Julie Bégin
Makeup Designer

Julie Bégin's fascination with the transforming power of makeup began as a child. From an early age she experimented on faces and by the time she was 18, she'd left her science studies behind and embarked on her nomadic makeup journey.

Julie got her first job on a dare. A friend persuaded her to apply for a makeup position while visiting Toronto. Despite the fact that she had no formal training, her talent shone through and she found herself working in a field that proved to be a perfect fit.

In 1998, after spending more then eight years refining her trade in Europe and Asia, Julie moved to New York to further her career and pursue her interest in arts. She soon attracted the attention of celebrated makeup artist Dick Page and rapidly became a top player on his team working in New York, Milan and Paris.

The top names in the fashion and entertainment industries quickly began to seek Julie out: Fashion designers like John Galliano, Marc Jacobs and Helmut Lang called on her. She worked with such prominent photographers as Ellen Von Unwerth and Mick Rock on editorial and advertising shoots, and world-renowed singers and celebrities, including Céline Dion and Alanis Morisette.

Julie's methods are wide-ranging and imaginative. From effortless natural looks to dramatic styles, even when creativity's limits are pushed to the extreme, her main focus in fashion is always to reveal the beauty of a face. "The challenge of designing makeup for a Cirque du Soleil show is to go beyond beauty to reveal character," she says. Every face is a new inspiration, and when it all works you're actually revealing more than the person, you're able to catch a glimpse of their soul."

Julie's designs for OVO called for an evocation of the insect world. "I wasn't given a precise mandate," she says. "But I knew I didn't want to simply reproduce actual insect heads. I took the rather stark designs of the Bauhaus and the sculptor Alexander Calder as my starting points, but as the production evolved I drew back from the abstractions of those sources of inspiration and arrived at something more organic, perhaps more inspired by the work of Gaudí or the Organic Abstractionists. This quote form Antony Gromley sums it up nicely: My work is an attempt to materialize the place at the other side of appearance where we all live."

Julie Bégin was born in Montréal and lives in New York.