The iconic Bette Midler wanted a new look for the Oscars. The singer and new acting sensation had been nominated for her performance in the 1979 film “The Rose,” and she was looking for a makeup artist.
Newhall resident Eugenia Weston was already known for her work. To Weston, makeup was indeed an art. She knew how to make people look their best and she loved transforming people. She’d been doing professional makeup for almost a decade, and when she got Midler in her chair, a working relationship was born that would continue to this day.
“My thing is that I listen to people,” Weston told The Signal. “You’ve got to get all the information. You’ve got to get their lifestyle, how they feel about themselves, what features of their face they like, what features they don’t like, what kind of makeup they like to wear, what color clothes they usually wear. It’s an interview.”
While such a discussion is taking place, Weston is analyzing the person’s face, and she’s simultaneously creating what she thinks will be the person’s look. She said the look she created for Midler happened to be exactly what the star had been wanting when Weston first did her makeup.
Soon after, Midler would threaten to terminate a four-picture deal with Disney if they didn’t write Weston into her contract – the first time that was ever done, Weston said. The rest, as they say, is history.
Weston, now 74 years old, was born Eugenia Balsamo in the San Fernando Valley to very artistic parents — her dad played upright bass, and her mother was just a crafty person.
Weston said she was always into makeup. Perhaps it was all the magazines in the house, and the glamorous faces she saw within those pages. And then there was TV.
According to Weston’s husband, David Weston, when the two were dating, he’d go over to her house and the whole family would have the “TV shows memorized, they knew all the actors’ names,” he said, and he added that they were just really into celebrities.
When Weston was 12 years old, the family moved to the Santa Clarita Valley. Her dad was a mason, and he did plenty of work out here, including much of the masonry for Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church on Lyons Avenue in Newhall.
Weston’s first job out of high school was just down the street from that church at the Thrifty drug store (which would eventually change names to Rite Aid, now gone, in the shopping center that’s currently anchored by the Vallarta supermarket). She worked behind the makeup and photo counters.
And while she was already known at Hart High School for the way she did her own makeup, it was only by chance that she got a position in makeup at the store, even if it was only behind the counter selling it.
“I really did myself up,” she said of her high-school self. “I used to get sent home for wearing too much makeup.” The school at that time, of course, didn’t permit it.
Asked where she developed the interest, she said she believes makeup is simply in her DNA. She said Bette Midler often tells people that Weston came out of the womb with a brush in her hand. But there’s also something to be said about genetics.
“My mother was really artistic,” Weston added. “But I guess I was just always really fascinated with faces.”
With a giggle, Weston said that at a very young age, she used to stare at people and just want to transform them. She said she felt she always knew how she could make anyone look better. Working at Thrifty certainly gave her access to more makeup, but she only got the job because her parents told her she had to work, and her parents had an “in” at the store.
“They used to go in there all the time because it was really the only place to go,” she said. “Lyons Avenue had nothing. You had the Safeway and then the Thrifty’s. But they knew Mr. Dempsey. He was the manager. And they really wanted me to start working, so they talked him into hiring me.”
But no, she did not put her paycheck back into the store for makeup. She said her dad made her save her money for a car. She eventually paid $3,700 cash for a brand-new 1970, bright orange Mustang coupe. She bought the car at Galpin Motors in Van Nuys because a woman she worked with at Thrifty was married to a salesman there.
As fate would have it, yet another acquaintance in Weston’s life would influence one of her moves. The year was 1970, and her husband, David, who was her boyfriend then, was friends with a woman named Jeanne who did hair at a salon in Canyon Country and who had an interview at a new shop in Woodland Hills. Jeanne had asked Weston if she’d tag along, as this was a Jon Peters salon, and Jon Peters, Weston said, was a “big hairdresser,” with more than one salon in Los Angeles, including a big celebrity shop on Rodeo Drive. Jeanne was perhaps a bit nervous to go to the interview alone.
Also a big deal was the fact that Weston’s friend Jeanne would be interviewing with Allen Edwards, the hairdresser who, according to a number of sources, crafted Farrah Fawcett’s signature feathered look. Edwards would be running this new Woodland Hills salon. So, Weston went to the salon with her friend.
“Jeanne is a matchmaker personality,” Weston said. “And so, I was with her, just hanging out, and the matchmaker she is, she goes, ‘Oh, my friend Eugenia here is really good with makeup.’ I wasn’t expecting that. I was just, like I said, hanging out. And Allen said, ‘Oh, well, Bobbe Joy is here. She has her makeup line that’s in my salon. Go talk to her.’”
Bobbe Joy had quite the reputation for her line of makeup and for her celebrity makeup work in film, television and print.
Weston said she walked over to Joy, introduced herself, and told this acclaimed makeup artist that “I really like makeup.” Probably not the greatest sales pitch, she admitted, but a week later, Weston had an interview. That meeting resulted in a makeup and eyebrow-shaping job that changed the course of Weston’s life. Jeanne, by the way, would eventually get the position she was vying for, but about a month after Weston had been hired.
Nevertheless, Weston’s new job in no way meant she struck gold. In fact, she still hung onto her job at Thrifty.
