Page has worked with Japanese luxury beauty brand Shiseido since 1997; since 2007, he’s acted as artistic director of Shiseido The Makeup. He’s lent his hand to countless editorials for the likes of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Allure, and campaigns for such brands as Saint Laurent and Miu Miu and worked with the fashion industry’s leading photographers, from Guy Aroch, who collaborated with Page for VIOLET GREY, to Inez and Vinoodh to Juergen Teller to the late Richard Avedon. But despite his relationships with fashion’s and Hollywood’s Who’s Who, Page is modest about his celebrity cache. “I didn’t really land really hard with any celebrities per se, because I can get kind of star struck or nervous about the whole fame thing,” he says. Nonetheless, Page says he considers Catherine Zeta-Jones a kindred spirit. “She’s lovely to work with. I grew up in the west of England, and she grew up in Wales about 45 minutes away. So there’s a kind of shared sense of humor and experience, kind of like a shorthand, we understood a lot of the same references.”

Nowadays, Page himself is something of a celebrity, though he’d be loathe to say so. “I’ve had to let people go from teams because they are just so into the whole idea of the glamour of it, and all they want to do is take selfies with the model. Just do your job, shut up, and do the work,” Page explains on how to truly succeed in face painting (a playful term he often uses when crediting his own work on Instagram). His final words of advice to aspiring makeup artists? “Be professional, punctual, polite, and a good team player,” he says. “Learn to be a small part of a great picture rather than another big part of a lousy picture.”