This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Timeless Issue, no. 371, Spring 2023. Order your copy here.
There’s a poisonous myth that everyone who works in any kind of creative industry will know all too well: that you’re only ever as good as the last thing you made. You’re only going to be remembered for your last photograph, your last look, the last thing you wrote or painted or choreographed. It’s a myth that until recently, make-up artist Yadim Carranza believed in too. Then, just before the pandemic, he made the brave decision to take himself out of the industry entirely and enforce a self-imposed total break from work while he got sober.
“The decision was kind of made for me,” he says now, speaking to i-D from his home in San Diego. “It just got rough, you know, and I had to make a decision to get better. So I took maybe two or three years off. Then that happened to be around that time that the pandemic hit, and all that kind of coincided. Really, it’s only been in the last couple of years that I started working a lot again. So this past year was about connecting more with work and still trying to take it easy, to take care of myself.”
It’s as part of his return to the world that Yadim worked with photographer Christopher Michael, creating beauty for this issue of i-D in his idiosyncratic, genre-bending style. In it, bold silvers and dopamine fuelled pinks are daubed across the models’ eyes, their lipsticks smudged like they’ve spent all night at the club, chewing, talking, kissing, faces smeared in glitter. Yadim’s work is known for pushing boundaries, twisting the ugly to become beautiful and back again. “It can really be a commentary on the time,” he says of make-up artistry today. “I don’t know if there’s anything that I’d say I’ll never do, because you just never know.”
“I’ve always been really spontaneous. I don’t want to be stuck in one style, or one way of doing makeup.” That spontaneity and frenetic energy, and a new way of looking at the power of make-up, is at the heart of Yadim’s practice and has been since he moved from the West Coast to New York back in 2004. “I just didn’t stop working”, he says now of his time starting out at a MAC beauty counter in the city. “I was just hustling, you know. I was always trying to get on as an assistant somewhere, and then leaving that situation and trying to get my own stuff going… It always felt like this uphill battle to be able to create and find stability in the industry. And I just burnt myself out.” Toxic productivity is a very real and ever-present problem, and burnout is inevitable in a cutthroat world that demands us to pour every ounce of ourselves into what we create. It’s understandable then, that Yadim first worried that he’d torpedoed his practice simply by prioritising self-care.
“If we just know our worth, we’re instantly beautiful. We move through the world in a different way.” Yadim
“Sometimes in this industry, I think we start to believe that we have to make ourselves available all the time, otherwise, you’re gonna lose something, we have to be in the centre. Or we’re gonna be overlooked or forgotten. So when I took my break there was a real fear that I was going to be forgotten. I’m not going to ever do this again, and I’m never going to work in this field again,” he says. “But then that’s the lie. That’s totally the lie. Taking a break allowed me to actually step back and prioritise what my needs are and what self-care looks like for me in this crazy field of work, and then also be excited about it again.”
That excitement is palpable talking to Yadim, but it’s also evident in his work with photographers like Mert and Marcus, Inez & Vinoodh, Glen Luchford and Willy Vanderperre. His renegade, genre-defying approach to beauty undoubtedly comes from his unconventional entrance into the industry. At first, he toyed with the idea of becoming an architect (“I was obsessed with rollercoasters”), and then a writer, before falling into fashion and make-up artistry through his friends.
“I was a little club kid,” Yadim explains. “I had a lot of friends that did drag and we’d all just go out and dress up. I was going to parties up in LA, San Francisco, and all along the West Coast. I just started doing everyone’s make-up. And I loved it.”
“I didn’t really think at that time that it was something that I would do professionally, but I just fell in love with it. I didn’t want to work in retail. I wanted to be in fashion. I liked the disruptive effect that makeup can have. It’s not always about the typical or conventional. I like turning things on their head and seeing how far they can go.” Yadim defines beauty not as a singular aesthetic, but rather as self-worth. “It’s not about what you look like but what you feel. We work in this industry where we’re selling people stuff they don’t need, and the irony of it all is that it’s an inside job. If we just know our worth, we’re instantly beautiful. We move through the world in a different way.”
This genuine excitement and belief in individuality feels refreshing and disruptive. Yadim, too, is optimistic about the future of the industry, and what it means for how we see beauty and creativity. “Years ago it was just this sea of the same,” he says of improving diversity in the industry. “The fact that that’s changing drastically – I’m excited. And I hope to just be a little part of pushing the envelope that much further.”
But whether he can do that with this job, or the next one, is something that he knows is out of his hands. “I want to be able to do something that I’m really excited about in the moment, and then be able to let it go afterwards. A lot of creatives get into this mode of obsessing and looking back and thinking about what we could have done differently. I just really want to practise fully letting go. And seeing what’s next. You know what I mean? Oh, that was great. That was amazing. I’m proud of it. But like, let’s move forward. You know? Done, I have no control.” That feels like as good a 2023 resolution as any.
Credits
Photography Christopher Michael
Make-up Yadim
Fashion Alexander Picon
Hair Dylan Chavles at MA+Group
Photography assistance Suede Lacy
Fashion assistance Raea Palimeri
Make-up assistance Paloma Romo
Hair assistance Allison DeMoss and Matthew Leadabrand
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING
Casting assistance Alexandra Antonova
Models Memu Conteh at Vision, Dosha Deng at Storm, Fitz at One Management and Denya Gore at Lulu