“We’re all hungry for a dream, and makeup allows us to access that”: Sam Visser is makeup’s boy wonder
PHOTOGRAPHY BRYCE ANDERSON
STYLING ALEXANDER PICON
MAKEUP SAM VISSER
Sam Visser’s decadent looks are at once nostalgic and new. Sarah Brown charts the ascent of fashion’s favorite new makeup artist.
Sam Visser believes in glamour. He believes in high drama and high gloss, cinematic beauty with its slick veneer and velvet edges. Most of all, he believes in makeup. At the ripe old age of 26, Sam has been working as a professional makeup artist for a full decade. According to his fabled origin story, Hollywood makeup artist David Hernandez receives credit for unleashing a 12-year-old Sam onto the beauty world when he invited the makeup-obsessed kid (who had bravely introduced himself during a chance encounter at a Make Up For Ever boutique) to accompany him to a David LaChapelle shoot as a “shadow.” Inspired, and like any normal sixth grader, Sam started doing small shoots in his free time, eventually announcing to his parents that they needed to move from their beachy hometown of Ventura, California, south to the real action: Los Angeles. By the time he was 16, Kris Jenner — who’d come across him on Instagram — had the high-school sophomore making house calls to Calabasas five days a week to do her makeup.
(Sam would like you to know that no child labor laws were broken: “It was legal!” he says, laughing. “I used to go to the child entertainment center in the Valley to get everything signed off on every month!”) Before he knew it, Gigi, Bella, Kendall and Kaia were his clients, and his friends; Kate Moss, Sabrina Carpenter and Rihanna had all sat in his chair. By 21, he was a beauty ambassador for the house of Dior. Last year, he was anointed global makeup artist for YSL Beauté, assuming the mantle from Tom Pecheux, one of his idols. If Sam Visser has ascended, via the express lane, into the firmament of beauty’s A-List, it is certainly well-earned.
Sam is part of a small group of makeup artists working in today’s digital age who are not slotted into a specific space, or specialty. He is flexible with his craft, able to hop back and forth between media that require different rhythms, nuances and technical skillsets. He works with the world’s leading photographers and stylists on magazine editorial and commercial campaign work (Gucci, Balenciaga, Versace, Marc Jacobs); he does his share of red carpet (Alex Consani and Amelia Gray for this year’s Met Gala); he has become a backstage maestro, too, responsible for the smoldering glamazons at Demna’s fall/winter 2026 collection for Gucci. Decadent, color-drenched beauty is his calling card, which made him the obvious choice for Doja Cat’s “Gorgeous” music video — a 1980s cosmetics campaign send-up starring an iconic cast of supes, from Paloma Elsesser and Karen Elson to Anok Yai and Mona Tougaard.
Sam, who also dabbles in photography and filmmaking, has been particularly moved by The Art Spirit, a book written in 1923 by the realist painter and founder of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri. “It’s not directly involved with makeup,” says Sam, “but it’s about this kind of unwavering dedication to being an artist, to following your gut, and how, when you make a brush stroke — whether it’s on a face or a canvas — the intention behind it is much more important than what you hope the outcome will be. That changed the way I look at doing makeup now,” he continues. “We can strive for perfection, but what’s most important is expression.” Like all great artists, Sam desires for his work to elicit a feeling. He is drawn to music, art, film and fashion “that takes you somewhere, makes you feel a part of something.” He cites the work of directors Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and the French New Wave’s Henri-Pierre Roché. He appreciates silent-era films, and George Cukor’s oeuvre from the 1930s and 1940s. “What I’m interested in is atmosphere,” says Sam, who will watch the same movie over and over and over again, should he become captivated by a scene whose set, soundtrack, and details big and small “pulls something out” of him.
Like all great artists, Sam desires
for his work to elicit a feeling.
SARAH BROWN
One such scene is from David Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir thriller Lost Highway, when Patricia Arquette steps out of a shiny black 1960 Cadillac convertible, with Lou Reed’s cover of “This Magic Moment” playing in the background. “She has this platinum-blond hair and metallic lips. You don’t even notice it, unless you’re really paying attention, but there’s a strobe light, and she looks so radiant. It’s so silver screen. It’s the way a movie star looks, like Marlene Dietrich,” says Sam, rambling on with the excitement of someone who’s just tasted ice cream for the first time. “As she moves from one car to another, she’s flipping her hair, and it’s just magical. All the scene is, is her getting in one car from another. That’s it. But it evokes this magic that is kind of invisible, that you can’t really put your finger on, but it’s there. That’s what I’m interested in,” he says firmly. “More than just pretty makeup.” It’s world-building, I offer. “Exactly. And I admire people who can do that successfully,” he replies.
