When a Makeup Artist Becomes a Myth-Maker
There’s a moment in every great collaboration where the work stops being about the product and starts being about something larger a feeling, a cultural signal, a mood that a generation didn’t know it needed until it arrived. That’s the territory Andrew Dahling occupies. As the lead makeup artist behind the latest Viva Glam campaign starring Chappell Roan for MAC Cosmetics, Dahling didn’t just apply product to a face. He constructed a visual argument for what glamour means right now, in this exact cultural moment, when maximalism has made its full comeback and drag-adjacent aesthetics have walked from the underground straight onto the main stage.
To understand what makes this campaign resonate so deeply, you have to start with the pairing itself. Chappell Roan is not a neutral choice. She is loud, deliberately theatrical, and carries with her an entire philosophy about self-expression one rooted in queer performance tradition, in the kind of drag culture that transforms a person into a statement. Viva Glam, since its 1994 launch, has always been tied to advocacy and identity, originally raising funds for HIV/AIDS relief through MAC’s AIDS Fund. The line has never been simply about lipstick. It’s always been about who gets to be visible, who gets to be celebrated, and how beauty becomes a political act disguised as a cosmetic one. Placing Chappell Roan at the center of that legacy isn’t a marketing gimmick. It’s a continuation of the line’s founding logic.
Dahling understands this. His work on this campaign reflects a deep literacy in what the brief was actually asking for beneath the surface brief.
The Face as a Stage Set
Working with a performer like Chappell Roan gives a makeup artist both extraordinary freedom and a very specific responsibility. Roan has her own developed visual language the rosy reds, the theatrical liner, the references to 80s pop stardom filtered through a contemporary queer lens. She is not a blank canvas. She arrives with an aesthetic identity that is already fully formed and wildly specific. Dahling’s task was not to impose a look but to elevate and extend what was already there, to take Roan’s existing aesthetic vocabulary and push it to a level of polish and intensity that could hold up in campaign imagery without losing what makes it feel alive and personal.
The result is makeup that reads as both archival and forward. The skintone approach has that luminous, almost wet quality that recalls late 70s disco photography not in a costume way, but in the way that certain lighting and skin preparation techniques genuinely evoke an era without dressing up as it. The lips carry that concentrated pigment that Viva Glam shades have always been engineered to deliver, the kind of color that doesn’t whisper from across a room but announces. The eye work threads a line between precision and theatricality, structured enough to photograph with clarity, expressive enough that it reads as emotion rather than geometry.
What Dahling is doing here is something that gets discussed too rarely in beauty editorial: he is managing scale. Campaign work exists at multiple sizes simultaneously the billboard version, the social media square, the editorial page, the close-up video frame. A look that works at one scale can dissolve at another. The technical challenge is building a face that survives compression, survives enlargement, survives the iPhone screen and the taxi-top display with equal integrity. That’s a craft problem as much as an artistic one.
The Viva Glam Legacy and Where This Campaign Sits
The Viva Glam lineage is genuinely unusual in the beauty industry. Most cosmetic lines age into irrelevance or get quietly repositioned. Viva Glam has kept its cultural friction intact across three decades partly because MAC has been willing to let the campaign spokespeople be genuinely controversial, genuinely marginal, genuinely subversive figures who meant something to communities that mainstream beauty had historically ignored or tokenized. RuPaul in the 90s. Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper in the early 2010s. Miley Cyrus. The campaign has always moved toward cultural edges rather than away from them.
Chappell Roan in2024 and into 2025 occupies a specific cultural position that makes this pairing feel earned rather than opportunistic. Her rise happened through genuine community investment years of shows, a dedicated fanbase built before mainstream recognition arrived, and a public persona that has never softened itself to become more palatable to people who were only just becoming aware of her. The boundary she famously articulates around fan interaction, the way she has spoken about the pressures of sudden fame, the deliberateness with which she protects her own creative and personal space these qualities aren’t incidental to why she works for Viva Glam. They are exactly the point. The campaign has always been at its best when it features people who assert the right to exist on their own terms.
Dahling’s makeup reads that context and responds to it. There’s nothing about the finished look that feels like an attempt to sand down Roan’s edges for a wider audience. The choices amplify rather than dilute.
What It Means to Make Something Feel Magical
The word “magic” in the context of beauty work gets used carelessly, usually as a vague compliment that avoids the specificity of actual craft. But there’s a real phenomenon being described when people say certain makeup transforms rather than just decorates. It happens when the technical execution is so thoroughly in service of an emotional truth that the seams disappear. You stop seeing the foundation and the liner and the highlight as separate elements applied in a sequence and start experiencing the face as a whole thing that simply is the way it is.
Achieving that coherence is what separates makeup artists who are skilled from makeup artists who are genuinely doing something creative. Dahling has been building toward this kind of work throughout his career, developing a sensibility that understands skin as texture and light rather than just as a surface to cover, that understands color as mood rather than just as category.
With this campaign, that accumulated craft arrives at a moment that deserves it. Chappell Roan is an artist whose whole project is about refusing to be smaller than what she is. The makeup Dahling built for her does the same thing it doesn’t minimize, doesn’t hedge, doesn’t soften into something safer. It goes all the way in. That willingness to commit completely, to trust that the maximalist choice is the right choice when the context calls for it, is what transforms technical execution into something that actually sticks in the cultural memory.
That’s what Viva Glam has always been reaching for, and that’s what this campaign, through Dahling’s hands, actually delivers.
