Shu Uemura |
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Shu Uemura, who died of acute pneumonia on Dec. 29 in Tokyo at the age of 79, sold controlling interest in his self-named brand to the French cosmetics giant L'Oreal for an undisclosed but enormous sum in 2003. But he continued to be the driving creative force behind the company. Until recently, Uemura twice-a-year personally demonstrated his makeup skills in public, showing off the latest in his Mode Makeup collections in Tokyo, London and sometimes New York City.
Heading for Hollywood to hone his skills, he found himself filling the archetypal role of the understudy who becomes a star. The head makeup artist on the film My Geisha wasn't available and Uemura had to step in and do Shirley MacLaine's face for the movie, transforming her Caucasian features into those of a Japanese courtesan. He soon became a favorite makeup artist among Hollywood stars, including such male celebrities as Frank Sinatra and Edward G. Robinson.
But women were his greatest audience. He returned to Tokyo in the late 1960s and marked his first big success with a specially formulated cleansing oil, inculcating to generations of women that oil, which preserves moisture, also left skin cleaner than soap. The health of a woman's skin, he believed, was paramount and Uemura's reputation was for enhancing natural beauty — not artificially creating it.
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