I first met Sam a number of years ago when I ran into the makeup artist Troy Surratt at The Museum of Modern Art in New York one rainy afternoon. Troy was squiring a shy, boyishly cute, curly-haired 19-year-old around town. He had been introduced to Sam through Pati Dubroff, the veteran LA makeup artist who had similarly taken him under her wing. “You’ve got to meet this kid,” Troy whispered in my ear. I remember being struck by the sweetness of the outing I was witnessing: Two makeup artists — mentor and mentee, old guard and new — looking at art together, exposing themselves to beauty, soaking it all in, comparing notes. I wondered how what they were seeing — color, texture, gesture, light — might later manifest on a magazine cover, a red carpet or runway, or in a new lipstick shade or eyeshadow finish.
Sam has always revered those who have come before him, honoring the legacy of his forebears, studying the work of legendary makeup artists like Kevyn Aucoin — “He really appreciated individuality, before it was a buzzword, you know?” — with an almost academic rigor. What is currently propelling him forward, though, is a hunger for what’s next. “For a long time,” he says, “I was focused only on learning about the past. I was almost defiant against what was new — the modern world, contemporary art, fashion and beauty. Now, it’s: How do I mix the two together?”
Sam sees makeup — with
a capital M — on the horizon.
SARAH BROWN
It’s the very thing he is trying to work out in the pictures that accompany this story, which Sam conceived and creative directed for 72 in collaboration with the photographer Bryce Anderson. The images on these pages, featuring models Josephen Akuei, Summer Dirx and Hunter Pifer, are a riff on SoCal beauty supply store culture — equal parts candy land and discount emporium — and the endless possibilities Sam found within them as a wide-eyed child wandering the aisles, discovering a brand-new world where he felt he might belong. “You’d walk into the shop and there was something for every transformative beauty ideal,” he recalls of stores like Sally Beauty, where, even as a gradeschooler, he had a professional discount. “If you want longer nails, there’s seven-inch nails. There’s a million shades of hair dye.
It resonated with me as a kid because it was kind of accessible. It wasn’t like going to a department store where things were way out of my league, price-wise. If you try to buy a Chanel lipstick when you’re ten, it just doesn’t work. This was a way to access beauty,” he says. “Being around all the mannequins and wig heads, it felt like infinite opportunity. It was a place where beauty felt free. You could be as eccentric as you wanted, because everything was accepted there.”
It was especially meaningful for Sam to work on this project with Anderson, a fellow native of Southern California. “It’s rare that I meet people who understand that aesthetic,” says Sam. “We’re walking a very fine tightrope of chic and vulgar, figuring out the common space between them.” What results from their collaboration is a brand of sexy, joyful, gritty glamour. An homage to artistry and free expression. “We’re taking elements of that raw and real environment, remixing it with a super-glossy photography style — kind of perfect and inspired by the fashion illustrations that we love,” says Sam, referencing the 1970s and 1980s work of illustrators Antonio Lopez and Tony Viramontes, and airbrush artist Pater Sato. It is this spirit of vintage glamour with a modern pulse that he brings with him to his year-old role at YSL Beauté, where he creates beauty campaigns and has a hand in product development. In the wake of the pandemic-era Clean Girl and the past few seasons’ tasteful, quiet luxury approach to all things aesthetic, Sam sees makeup — with a capital M — on the horizon.
He describes this gravitational pull toward drama and confident color as a “kind of rebellious energy we have right now, because of the chaos of the world. We’re all hungry for an outlet, a dream, a fantasy, and makeup allows us to access that when we put on a lip or a full face and transform into something that feels a little bit contradictory to what the world is telling us to be.” With YSL, he points out, it’s the genuine heritage of the brand. Furthermore, he adds, “that is what Yves Saint Laurent [the man] was all about: bending the rules in an incredibly provocative way. What I want to bring to YSL is not just replicating the past, but replicating the way it affected culture, and empowered people to dare.”
We’re all hungry for an outlet, a dream, a fantasy, and makeup allows us to access that.
SAM VISSER
PHOTOGRAPHY BRYCE ANDERSON
MAKEUP SAM VISSER AT ART PARTNER USING YSL BEAUTÉ
STYLING: ALEXANDER PICON
HAIR: BOB RECINE
NAILS: HONEY
CASTING: PIERGIORGIO DEL MORO FOR DM CASTING.
PRODUCTION: LOLA PRODUCTION.
FIRST PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT AUSTIN WITHERS.
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANTS: ASTIN FERRERAS, DAVID MITCHELL.
STYLING ASSISTANTS, JACKSON PRUS, TATE TREVERTON.
MAKEUP ASSISTANTS: MIKI ISHIKURA, SHIMU ISHIKURA.
CASTING ASSISTANT JULIUN WILLIAMS
MODELS: HUNTER PIFER AT IMG, JOSEPHEN AKUEI AT HEROES,
SUMMER DIRX AT WILHELMINA
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