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Olivia Munn prefers working with multi-ethnic makeup artists for this powerful reason

With more than a decade of experience working in Hollywood, Olivia Munn knows her angles, her skin, and her makeup. The 37-year-old has spoken before about her struggles with acne and her journey to good skin health. In a new interview with Byrdie, she opens up about how her ethnicity has steered her makeup choices.

Munn’s striking features come from her white and Chinese background, and she goes out of her way to work with makeup artists who understand the best looks for her. Recently, she started working with Asian-American makeup artist Patrick Ta, who understands how to customize Munn’s beauty routine.

Working with Ta, Munn explains, is when she “really appreciated how makeup can transform you in different ways.” Munn says, “Being multi-ethnic has always been difficult with makeup artists and hair artists because one little thing can drastically change my face. I had one makeup artist for the Entertainment Weekly Pop Fest, but then I worked Patrick a week later at the CFDA dinner in New York; and if you put those pictures side to side, I look drastically different.”

Growing up, Munn says, it took time to understand and appreciate her looks. As a child, she didn’t understand why she didn’t have blond hair or why her eyes were almond-shaped. As an adult, she’s learned how different makeup tricks transform her features in different ways.

“Putting shimmer in the corner of my eyes can make me look cross-eyed,” she says. “There are some people who can wear any makeup style, and they will look beautiful. But for me, I can see drastic changes. Like when I work with other makeup artists, sometimes they’ll do the same thing to me that they’ve done to a lot of white girls, and it doesn’t work. They don’t understand that rimming my eye in black will just make it smaller.”

Working with Ta has changed all that, and given Munn a deeper understanding of what works for her. “I’ve felt so much more beautiful when I have been able to work with someone like Patrick who accentuates my features and does something unique, as opposed to doing the same thing he would do on Gigi Hadid,” she says. Now I understand what works for me — the almond shape of my eye, the way to open it up, the different technique.”

What works on Hadid may not work on Munn, but they both end up looking fabulous — with or without shimmer.

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