hall of fame shu uemura, 1928-2007

Shu Uemura was an unlikely makeup pioneer. Growing up in Japan in the 1940s, Uemura dreamed of being an actor, but as a teenager, he was struck with a severe illness that left him permanently weakened. Deciding that acting was too physically demanding, Uemura enrolled in beauty school in Tokyo, where he was the only male in a class of 130 students. In 1955, a Hollywood makeup artist who was shooting in post-war Tokyo came to the school looking for a male assistant, and Uemura’s career began.

Uemura departed Japan for Hollywood and became a sensation in 1962, when he transformed American-as-apple-pie actress Shirley MacLaine into a traditional Japanese geisha for the movie My Geisha. He was also a favorite of many male actors in Hollywood, including the notoriously volatile Frank Sinatra, with whom he worked on the set of None But the Brave. Sinatra liked Uemura so much that he presented him with an engraved makeup box that read SHU SHU BABY, on his birthday.

When he returned to Japan, Uemura established a makeup studio, began creating his own products, and held dramatic large-scale makeup shows that turned the art of creating a face into performance. “I remember watching him do choreographed makeup once,” recalls Shu Uemura artistic director Gina Brooke. “He was in all white and looked like an angel, and the passion in his strokes was just so inspiring. Mr.

Uemura was very much about color, and he would use certain shades that you would have never imagined anyone could use in makeup.”

Uemura embraced a Japanese philosophy of learning called Shu-Ha-Ri––his successor, Kakuyasu Uchiide, is also a follower––which called first for obedience, then pushing boundaries, and finally mastery, which resulted in the transcendence of all rules. And for the last half a century, he did just this, creating ground-breaking looks and products that quickly became the industry standard. With his Depsea water and cleansing oil, Uemura was one of the first makeup artists to emphasize the importance of healthy skin as the base for all beautiful looks. He was equally known for his signature dramatic eyes, which spawned the invention of his perfect eyelash curler and more recently, fantastic falsies made from exotic materials like feathers. Uemura’s eye designs were best displayed in the looks he created to inspire each season’s makeup trends—from the La Ronde, which had Marcel Marceau-esque black circles on the lower lid, to the Fantastic, with a spray of rhinestones above the brow, and the Bush, with its deep blue swaths of tribal color. “Mr. Uemura really believed that colors were like personalities, and that they were infinite,” Brooke says. “He believed that there were no rules to makeup, and that where you restrict yourself to rules, that is where it ends.”

The legend of makeup arTisT shu uemura will neVer Be forgoTTen. BY kaTe williams

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top to bottom: lucent sky lashes, “umbrella lash” from the ’60s, “les yeux” from the ’70s, portrait of shu uemura with the botan brush, skin purifier cleansing oil, “romantic night” from the ’80s, eyelash curler.

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