“I worked two jobs because nobody in those days thought you could make any money doing makeup,” she said. “So, I worked four days at Thrifty and three days for Bobbe.”
She worked seven days a week for about four years, until 1974, when she just couldn’t do it anymore. She quit Thrifty and worked full time with Bobbe Joy. Around that time, she also got married.
In 1976, Weston and her husband had their daughter, and they’d have a son in 1983. When Weston was pregnant with their first child, she decided to quit the salon because there were no maternity benefits.
“She was going to be a housewife,” Weston’s husband said.
When the couple’s daughter was about 3 months old, Weston got a call from a hairdresser who she’d worked with at the salon, asking her – no, pretty much telling her – to join her at a new “incredible salon” in the San Fernando Valley, where she could create her very own makeup line.
That would be the beginning of what Weston and her husband called Senna Cosmetiques and what the Senna website described as “the first ever pro studio makeup for ‘everyday’ women,” sold exclusively at this new salon called Cassandre.
From then on, Weston began a series of firsts. According to the Senna website, she invented the detailer brush. Weston scissor-cut a slanted tip on a painter’s brush to line eyes with powder color. Nobody was doing that at that time, Weston said, and even when she tried to mass-produce the brush, the manufacturer wouldn’t do the scissor cut because they feared, according to Weston, that users would injure their eyes.
“But in the meantime, they made me a straight brush,” Weston said. “So, I would sit in front of the TV and I would hand-cut the brushes.”
Her husband recalled cutting over 3,000 of them.
Weston made waves at trade shows. People would see the name “Senna” on her badge and would approach her and say, “Oh, you’re the one that has that brush.” Even brush manufacturers, she said, asked where she’d gotten the tool.
Weston recalled her mother working with her hands in a similar way: “She made everything. She sewed, she made crafts, she built furniture, she did pottery. She was really creative and really resourceful.” Like her mom, Weston was never afraid to work with her hands to create things.
According to the Senna website, Weston in 1977 became the first licensed cosmetician in California.
Then in 1982, she and her husband left the Cassandre salon and opened their own freestanding shop called Senna Makeup and Brow Studio in Tarzana. As stated on the company’s website, celebrities, pro artists and beauty seekers flooded the place for “brow shaping and colors that didn’t exist” at the time. The whole idea of her kind of salon was uncommon.
“For people to get their makeup done in a salon,” Weston said, “you had to be wealthy.”
In those days, most people, she continued, did their own makeup or, in some cases, went to department stores to have it done. The idea that there was now a salon just for makeup and brows was new and exciting. And it would lead to Weston and her husband opening other salons in Beverly Hills and in Valencia (located in the Kohl’s shopping center off McBean Parkway, which later moved to a spot on Cinema Drive).
Yet another first for Weston took place following her introduction to Bette Midler. Weston had already been building her Senna brand, she’d done makeup on photo shoots with many renowned photographers like Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and Matthew Rolston, and she’d become a star favorite when it came to makeup artists, Midler among those stars.
Weston said Midler was signing a four-picture deal with Disney that included what would become the 1986 films “Ruthless People” and “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” but was going to walk if the studio didn’t write Weston into her contract.
In those days, Weston said, men did studio movie makeup, as women were not in the union. Regardless, Midler insisted Weston do her makeup.
“She wouldn’t do the movies without me,” Weston said.
She added that Disney wrote Weston into Midler’s contract, and Weston’s career and reputation continued to soar. Along the way, she’s picked up plenty of industry awards, including a makeup lifetime achievement award in 2017, and even an Emmy nomination for her makeup on Bette Midler in the 1993 TV movie “Gypsy.”
According to singer-choreographer Toni Basil, who’s worked with Weston on so many of her jobs from her first record album cover and her popular music video “Mickey” in the early 1980s, to the Fox TV series “So You Think You Can Dance” and the majority of her TV interviews up to today, Weston is not only great at makeup, able to achieve whatever result someone is looking for, but she can also work on young faces and mature faces, and she knows lighting and how it works best on the faces she’s made up.
“I’m detailed oriented,” Basil told The Signal during a phone interview, “and she (Weston) comes prepared. You can throw anything at her.”
Basil, who’s choreographed Frank Sinatra, Elvis and Tina Turner, is also credited with creating the bend-and-snap number from the 2001 film “Legally Blonde” and choregraphing dance scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” She has worked among the top talent in Hollywood and beyond, and said Weston is at the top in her field.
“I don’t think you can find anyone better, really,” she said. “She’s the best, and she really knows every layer of the business.”
At 74, Weston has no plans of retiring. She did have to permanently close her Valencia salon following the 2020 pandemic shutdown, she said. Still, she has her headquarters in the Valencia Industrial Center.
As for doing makeup, Weston just wrapped the upcoming Bette Midler movie “The Fabulous Four,” and she continues to run her business and do makeup and brows. Those who know her, like Basil, said Weston continues to make people shine, and she remains passionate about transforming people.
Quit? An artist is always an artist, Weston said. As long as she is able, she will always do her art.
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
