CRIMINAL JUSTICE to MAKEUP ARTIST

Ashley Rubell: What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Tiffany Leigh Patton: In high school I was told [the answer to this question] by one of my favorite teachers, my history teacher, which was then echoed by my other favorite teacher, my English teacher (who for all intensive purposes taught an ethics class. He thought it was far more interesting to talk about ethics in his English course). Both of them told me the same thing. They said you’re going to make a really great attorney. You’re going to make a really good advocate. You’re going to be a really good person who fights for….

AR: ...what you believe in?
TLP: Or just to even argue a point. When you can see two sides of a story, it’s really special. And so by high school, that’s what everybody was saying. ‘Tiffany’s really good at arguing a point’ or ‘Tiffany’s got enough personality to lead a charge’... and so, I stuck with that.

AR: How old were you when those teachers instilled that in you? You were in high school you said, but what grade was that? Junior year?
TLP: I must’ve been sixteen or seventeen, yeah. It was those last two years when you start thinking about going to college and teachers start telling you what you’re really good at. And I went right into college in summer school, after high school. I did not stop school. I had graduated with two bachelor’s degrees by the time I was twenty-three. 

AR: From where?
TLP: Cal State Fullerton. My GPA was high enough. I was poor. It was not in my realm of possibilities to do much more than go to the state school, which I had already been accepted to.

AR: What were your two degrees in?
TLP: Criminal Justice and American Studies. I knew that I was interested in laws and how laws are made and maybe how the system works. I didn’t want to take political science. I thought that was boring. I took American Studies because it had these other classes that I wanted to take. I was interested in women in crime, and basic tenants of women’s studies, and then there was men in crime, and minorities in crime, and it just kind of all fit under this American Studies thing. I was really interested in literature and historical context, and that’s what American Studies was. It was the studying of people over time.  

My senior projects consisted of ethnographic studies and studies of culture. I’ve always been fascinated by people and how they live the life they live, across so many different cultures. Political Science seemed so snooze fest to me. I was much more interested in how people think and theory.

AR: It sounds like your interests were in the body of people rather than the politics themselves or the system that governed them.
TLP: Yes, and when the counselors looked over my transcripts they pointed out that I already had enough credits to get a comparative religion minor.

AR: Oooh that was one of my favorite subjects in college.
TLP: Yeah, I was huge into ethics! And that all came from my high school teacher. He was really impactful. It was the whole idea of talking about theories and the stuff behind why people do what they do.

AR: So then, what bridged the gap into makeup?
TLP: I was putting myself through college and taking out loans on my own. I had to work. I had to work from the age of fourteen. There was no question about it.

AR: What was your family like? Tell me a little bit about your background.
TLP: My parents split when I was ten. My mom was a single mother. She was the manager at a grocery store. She made just enough to where we couldn’t get financial aid, and just too little to support three young girls. I’m the oldest.

AR: I can tell you aren’t the youngest!
TLP: Oh no, I definitely came out bossy. I’m sure that’s a part of the reason why my teachers might have said, ‘Tiffany is such a leader’ and why I always had this desire to sort of solve everyone’s problems. So that was something I carried with me from a very young age. I watched my mom work. She would literally show up to work every hour that the grocery store was open.

AR: You said you also started working at a young age. What was the first job you ever had?
TLP: I was a hostess. I started waiting tables at fifteen or sixteen, and I was younger than what was actually allowed in California at that time. Then I started working at Robinson’s May, which was a department store out in California.

AR: Let me guess, right next to a Mervyn’s… ?
TLP: Oh yeah, down at the LaBrea mall. I was working in fragrances and I was eighteen years old. I kept seeing the girls in the white lab coats over at the Clinique counter. It’s kind of trite but I wanted to be where the pretty girls were. I thought I deserved that. They were all in cosmetics, so I thought, I want to be in cosmetics.

AR: Trite as that may be, what I really love about all of it is that when you make up your mind about something, you just do it. You don’t let anything stand in your way.
TLP: Yeah, totally. Super fearless. At that time, I kept pushing to be in the cosmetics department. And I kid you not, I probably went on at least 8-10 interviews with MAC cosmetics. They essentially said, 'Great. You work in fragrances. But you can’t do makeup. We can’t help you.'  I’m the oldest of three girls. I did makeup for all my friends. I was a cheerleader in high school. I did makeup for all the football games. I always got my friends ready for proms and formals or whatever it was…

AR: So you had a lot of experience doing makeup, but informally.

