Beauty guru offers uplift amid cancer
Beauty may be only skin deep, but for people battling cancer, applying cosmetics on the outside can help them feel better on the inside.
So says Tim Quinn, a stockbroker turned internationally renowned makeup artist who spent Saturday, the first day of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, behind the Giorgio Armani beauty counter at Saks Fifth Avenue on Union Square, giving makeovers and providing beauty tips for people with cancer.
Quinn, who beat testicular cancer in 2007 and is a cancer research advocate for several groups, also shared how something as superficial as bronzer gave his psyche — and his mood — a boost while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation.
“It doesn’t hurt to help them
look their best,” said Quinn, who has worked backstage at fashion weeks in New York, Paris and Milan, at the Academy Awards and on luminaries from Jill Biden to January Jones. “When people are fighting for their lives, it can help to take them to a light-hearted place.”
Among those at the event were executive coach Judy Knight and secretary Fern Tom, who met Quinn at an event in Arizona four years ago. They’re fans, and bought makeup and skin care products to replenish their supplies at home. But the event also drew Lizabeth Light, an oncology nurse at California Pacific Medical Center, who was trying on a new makeup palette for her upcoming wedding, and who agreed with Quinn’s assessment.
“The drugs patients take can affect the skin, from dryness to rash to irritations,” Light said. “They often feel sick, but they still want to look pretty.”
In another chair, Tracey Wheatley, who lives in Ohio, was visiting San Francisco with a friend who flew in from Australia for a girls’ weekend. Their spontaneous trip into Saks for a day of shopping led to makeovers for both. Wheatley — who also happens to be an oncology nurse — agreed that patients can benefit from a bit of pampering, whether a makeover, a hand massage or a hug.
“In the hospital, they try to get people to donate lotions for someting as simple as a hand massage,” Wheatley said. “If you can take a minute and do that for someone, that means something. The sense of touch is so important in healing, because in hospitals, you can become very impersonal. You can come in and just talk about the disease and focus on the illness, but I think just touching someone’s hand, touching someone’s skin, feeling that tactile sensation is important. And that’s how I felt when the makeup artist put her hand on my face. It’s relaxing. We feel special.”
As is the case with many cancer patients, Quinn lost weight and energy, and his skin took on a pallor during a nine-week course of chemotherapy and radiation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“I hated having people look at me and identifying me immediately as a cancer patient — it takes away your personality, because people then say, ‘Oh! You have cancer,’ ” he said. “But you have to do your best to carry on. You have to do what you can to feel like yourself.”
For Quinn, who lives half the year in Florida, that meant finding a way to regain his suntan. He turned to self-tanning products for his body, and to bronzer (Armani’s Fluid Sheer, of course) diluted with moisturizer to give his face a subtle glow.
In the hospital, where he was placed in a unit with other male patients, “You’d see the same guys, and we were really not doing well, and they’d ask me, ‘How come your skin looks so good?’ ” he recalled. “I looked like I’d been at the beach. My skin was dewy. It didn’t look flat.”
Quinn took to bringing cosmetic gift bags for other patients and nurses, and later became active working with Look Good Feel Better and the American Cancer Society. He attended Vice President Joe Biden’s recent Cancer Moonshot summit and sits on the board of the Farrah Fawcett Foundation.
His beauty recommendations for men and women with cancer include the use of tinted or non-colored lip balm to prevent cracked, dehydrated lips; a radiant facial moisturizer to give a glow, rather than a thicker, colored foundation; concealer on undereye circles to brighten the face and counter the weary look; and brow pencil to fill in eyebrow hair lost to chemotherapy — or eyeglasses to hide nonexistent brows. A lack of eyebrows, he said, takes away some of the balance in the face, especially for people with strong jawlines.
“The silly little things we take for granted every day have a big effect on your psyche,” said Quinn, who thinks makeup is not silly at all. “After helping people with their brows and complexion, you can see a visceral change. You’re giving back a little bit of who they were, and who they are, and it’s empowering.”
“You’re giving back a little bit of who they were, and who they are, and it’s empowering.” Timm Quinn, Giorgio Armani Makeup Artist