Creativity Quote by Kevyn Aucoin

Perfection, Aucoin insists, is a dead end: a surface so polished it stops telling the truth. Coming from the makeup artist who helped define 1990s supermodel glamour, the provocation lands like a corrective to the industry he powered. Fashion sells the fantasy of flawlessness, yet Aucoin is arguing that the fantasy only works when it leaves room for the human. A face without “mistakes” isn’t just aesthetically bland; it’s culturally empty, stripped of history, stress, pleasure, and idiosyncrasy.

The word “mistakes” is doing sly double duty. It’s not only blemishes and asymmetry, but the lived-in evidence we’re trained to erase: a crooked tooth, a scar, a tired under-eye, the shape your features take when you’ve laughed a lot or cried too hard. Aucoin frames those as narrative details, the texture that makes a face legible and therefore compelling. In his hands, makeup isn’t a tool to standardize; it’s a highlighter for personality. The intent is less “stop trying” than “stop sanding yourself down.”

Context sharpens the edge. Aucoin worked before Instagram-face became a global template, but his line anticipates it: the airbrushed, filter-ready ideal that flattens difference into a single algorithm-friendly mask. He’s also pushing against a moral hierarchy where “perfect” equals “worthy.” By calling perfection boring, he flips the value system: the interesting face isn’t the compliant one, it’s the one that dares to look like someone.