A chance encounter with a stranger across the country didn’t seem like it would lead to a lucrative business relationship for Fara Homidi, let alone a marriage, but nearly two decades after the makeup artist met actor Aaron Yoo on a hike in LA, that’s exactly what happened. With her “slow beauty” approach to makeup, Fara has painted the faces of everyone from Bella Hadid to Serena Williams. But Fara’s eponymous brand? It was born from Aaron’s encouragement. “I told Aaron I thought I’d build a brand in my sixties, but he kept telling me, ‘This is an amazing idea—and you have to do it before somebody else does,’” she says. “That stopped me in my tracks.” Her products are now the only ones in Aaron’s own makeup kit. But let’s back up… Before there was a brand, and makeup lessons for Aaron from his wife, there was a love story with a friends-to-lovers-arc—and a hurricane.
Fara Homidi:
Aaron and I were both living in Los Angeles in 2008. I was finishing a hike at Runyon Canyon one day when I ran into Aaron with a mutual friend of ours. It was a very casual introduction.
Aaron Yoo:
And very LA.
FH:
Maybe a month later, I moved to New York and ran into Aaron at a friend’s house party. We ended up sitting next to each other in the kitchen and chatting away… and we continued to be friends for another four years.
AY:
My family is in New Jersey, and I was trying to spend as much time as I could with them after my niece was born in 2010. I also booked a bunch of work in New York. And some of Fara’s New York friends were in a group of my own New York friends. Fara also went to LA as much as she could, so we’d always run into each other by accident. And every time we saw each other, it was the best night ever.
FH:
I’d think, “Oh, my God, Aaron’s here. It’s going to be so fun."
AY:
Here’s the thing though: Fara was dating someone else that whole time. We truly were platonic friends for a long time. But when they split, I ran into her at a party…
FH:
…like the night that it happened.
AY:
I’ll tell you from my perspective, I thought, “Oh, there’s a spark here. That’s so weird. Let’s ignore it. My friend’s going through a breakup. That’s very strange.”
By now we’re in 2012, and a few days before Hurricane Sandy came into New York, Fara needed a place to stay because she had been living with her boyfriend. I was in New York for work and also needed a place to stay because I wanted to see my friends and niece, and our mutual friend told us he was going to LA for a month so we could be roommates in his apartment.
The hurricane hit, and I wound up inviting a family of four to stay with us. They took over the whole apartment, and Fara and I weren’t sure where we were going to sleep. We bounced to another apartment and slept on an air mattress before moving to yet another apartment. Somewhere in the midst of that, things happened. I think I was the person that said, “Look, something’s happening here.”
FH:
It was a little crazier than that. My recollection is that Aaron said to me, “We’re going to get married.” I was like, “What’s happening right now?” My life was upside down: I just had this crazy breakup, I didn’t have a home, and here was my friend telling me we were going to get married.
I also didn’t confess this until years later but I was upset that Aaron had given our apartment to friends. I understood why it needed to happen—they had a newborn and didn’t have electricity and clearly needed the apartment more than we did—but I didn’t have an apartment myself. It was all very stressful.
AY:
She told me she was upset almost seven years into us being married by the way.
FH:
But somewhere in between the three or so weeks that we were roommates, we went on a date. It’s fuzzy now, but I think we got ramen.
AY:
At the beginning of us dating, Fara thought it was crazy. She told me it was fun and everything, but that she needed to take stock of her life. I needed to go back to LA and she told me she wouldn’t do long distance. I said, “Great. I’ll just move to New York.” She said that was crazy, and that’s when I told her, “Look, we’re going to get married.” She was like, “That’s even crazier.”
My life theory for men is that there’s no rational reason, but, when you know, you know. You could list all of the reasons that something might or might not work out, but at the end of the day, it’s really about a feeling. The morning we woke up on that first mattress in Williamsburg, Fara said she needed to get to Manhattan for a shoot. We literally didn’t have electricity, the subways were flooded, and the bridges were blocked off, so I was like “You do not have a shoot.” Fara said something like, “Fashion stops for no one.” I figured all we had was water so maybe the East River Ferry was working. She’d never been on the ferry so I went with her to Manhattan—and lo and behold, the shoot was still happening. Somewhere on that weird, little adventure—and this is going to sound super corny—I had this feeling, like Oh, yeah, this is the one. We married in 2014.
I’ve been a working actor for most of my adult life, so I had an awareness of a beauty ‘routine,’ which was mostly skincare, when we met. I definitely had experiences with makeup, although I certainly didn’t know enough to tell artists that what they were applying was too much or that I looked really orange. Through Fara, I now have my own opinion on what ‘good’ makeup is—and I can understand the different philosophical avenues of people who want full coverage or no-makeup makeup.
FH:
My look is all about creating a veil-like skin finish so that it never looks heavy but still gives you coverage and evenness, and what I think is really fun now is that his whole makeup kit is all my makeup.
AY:
When you work on a project, no matter what role you play, you have a dedicated makeup artist for however long you’re there. I worked on one project and every single day a different makeup artist would come up to me and say something like, “Hi. It’s my turn to do your makeup today.” They ended up telling me that they loved Fara’s makeup and wanted a chance to play around with it so they’d swap jobs.
FH:
Aaron’s the president of the brand, so he’s very involved, but when I created the Essential Face Compact, Aaron came to me and asked for a tutorial so he could communicate it to the makeup artists. It was really cute.
AY:
Fara taught me pretty early on that you have to prime your products. A lot of people take the product directly from the pan to their face, but regardless of what foundation or concealer you’re using, if you want it to look like actual skin and not like makeup, you have to warm it up on the back of your hand. That way it’s evenly distributed on the brush and it’s not so pigmented so you can build it up.
FH:
By the way, you’d think that Aaron would be the kind of guy that doesn’t care about what’s on his face, but once he tried the Shiseido Benefiance eye cream, it was a wrap; it was never just mine anymore.
AY:
Fara gets so much free stuff to try and I’m down for that, too—why would I spend money? [Laughs] But in the eye cream category, it’s not really much of a race. I’ve tried others since and they’re just not as good as Shiseido’s.
FH:
And he loves Dr. Barbara Sturm’s Sun Drops and Augustinus Bader’s Rich Cream, too. Sometimes when we’re travelling he’ll go, “Did you pack those?” I’ll be like, “I mean, I did…”
AY:
A lot of the time I have my own, but if we’re traveling together… [Laughs] I’m down for bougie, but really, I don’t care what the price point is. If something is cheaper but better, especially for my sensitive skin, that’s what I’ll use. Sometimes the higher price-point products don’t work for me, and it’ll be Fara going, “Babe, I think you need to stop using that one.” I’ll ask her why, and she’ll go, "Because you’ve been complaining about x, y, and z since you started using it.” [Laughs]
—as told to Daise Bedolla
Photos courtesy of Fara Homidi