm, invited Visser to join him on the set of a David LaChapelle shoot a few days later. Visser begged his parents to let him go, and his father relented, driving him from their home near the sleepy surf town of Ventura to Los Angeles (a two-hour trip with traffic). “It was true Hollywood magic,” recalls Visser, who later began assisting professional makeup artists. “It was the moment that my career started,” he says. He was in sixth grade.
Visser, now 20, got hooked on the transformative power of makeup even earlier. He taught himself the basics with pre-YouTube bibles, such as Kevyn Aucoin’s iconic 1997 tome Making Faces and François Nars’s Makeup Your Mind, but he honed his skills with online tutorials, often locking himself in his room to binge-watch demos. By middle school, he was unofficially shade-matching shoppers at his local MAC counter. “People would say, ‘Are you supposed to be, like, working?’ ” he recalls over a plate of lasagna Bolognese near his West Village apartment earlier this spring.
Visser would also put his own experiments with pigments and sculpting powders on Instagram, which prompted an invitation from Kardashian Jenner Communications in 2016 to visit Calabasas for a makeup test. He got the gig and started doing Kris Jenner’s makeup every morning, five days a week, while juggling a sophomore curriculum. “Eventually,” he says, “I asked her to call my mom and tell her I needed to leave high school,” which he did shortly thereafter, moving to L.A. and transitioning into an independent-study program. Since then, the makeup artist has continued to work with the matriarch as well as her daughters Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian West and their beauty brands. “It’s not easy with so many different women in one family, and all these overwhelming situations—it’s a pressure cooker,” Jenner elaborates on what it takes to actually keep up with the Kardashians. “But Sam just knew from the beginning how to pace himself, be respectful, and be a team player.”
A stint with Mariah Carey soon followed, as did the opportunity to craft the perfect holographic black lip for the cover of Ariana Grande’s 2019 album Thank U, Next, earning Visser numerous accolades—and comparisons to industry legends. “He is the next Kevyn Aucoin,” says veteran makeup artist Pati Dubroff of her first impressions of “the kid” whose gentle charisma and beyond-his-years skill certainly resemble those of the man who spearheaded the “nineties face”—and became the world’s first celebrity makeup artist. “But with Sam, his reach can be even greater,” suggests Dubroff. “He’s not just another young person who has proclaimed, ‘I love makeup; I think I’ll be a makeup artist,’ ” adds makeup artist Troy Surratt. “He wants to truly breathe it all in, to live it.” An encyclopedic knowledge of the past—and a collection of snapshots of old campaigns, editorials, and covers—has paid dividends for Visser: You can see it in the perfectly sculpted glow and overlined lips he has helped make Bella Hadid’s signature look, and the dramatic ’60s cut-crease eyeliner he gave Lily-Rose Depp for her 20th-birthday party. A bright lavender eye shadow he used last winter to saturate Kaia Gerber’s lids before slicking on a contrasting peachy-nude pout made the 18-year-old model-of-the-moment an instant fan and loyal client. “Ever since then, I’ve trusted Sam completely,” says Gerber, who collaborated with Visser for the entire fall show season. “He pushes me to express myself through makeup as an art form, which is exactly how he treats it.”
In another nod to fashion’s past, Visser recently purchased a classic Polaroid camera and has started snapping portraits of his work with Bella, Kaia, and Lily-Rose as he becomes “more interested in the image itself than the makeup.” It’s not dissimilar to how Aucoin used a handheld camcorder to film Linda, Cindy, and Naomi during intimate moments in his makeup chair. It would be 15 years after Aucoin’s death before anyone would see that footage, which premiered in filmmaker Lori Kaye’s 2017 documentary Kevyn Aucoin: Beauty & the Beast in Me; Visser’s photographs and videos, meanwhile, which he often digitizes from VHS, are going up on his Instagram in real time. “Sam is an old-school artist with the tools of youth,” adds Dubroff. “It’s a powerful combination.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
