Happiness Quote by Kevyn Aucoin

Defiance is the engine here: a daily, almost ceremonial refusal to let circumstance write the script. Kevyn Aucoin frames “life” not as a lofty abstraction but as a repeated, gritty decision made at the most ordinary moment possible: waking up. That’s the trick. By dragging existential talk into the morning routine, he makes it feel actionable rather than inspirational-poster vague.

The list—“joy, happiness, negativity, pain”—isn’t symmetrical by accident. He pairs the shiny emotions with the ones we’re trained to hide, then insists they’re all options on the same menu. The subtext is quietly radical: emotional agency doesn’t mean curating only the pleasant parts; it means owning the whole range without outsourcing responsibility to trauma, other people, or fate. “Today I choose life” reads like a mantra, but it’s also a boundary.

Aucoin’s context sharpens the point. As a makeup artist who helped define late-’90s celebrity beauty, he worked in an industry built on denial—airbrushing, masking, selling “flawless” as a moral achievement. So when he says he chooses “the freedom… to continue to make mistakes,” it lands as an inside critique of perfection culture. Makeup can be camouflage, but it can also be permission: to experiment, to be messy, to show up anyway.

The line “not to deny my humanity but embrace it” sounds gentle, yet it’s a blunt rebuttal to shame. He’s not promising transformation. He’s arguing for presence—feeling life as it is, with all the unfinished edges left visible.