Olivier Échaudemaison, the man who put makeup on the Queen of England

One fine day in the eighties, Grace Kelly, already a princess of Monaco, detected that her daughter Carolina, who had just turned 18, had a problem.

The girl liked excesses: two patches of blue eyeshadow on her eyelids, pearl plasters on her face as a makeup base, and to top it off, a shiny lipstick.

The princess asked a man for help, the only one who, in her opinion, could teach her daughter to have a more fluid relationship with her toiletry bag.

"Take charge," he told her.

That man became Carolina's makeup artist for a decade.

“She was very young, and she just wanted to experiment.

In the eighties the ideal of beauty was Joan Collins in the series Dynasty, women painted too much and I spent my time removing makeup.

It was funny because his sister Estefanía was at the other end and she didn't want to know anything about me ”.

This is Olivier Échaudemaison (Périgueux, 1942), artistic director of Guerlain for more than 20 years, make-up artist, creator of fetish cosmetics, illustrator, artist, former artistic director of Vogue, former head of make-up at Estée Lauder and Givenchy.

In their hands they have entrusted true icons of 20th century beauty, from Verouska to Audrey Hepburn, through Jackie Kennedy and Romy Schneider.

He has been with everyone and everywhere.

Josephine Baker hired him as a makeup artist at her last concert.

It is like an encyclopedia of the beauty of the last decades.

Échaudemaison, with one of Guerlain's lipsticks.

Talos Buccellati

He welcomes us at Maison Guerlain, at number 68 on the Champs-Elysées, on an autumnal Monday in a Paris that tries to put the biggest pandemic of the last 100 years on its back and move on.

This house, one of the epicenters of world luxury, knows a lot about overcoming tragedies.

Here are the photos that testify to the queues that recently arrived soldiers from the front made at their doorstep to buy a lipstick for their girlfriends at the end of World War II.

Échaudemaison is wearing a printed Etro suit and a Hermès bag.

He is exultant and smiles all the time.

His assistants breathe a sigh of relief and report, "You have a good day."

Later, he himself clarifies with laughter that he is not "a dictator", but that on the door of his office there is a dissuasive poster: "This dog bites."

Échaudemaison managed his position at Guerlain.

From a young age he has a mantra: "It is better to talk to God than to his saints."

So one day, 20 years ago, he made an appointment with Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, the business group to which Guerlain belongs, and also Givenchy, the brand he worked for at the time.

"I want to wake up the sleeping beauty you have in your stables, sir," he told his boss.

Now he laughs at his recklessness: “I have a very high esteem for myself, I've always had a lot of confidence in myself.

And I do not accept a 'no' for an answer, perhaps a 'may be' because I know it will end up being a 'yes ”.

Something must have worked in that conversation because Arnault put Guerlain in their hands with a mission: "Rejuvenate her and see to it that young girls continue to buy their mothers' favorite brand."

To Échaudemaison we owe the Kiss Kiss lipsticks and the Rouge G. In addition to the modernization of one of the most copied cosmetics in the world, the Terracotta sun powders created in 1984 by Dominique Szabo, and one of the two best sellers of the house together to the Shalimar fragrance.

“I just knew how to do it, I love this brand.

When I was 19 my first fragrance was Vetiver, I had seen this house shine and felt like it was fading.

I decided to walk with Guerlain because it is a free territory, there is no fashion, there are no bags, shoes, jewelry, sunglasses… it is only beauty.

I don't care about fashion, I don't care about Kim Kardashian.

You have to fight to be yourself ”.

Soldiers in 1945 shop at the Guerlain boutique on the Champs-Élysées.

With actress Sophia Loren.

His story is a perfect balance between hard work and good fortune.

"I believe in luck above all things," he confesses.

As evidenced by a milestone that marked his resume: his first magazine job, the US edition of Harper's Bazaar, was shot by Richard Avedon with Suzy Parker as a model.

What more could you want?

Échaudemaison relates in her memoirs that at the time it was the models who used makeup for the photo sessions.

“Professional makeup artists, who were not yet called make up artists, worked in the film industry or in beauty institutes.

The models, both in fashion houses and in magazines, knew how to put on makeup very well.

I learned everything I know by looking at them ”.

Échaudemaison and Alexandre comb Shirley MacLaine's hair during the filming of 'Woman Times Seven' in 1966.

From a family of horticulturists in the Périgord region - a job he hated since he was seven - his parents divorced and it was his mother who brought the family forward.

The creative says that his secondary school notebooks were already full of drawings and portraits.

At that time, the early 1950s, he was obsessed with Picasso and copied all his paintings.

Later he began collecting fashion magazines and discovered Christian Dior, Jacques Fath and Balenciaga.

