Bobbi Brown reveals the stars who changed her beauty standards

The back cover of “Still Bobbi,” the new memoir from makeup maven Bobbi Brown, notes the “crazy thought” she had in 1980: the revolutionary idea that “real faces are beautiful.”

But 45 years ago, the phrase “real faces” had a radically different definition than it does in 2025.

Once stigmatized, plastic surgery, fillers and other aesthetic procedures are more available — and more utilized — than ever.

Women start injecting Botox younger and younger to block crow’s feet, well before they’ve even been conceived by years of laughter.

“In the ’80s, real faces meant people without nose jobs, people who let their freckles show, people with gaps in their teeth,” Brown, 68, told me. “It’s definitely evolved into something different.”

But it’s not just preventative — it’s also altering: preternaturally plumped lips, cheeks and chins defined by implants, noses shaved down to the cookie-cutter standard.

So many faces are derivative rather than distinct.

“It’s not taboo anymore,” Brown said of plastic surgery. “However, I don’t think it’s good, especially [not] when you look in the mirror and think you should look different — and you start doing that in your 20s.”

Brown does diplomatically concede that some women have had good work that’s barely noticeable.

“Other people do too much and it goes off the deep end. And you know it’s not reversible,” she said. “Who says you can’t be attractive with small lips? Who says you can’t be attractive in a natural way.”

That’s been Brown’s enduring gospel — one that helped her distinguish herself in an industry that exalts excess.

She began her career as a makeup artist in the 80s, working with the great supermodels of the era like Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista.

In 1991, Brown launched her eponymous brand based on 10 shades of lipstick. It was so successful that Estée Lauder scooped it up four years later and turned it into a billion-dollar business, albeit with a noncompete that meant Brown could not use her name on another lines for a quarter of a century.

In her new book, Brown, who has three sons and two grandchildren, writes about her professional journey — which she once naively assumed would be over by the time she was 60.

“Time to retire! Pour me a tequila shot,” she writes, recalling how she felt about the future when she signed her giant Lauder deal as a 37-year-old.

But when Brown actually walked away in 2016, it was to start fresh.

The launch date for her hit clean beauty brand Jones Road was October 26, 2020: the very day her noncompete ended.

Raised in Wilmette, a Chicago suburb, Brown was reared in an entrepreneurial family. Her grandfather, Papa Sam, had a Cadillac dealership and her lawyer father dabbled in various pursuits.

Her doting mother, Sandra, meanwhile practiced fad diets and beauty treatments.

She also had mother’s sister, Aunt Alice, who prized comfort over fussiness. “My house was the perfect shoes. Her house was fuzzy slippers,” she writes.

Aunt Alice and other family members helped provide stability when Brown’s mother, who was bipolar, was hospitalized a few times during Brown’s childhood.

But the combination of the two women helped provide the duality of pragmatic glamour that’s steered her career.

I first met Brown when I was in my very early 20s, at a Mother’s Day makeover event in the basement of Barney’s. I was completely ignorant about makeup, for reasons of nature and nurture.

I went to high school near the Jersey Shore in the 1990s, where our beauty routines were minimal: a tan and lip balm. I also have a large birthmark that covers half of my face, and what the hell do you do with that kind of canvas?

When I asked the makeup artist assigned to me, she immediately brought in the big boss. I told Brown that I didn’t want to cover it up. I simply wanted to know how to work with it.

Well, Brown positively lit up. She dropped everything and said, “Take me to your mother now.” She then praised my mother up and down for instilling such confidence.

To be honest, I never thought much of my birthmark, but she gained a customer in me. And as I grow older, I appreciate her enthusiasm for natural beauty even more.

When Brown herself was a teenager, her mother suggested she get a nose job.

“She loved me to pieces, and she came to me one night and said, ‘You’re such a pretty girl. But you’d be gorgeous if you had your nose fixed,’” Brown told me. “In the ’60s and the ’70s, that’s what girls in the suburbs did. If they didn’t like their nose, their mothers brought them in for a nose job.”

Brown’s schnoz never bothered her. But neither did her mother’s suggestion which, she said, came from love.

“She was brunette like me. She had dark hair parted in the middle like me, strong eyebrows like me and freckles on her nose like me.” Brown writes. “I saw myself in her. For the first time in my life, I thought, I can be beautiful too.”

Still, Brown the brunette admits that, as a teen, she wanted to be thin and blonde. But she experienced a revelation when she saw Ali MacGraw in “Love Story.“

Today, she points to Sarah Jessica Parker as a Hollywood celebrity who is singular — and radical — in her approach to beauty and aging.

“I really admire her because she has not done anything, and I think it’s incredible. She still has the same face,” Brown said.

Not that Brown hasn’t experimented. She tried bBotox twice, at 40.

Her first attempt produced an eye droop that made her husband think she was having a stroke. The second shot gave her a cartoonish pointy brow.

“I said, this is the universe telling me this is not for me, and I’m very grateful,” Brown explained.

She remains interested in, though, in non-invasive ultrasound treatments that tighten skin and promote collagen production, like Sofwave.

“I’m not going to lie,” she said of that one. “It hurts, but not as bad as Ulthera, which was worse than childbirth.

The procedure, she said, has tightened her jaw and neck — “but it’s expensive.”

She also has one other beauty secret for feeling good in her own skin: her husband of nearly 40 years, real-estate developer Steven Plofker.

“Personally, for me, it’s the guy I married,” said Brown, explaining that he has told her he likes her aging naturally. “I’m lucky for that.”