I profile
True Beauty
Cosmetics queen Sonia Kashuk helps
women find outer and inner beauty.
BY KAREN BUSCEMI
"I feel strong
and healthy,"
says Sonia Kashuk.
"I am a fighter and
now am embarking
on a new fight."
12 •
OCTOBER 2007 •
platinum
Sonia Kashuk leads a life surrounded by
beauty. An esteemed beauty educator and
makeup artist, she has an exclusive cos-
metics line with Target and has worked
with an array of models, designers and
celebrities including Cindy Crawford,
Marc Jacobs and Kim Basinger.
Born in Minnesota, Kashuk began
her career as a fashion stylist with a pas-
sion for makeup and was a fixture on the
then-burgeoning Minneapolis art and
music scenes. When the makeup artist
for a local video shoot was a no-show,
Kashuk stepped in — and the video,
Lipps Inc.'s Funkytown, became a cult
classic. Relocating to New York City and
developing a collaboration with photog-
rapher Arthur Elgort, Kashuk became a
regular on projects with Elle, Vogue and
Harper's Bazaar.
In 1997, she approached Minneapolis-
based Target with the idea for her now
wildly successful boutique-driven make-
up line at affordable prices. But when
she was diagnosed with breast cancer in
2006, Kashuk, now 48, chose a double
mastectomy — with no worry as to how
her choice might affect her career.
"My gynecologist, who I'm very close
to," she says, and who knows Kashuk is
aesthetically driven, "wasn't so in favor of
me doing the mastectomy. I don't look at
it like that. To me, health came first."
Kashuk lost her maternal grandmoth-
er to the disease, and her mother, now 76,
was diagnosed at age 51 and had a double
mastectomy. So Kashuk made sure to
get regular mammograms. In 2000, she
was diagnosed with carcinoma in situ,
a precancerous condition, and spent six
years in the Special Surveillance Breast
Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center in New York.
"It wasn't like if I was going to get
cancer, it was when I was going to get
cancer," says Kashuk. "But the doctors
said they would be watching me so
closely that if I got it they would get it
early. And they did."
The breast-cancer diagnosis came in
June 2006 after a change in her mam-
mogram and subsequent biopsy. Though
she believed she would be fine, Kashuk
found it difficult to tell her children,
Jonah and Sadye, now 12 and 9.
"Cancer is such a scary word for
adults. How do you say it to a child?" she
asks. "It took me six weeks to tell them
because it never seemed like the right
time or the right situation."
A fear of the cancer coming back was
the driving factor for Kashuk's decision
to get a double mastectomy; her hus-
band, businessman Daniel Kaner, she
says, was completely supportive. Kashuk,
who was raised in a Conservative Jewish
household, was all about mental tough-
ness, determined not to let cancer stop
her or get her down. And after having
the surgery, she says she'd make the same
choice if she had to do it all over again.
"I'd known women who chose to do a
lumpectomy and radiation and then the
cancer came back with a vengeance," she
says. "I have children, and I wanted to
know it was gone."
Kashuk decided to get breast implants
in February 2007. "They don't feel like
boobs, but in appearance, they're pretty
impressive," she notes. She still needs to
undergo one nipple reconstruction sur-
gery before her breast reconstruction is
complete — she was able to save her own
nipple from the non-cancerous breast.
Soon after the diagnosis, the makeup
guru, who has two published books —
Real Beauty (Clarkson Potter) and Basic
Face (Broadway), which she co-wrote