A Star Is Born
How Pati Dubroff went from working at a cosmetics counter to becoming one of Hollywood’s go-to celebrity makeup artists.
The first celebrity Pati Dubroff ever met was David Bowie. “I was pretty star-struck,” says the makeup artist, who’s in Toronto for a Winners/TJX event. On a whim, the then 22-year-old Dubroff auditioned for the early-’90s film The Linguini Incident starring Bowie. She landed a small role, which meant sharing some screen time with the legendary musician. While she didn’t pursue her acting career further, she ended up in that world regardless; her long and loyal list of celebrity clients includes Margot Robbie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Melissa McCarthy and Priyanka Chopra, whose face she painted for this year’s Met Gala, with Bowie serving as inspiration. “He was such an
incredible embodiment of camp,” she says. Dubroff’s main reference for Chopra’s Louis XIV-inspired look was an image from photographer Roxanne Lowit’s book Backstage Dior—a nod to another pivotal moment in her career, when she was a spokesperson for the French brand, which was long before cosmetics companies working with makeup ambassadors was the norm.
Dubroff started out during the pre-internet era, which is to say that she wasn’t sliding into her heroes’ DMs looking for a job. “I didn’t really know what a makeup artist did, but I knew I loved the stuff,” she says. Barely out of high school, Dubroff moved to New York and joined the Yves Saint Laurent counter at Bergdorf Goodman. From there, she freelanced at MTV, where she worked with artists like Macy Gray and Björk. “I did a flash of silver on her eyelid for the ‘Big Time Sensuality’ video,” she says. Being mentored for a few years by François Nars got her on shoots with Madonna and on runway shows like Versace and also meant working alongside Nars’s coiffeur counterpart, Oribe Canales. “What a genius,” says Dubroff of the late hairstylist.
Prepping celebrities for film premieres and awards ceremonies doesn’t usually allow for boundary-pushing makeup, the way her career once did, but every now and then, there’s an opportunity to bend the rules, like when Dubroff recently did a Marie Antoinette-inspired shoot with comedian Ali Wong for Vanity Fair. It was a full-circle moment, if you consider that Dubroff felt she’d finally made it as a makeup artist when she was working on her first Hollywood-issue cover with Annie Leibovitz in the early aughts. But by anyone else’s standards, she already had.