TLP: Informally… but also brazen. I was just brazen. I went on one of these freelancer calls for MAC cosmetics at the Lakewood mall. By this time, I had gone on six or seven interviews with MAC and not gotten a job. So I was hard-headed. A surefire way for me to accomplish something is to tell me I can’t do it. I had already talked to friends and picked their brains, I was a MAC addict, and I was giving every bit of my paycheck - that wasn’t going to my mom - to makeup! Anyway, I ended up getting the job with them in the end.
I had always done makeup or waited tables, even when I got side tracked working in the music industry. I never stopped doing makeup. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five I was juggling going to school and working seven days a week. I was never not working. Freelancing with MAC (or just at the counter in general) was the thing that I did most consistently over that period of time. Estee Lauder is really great about their training programs. I got hired at MAC in 2001. 2007 was when I did my first music video. I did that because my homies were in a band.

I had no idea what I was doing in terms of doing something for on-camera. They were doing a music video that was based on this french movie called Pierrot Le Fou. It’s a french film. There was a fight scene and a bathtub scene. I think [in the movie] he commits suicide? And he’s in this bathtub and he paints his face blue. Over this two day stretch I had to do continuity. In the movie, this guy Pierrot Le Fou gets beat up so I googled -- back before YouTube was even really a thing, it wasn’t a popular thing in 2007 to cap everything off the internet -- “how to make bruises with makeup” and zombie halloween makeup was the only thing I found. The techniques of making zombie eyes and colors or veins or marks was very similar to what a fight would be like. Now I look back at that video and I’m both surprised and embarrassed that I had it so right and so wrong at the same time. There were things that were really shit, and there were things that were really good for someone who had never done it.

Because of that one music video, other friends starting referring me for other music videos. In that first year I must’ve done fifteen to twenty music videos. By that time, in 2007, I had my paralegal certificate, won the internship at the law firm by my school which I was also living next to, so I would walk to work. I worked at the law firm, I was a paralegal, and managed the calendar for two attorneys, and was “miss law firm girl”. Meanwhile still working freelance for MAC on the weekends. When the music videos started happening they were always at night, usually in downtown LA. It was the craziest thing. I would work 8 to 3 or 4 at the law firm, I would drive to LA and get there for the 6pm call time, I would work until 6:30am and get back in time for my 8am start at the firm.

AR: You just never slept?!
TLP: I had a few times where I worked for 48 hours straight.

AR: And I guess that’s what your twenties are for.
TLP: That’s what they’re for!

AR: Would you consider problem-solving as one of the parallels between law and makeup?
TLP: Yeah, I would say so. But this is all hindsight, I wouldn’t have known back then which of my skills was going to be what makes me a great makeup artist.

AR: Of course. But now, looking back, what would you say are some of the other parallels between your studies and your current profession?
TLP: Problem-solving for sure, especially under pressure. I think that’s why I like the shows so much because I work well in that environment. And being able to delegate tasks to other people. I think I might come off as bossy when I’m on a new team initially, but I find that the next time someone sees me from that team, they know I’m the first person to go to and ask questions on how, or what to do and I’ll typically have the right answer. That’s something that I think makes me good at my job for sure. Problem solving, especially in fast paced environments, is where I excel.

AR: Tell me how you ended up going full-time into freelance? What did that look like?
TLP: That looked like poverty, haha

AR: Haha okay, and how long did that poverty last?
TLP:  For about 2 ½ years. I became someone’s first assistant in LA in 2008, which isn’t the real deal until you move to NY, but that’s where I started. She primarily had advertising clients - big brands like Wells Fargo and McDonald’s - and in working with her on those jobs I learned that I definitely preferred photo over video, and that I wanted to work in apparel over advertising.

AR: Wait, was she with an agency?
TLP: No, she was on her own.

AR: So how did you find her??
TLP: One of the directors that worked on a music video I did had assisted her and recommended her to me.

