A Career Doing What Comes Cosmetically
It’s a long road from working behind a Thrifty makeup counter to running a lucrative cosmetics company and being Bette Midler’s personal makeup artist. But, for Eugenia Weston, it was simply a matter of following up on what she loved: cosmetics.
Even when she attended William S. Hart High School in Newhall, Weston, now 37, always stood out with her dramatic eye shadows and lipsticks.
At 15, when she came home from school, Weston mixed batches of ointments. “My mom had all these remedy books, and I’d make creams from beeswax and lemon oil,” she recalled. And, whenever she saw a movie, she always pored over the credits for makeup and hair styling.
Her first job after high school graduation was as a clerk in the cosmetics department of a local Thrifty drugstore, where she would liberally give advice on hair and makeup colors. She left to become a makeup artist in hair stylist Jon Peters’ Woodland Hills beauty salon, later operated by Allen Edwards.
Formed Company in 1976
Weston, who studied color theory at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, formed her own company, Senna Cosmetics, in 1976.
Weston, who started the company in her garage, went on to work with a chemist to develop products that do not use preservatives, she said. Last year, Senna registered $700,000 in sales through Allen Edwards’ and Jose Eber’s salons in areas such as Beverly Hills and Newport Beach.
“We have gone to the high end of the market,” said her husband, David, who five years ago left a job as a senior hydroelectric operator for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to become chief executive officer of Senna. The couple also sell the line wholesale to makeup artists.
Weston’s own salon and business headquarters are on the first floor of a brick-fronted building on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana, and her warehouse is in Newhall.
Weston caters mostly to professional women and housewives, but she has made up or sold products to actresses such as Cher, Linda Gray, Teri Garr, Lesley Ann Warren and Carrie Fisher.
“My clients get bored really fast, so we change their makeup all the time, with every season,” she said.
Weston hand-makes lip lacquers from a blend of lanolin and castor oils and waxes, to which she adds pigments. To achieve specific eye-shadow colors, she blends loose powders, then sends them to a Southwestern laboratory--whose name she guards--where they are duplicated.
Makeup cases are custom-made in the East and the final products are assembled by two of Weston’s 16 employees at a Newhall warehouse.
Although most who go to the Tarzana salon seek a more glamorous look for a party, or simply want to see how a season’s new makeup shades look on them, some want to leave looking like a star.
Weston recalled a recent telephone call from a woman who said she looked like actresses Joan Collins and Elizabeth Taylor, but wanted to learn whom she resembled most and have her features enhanced accordingly. “She’s coming in next week,” Weston said with a giggle.
“But people usually want to look like themselves,” she added.
Natural Eyebrows Favored
A “huge trend” Weston said she sees now--and one she has advocated for years--is the natural, untweezed eyebrow. “We let all of our customers’ eyebrows grow in,” she said, adding that she lightens brows to “take the edge off.”
“The most common mistakes that people make are that they don’t blend when they put a rouge or blush on--and it looks like it’s there. And when a makeup looks good, you can’t tell how much is actually there. Blending is the key, especially in the ‘80s.”
She takes to her salon work tricks acquired from her film work, such as using cake eyeliner under the upper lid to flatter the eye less conspicuously. And, she sometimes will dip a tiny brush in a cream foundation and “paint out” imperfections such as scars and freckles, using “cross-hatchings.”
In motion pictures, Weston created the makeup design, executed by another makeup artist, for actress Leslie Ann Warren in “Victor/Victoria,” which was filmed in London.
Makeup for Actress
She also has worked with Bette Midler for eight years and was makeup artist on the actress-singer’s last three movies, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Ruthless People” and “Outrageous Fortune.”
For Warren, Weston designed the Jean Harlow look of Norma, the dumb-blonde character she played in the 1982 movie “Victor/Victoria.”
She created the makeup for singer Melissa Manchester on her “MA+HEMA+ICS” album and Midler on two of her albums and her “Beast of Burden” video with Mick Jagger. She also makes up models for print photography.
Wearing a two-piece black taffeta suit, off-white patterned blouse and oversized earrings, the petite Weston recently escorted a salon visitor through her black-and-white motif shop to a lounge area partitioned by a tiger-striped curtain.
Her dark, curly hair was worn in a simple ponytail. Her only visible makeup was blue indigo eye shadow framing her brown eyes and frosted violet lipstick.
Seeking Glamor
She chatted amiably until her client of 16 years arrived, Charlene Hartman of Woodland Hills, a junior high school teacher who wanted to look glamorous for her birthday party that evening.
“I want her to make me look 10 years younger,” Hartman said, settling into a chair beneath tungsten spotlights.
As Weston applied a concealer under Hartman’s eyes, then powdered over it using a foam wedge, Hartman asked if Weston could help rid her of dark circles under her eyes. Weston nodded.
“She draws on me, like she is doing a painting,” Hartman said.
An hour makeup session with Weston costs $45, a two-hour make-over $65. “There are charts; there are before-and-after pictures,” she said. “We teach them how to use their hands, how to work with a brush.” If she goes to someone’s house, she charges $150.
Lack Proper Skills
Mistakes Weston commonly sees in makeup application involve women lacking skills to apply cosmetics properly, not seeing themselves objectively and simply getting stuck in ruts.
“I think they were taught in the ‘50s. . . . And also, what I’ve heard, but it’s hard for me to believe this, when they wore these colors that was a time when they were younger, it was a happy time in their lives, they were popular, whatever it was; they stayed with those shades because they were happy then.”
Weston views herself primarily as a makeup artist rather than a businesswoman and, within that role, a color specialist. She developed all of Senna’s 150-plus shades of face and eye colors with attention to consistency and staying properties to accommodate film, video and print work as well as everyday activities.
Weston lives on a ranch in the Placerita Canyon area of Newhall with her husband and two children, Theda, 11, and Alex, 4. Her passion is gardening and, although she always wears a moisturizer, sunscreen and makeup base, she does not wear eye makeup.
Despite the fact that she has dozens of wholesale accounts nationwide and her entrepreneurial side is pulling her toward creating a catalogue for mail-order sales, Weston said what she does professionally is “not really a job.”
“I always wanted to do something like this from high school on,” she said. “I just think I was meant to do this in my life. . . . It was in my soul.”
