A Helicopter, a Dragonfly and Teenage Kirsten Dunst: A Makeup Artist's Premiere Confession
A celebrity makeup artist recalls designing a dragonfly body art look for teenage Kirsten Dunst's 1999 Dick premiere — helicopter transfer, dress swap and all.
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The takeaway
- The artist created a glistening dragonfly body art design for a teenage Kirsten Dunst at the Dick premiere, after her PR team approved his sketch immediately.
- Dunst flew from the San Diego set of Cheer Fever (later Bring It On) to Los Angeles by helicopter on a shoot day; hair, makeup and body art took two hours.
- The strapless dress was swapped for thin straps at the last minute; the artist says he 'would drop the body art entirely' if that happened today, though the look was widely praised.
A helicopter, a last-minute dress swap and a hand-sketched dragonfly: that is what one celebrity makeup artist remembers most from his first big Los Angeles job with a teenage Kirsten Dunst.
The artist had just moved to Los Angeles when he got the call to work with Dunst for the premiere of the film Dick. She was a teenager at the time and, in his words, "one of the best clients you could ask for—young, genuinely into makeup and up for anything."
His idea was body art in the form of a glistening dragonfly. He sketched the design out and sent it to her PR team. "They loved it immediately," he recalls. He believes he still has the sketch somewhere.
Then the logistics got complicated. Dunst was in San Diego shooting Cheer Fever — the film that would later become Bring It On — and it was a shoot day. For a while, it was genuinely uncertain whether she would make it to the premiere at all. The solution was what he calls "very 1999": the production sent a helicopter to fly her to Los Angeles. He completed her hair and makeup, dragonfly included, in two hours flat.
The dress created the real drama. The original plan was built around a strapless dress, and the whole point of the dragonfly was to keep it fully on display. When the artist got into the room to prepare Dunst, he saw that the gown had been swapped for a dress with thin straps. "If that happened to me today, I would drop the body art entirely," he says. "It just doesn't sit right to have skinny straps cut across it."
He did not abandon the plan. "I was young, and I'd already built this whole plan in my head, and I wasn't about to abandon it," he says. He still looks at photos from that night and thinks the look seems "a little off." The public disagreed. "Nobody else seemed to care, though—people loved it."
The moment that stayed with him most was not the dress. USA Today wanted to interview him about the concept afterward. He had barely settled in Los Angeles and was in his 20s. It was one of the first times he had received any real press. "I was thrilled about it in a way I don't think I've ever quite outgrown," he says. "It was a really big deal for me, and it still is."
Looking back, he frames the night as a lesson in what lingers — and what can keep an artist up at night. "The dragonfly I'd never do the same way twice, and the phone call from a reporter that made a 20-something makeup artist feel like he was actually doing something in a new city he'd ultimately call home."
For working artists, the anecdote is a reminder that a premiere look is never just about the makeup: wardrobe changes, transport logistics and press attention can redefine a single job as a career milestone — or a design compromise an artist re-evaluates for decades.
Source: NewBeauty; Source: instagram.com
More from Daniel Okafor
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News editor covering business strategy at Eurasian Beauty Journal.
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