Celebrity makeup artist Christopher Buckle has gotten huge stars like Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera and Lindsay Lohan Red Carpet. He is what they trust when every detail matters. But when his own reflection began to feel, the man behind the best face of beauty decided it was time to make a change. “I didn’t feel handsome,” he says. “And I work in beauty. If you don’t have it, you can’t sell confidence.”
When makeup tricks stop working
In his early 50s, Buckle began to notice shifts. His eyes once became heavier and more asymmetrical in the features of his signature. His chin had no definition. The faces he had known and worked with for decades felt unfamiliar. To compensate, he relied on the tools he knew best. “I used Japanese eye tape every day. I was drawing on my beard just to give my chin some structure. That was just too many tricks,” he says. “I was fixing everything. It got me tired. I didn’t feel like I was anymore.”
From one revision to a complete plan
What began as a plan to raise his eyes quickly evolved after consultations with New York’s facial plastic surgeon David Rosenberg. Although the buckle had planned to deal with the heavy eyelids, Dr. Rosenberg recommended a combination of surgical procedures to address some concerns in the area he needed, including lifting his face underneath and strengthening his profile. The final plan included five steps in one surgery. This is an upper eye pharplasty, brow lift, deep plain face lift, deep plain neck lift, and chin implant. “If you fix one thing, you can remove the rest of your face from the balance,” says Buckle. “This has brought everything back to alignment.”
In particular, the jaw implants changed everything he said. “I was joking about how it looked like a Muppet rejection,” he says. “Now I have a structure. My face looks masculine again.”
A familiar face
To my surprise, recovery was an easy part. The buckle religiously iced, skipped the painkillers, and within a few days he returned to his feet. However, what left the biggest impression on me was the emotional change. The compliments came soon, but his mother’s response stayed with him. “She said, ‘You look like that picture in Acapulco in 1999.’ That’s exactly what I wanted,” he says. “I didn’t want to look different. I wanted to be like me again.”
These days he feels he doesn’t have much makeup and doesn’t need any facial tape or layers of contour. “There’s no need to create fantasies anymore. You can look beautiful.”
Why isn’t he keeping it a secret?
Buckle openly shared his journey on Instagram, posting photos before and after, recording his recovery. “When people hide something, that’s because there’s usually shame,” he says. “There’s no shame. It’s clear. This worked.”
He is also practical about the meaning of surgery. “People think plastic surgery is about vanity. For me, it was about maintenance. You fix the tip paint. You replace the windshield wiper. This is your car. Keep it on.”