AR: The director assisted her for makeup??
TLP: Yes the director was a makeup artist before she started doing her own thing. In fact, she’s become one of the top directors working on music videos in LA right now. And she’s a female and she’s kicking ass. So Hannah recommended me to Donna, Donna was my mentor, and I still see her pretty much every time when I go back home.

AR: It sounds like this mentor really encouraged you?
TLP: Oh, she was so encouraging. She was my sounding board. She was the person who gave me so much confidence. We’re so similar in that we both overachieve… she is such a beautiful person, one of the best humans in the whole world. She really has helped me over the years. I tell her that all the time, but it still really tugs on my heart strings to think about it. We both cried when I told her I was moving to NY.

AR: What brought you to the decision on NY?
TLP: Fashion. I just knew that I wanted to be in fashion.

AR: Did Donna have any influence on that choice?
TLP: She didn’t want me to leave. But she knew. She knew I had to go. She wanted me to stay because she had finally found someone who could really help her with everything, but she also didn’t want to hold me back.

AR: Did you ever feel like your ego got in the way when you were assisting her? Considering how much you helped her, did that ever turn on you in any way, knowing that you could do things yourself? I know that’s a common feeling with a lot of assistants.
TLP: Something that I think is really important is knowing how to submit. To be a true leader, you have to know how to submit. You have to know who’s in charge. That’s something that I really appreciate about doing the shows. You may be really talented, but it’s an opportunity to take a step back from what you’re doing and telling yourself, 'it’s not my rodeo.' There are other people at the top of this hierarchy and you need to support them. Don’t get me wrong, even I have an ego, but I think I’ve just always approached it as an apprenticeship and I’ve treated it as such.

What’s really funny is that after assisting Donna, after moving to NY, I went into all these agencies and was like, “I’ve been doing makeup for X amount of years, I assisted for this long…” thinking I was going to get signed! Which is so laughable now! And they were all like, “Great. You can wash her brushes. You’re hired.”

AR: How did that make you feel?
TLP: Like an idiot! It made me feel like the world just didn’t know, the way they say ‘parents just don’t understand,’ I felt these agencies just didn’t understand me. I reverted back to the seventeen year old who demands the job at MAC Cosmetics. I was brazen. But it’s helped me I think. Somehow I knew that I needed to be in the same room with certain people, but I also felt like I deserved more. It was very paradoxical in that way. I viewed both things to be true so I had that internal struggle.

AR: Aside from your mentor, did anyone in your family, or anyone else back home encourage you or discourage you towards becoming a makeup artist? Were people supportive of your decisions at the time?
TLP: My family was interesting. There was no one who had graduated from college. I think my mom intuitively will always trust my decisions, because I’ve always been such a go-getter. She had deposited money into my account, ex-boyfriends had deposited money into my account, my sister had deposited money into my account. I phoned home for money more times than I care to admit. I have made dear friends that have paid for me to fly to Europe, friends that I still owe money to in fact from about three seasons ago. because I got on Val Garland’s team and my makeup artist friend told me there was no way that I wasn’t going. He deposited $5,000 in my account so that I could be here. I’ve never had money. But I have experienced grace in a real, true way.

AR: What are you most excited about in the beauty industry right now?
TLP: Diversity. I’m excited that we have people of all shapes and colors and sizes on the runway. There are some people who speak against this new diversity, saying it’s making fashion “too basic” or “not special,” but I think we need this sort of inclusivity if fashion’s going to continue as it has. I want to celebrate more than just white privilege.

AR: Could you see yourself pursuing another craft after or outside of makeup? And what would that be?
TLP: I could see that being interior design. I’m a little neurotic about my spaces. But I don’t see myself switching careers again.

AR: What advice would you give to yourself 10 years ago?
TLP: You don’t have to work so hard? Enjoy life a little more. It’s the same advice I’d give myself now. I’m just more tired. My body doesn’t work the same.

AR: What advice would you give folks of the next generation who are looking to break into the beauty industry?
TLP: Go for it. Apprentice. Don’t worry about being at the top right away. Don’t be in such a hurry.

AR: What about advice for youth outside of the beauty industry?
TLP: Don’t be afraid to try different things. Your degree doesn’t have to dictate anything. I’m glad I learned what I did from my degree, but it isn’t directly relevant to what I’m doing today. I really believe in going to college, even if you’ll “never use it”. And, there’s no need to rush.

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xo