Before finishing studying, he found the door to enter the world of luxury: a job as an assistant to Alexandre, one of the great hairdressers in Paris.

He was a minor and his mother had to sign an authorization for him with no little disgust.

His new job required him to stand between 12 and 14 hours a day and consisted of preparing and entertaining clients such as the Duchess of Windsor or the Countess of Paris while Monsieur Alexandre smoked his Virginia cigarettes.

"This was the school where I trained, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré style," he says proudly.

Échaudemaison and Jerry Hall.

Alexandre's splendid clientele was well distributed by the centers of power around the world: Madame Rothschild, Marella Agnelli, Begum Om Habibeh Aga Khan or Jacqueline Kennedy.

Also actresses like Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley MacLaine.

“He took me everywhere: to a royal wedding in Rome, to a funeral in Vienna, to an official visit to London and Frankfurt.

So I was able to meet the women I had seen in magazines.

And everything was much better than in real life, "he wrote in his memoir, Colors of My Life (2012).

“I was a very fast learner,” he says, “and I had decided not to be a loser, so I was pushing and pushing.

I had to learn to be discreet, to keep a low profile, to pretend that everything was normal ”:

"You have to go with the Dukes of Windsor."

-OKAY.

"You're going on the Kennedy plane for Europe."

-OKAY.

“No one took photos there and there were no social networks to show off your work.

My advertising was my hands.

They called me from Buckingham Palace to put makeup on Princess Anne in the official photos of her wedding, and the first thing they asked me was to shut my mouth: 'Shut up!'.

Then I took the official photos of her first child, I worked with the whole family, even the queen, and I could never tell anyone ”.

Posters by illustrator E. Darcy.

Échaudemaison went with the Kennedys on Air Force One on their official trip to London, Paris, and Vienna in 1961. He dressed, styled, and made up Jackie for dinner with the other leading couple in the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev and Nina Khrushcheva.

It was at the residence of the American ambassador in the Austrian capital.

“Jackie was always tired and all she wanted to do was take off her shoes and get into bed, JFK was more energetic and well aware of his wife's charming effect on public opinion.

It was he who had: 'More shine, more cleavage, more glamor', and she let it be done, ”says the creative, who left the cinema surprised when he saw the movie Jackie (2016) starring Natalie Portman.

For this reason he flatly refuses to see The Crown series.

"Everything is very different when you have lived with them and you have seen them coming out of the bathroom."

He also assures in his book that while dressing the first lady in a Parisian hotel suite, he saw JFK come out of the toilet wrapped in a towel to answer the phone.

As he spoke, the towel fell to the ground and he kept talking immutable and naked until a clean one was brought to him.

Poster by illustrator E. Darcy from 1935.

Time passed quickly for Alexandre's first assistant, who started collaborating with Diana Vreeland's Vogue and soon went freelance to New York.

Showing off his good luck, he ended up hired by Estée Lauder "to give a French touch" to their products.

At the age of three, she returned to Paris to launch the Givenchy makeup line.

That was for him the acid test in the cosmetic industry.

"You don't do a makeup line like you design a dress, you had to create at least 10 shades of eyeshadow, various makeup funds, powders, highlighters, 30 or 40 lipstick colors: between 150 and 200 products" .

It took two years to finish, but after that time Givenchy makeup was sold in 10 countries following the strict rule of the dressmaker: never more than three colors together.

There he spent a decade before he had the audacity to enter Arnault's office to apply to wake up Guerlain.

Sketch made by Échaudemaison.

Benjamin of Lapparent

Has the industry changed a lot in these four decades?

The creative hesitates for a few minutes.

"The big change is in the laboratory," he says.

“The textures are the revolution, the red of a lipstick can be the same, but the texture is different.

Prototypes travel frequently from my office to the lab, and back again, for a year until we say: Bingo!

There is a new generation concerned about sustainability and what goes into a cosmetic.

The customer has changed faster than the industry ”.

Creation with the Maison's lipstick collection.

Benjamin of Lapparent

Échaudemaison dislikes that we are becoming more and more like each other.

"As clones," he points out.

“Before, high-class Spanish women were very easy to identify, they used to wear makeup, a lot of Terracotta, shadow and carmine.

Those in Milan were filled with jewels, they looked like a Christmas tree.

In Scandinavia nobody wore anything, they all looked poor.

In Japan they were all the same, you had to have a very good eye to detect class differences.

And that's the fun of this world.

I hope that we can maintain our essences, that Spain continues to be Spain, France continues to be France and Italy continues to be Italy.

We must not be diluted in the madness of globalization.

That is also taking care of biodiversity [laughs] ”.