Damon Charles

Damon grew up in a suburb of San Diego, California, a small community known as Lomita Village. From ages of 5 and 10, he put on plays in his backyard and garage ... writing, directing, building sets, doing makeup, and acting. By the time he was 11 and continuing until a year before he finished high school, he was very active in school plays and community theater including The Old Globe Theater and Starlight Opera. At the start of 12th grade, Damon's parents threw him out of the house for being gay. Because of this, he had to secretly live alone in a canyon cave behind his high school so that he could finish his last year. Damon graduated but did not attend the ceremony. He instead watched it from the top of a hill. Damon, even though still a minor, then left San Diego to find his future. He headed to Big Bear, a small mountain community, where he stayed for 6 months working various jobs and meeting people who helped him understand and accept himself. His friends in Big Bear, old and young, told him to either move to New York and get in with the "theater" crowd or go to San Francisco and share his artistic flair with the hippie movement. With winter already started, New York did not seem like the right choice, so off to San Francisco it was. Upon arrival in San Francisco, Damon felt like a little kid in a candy store ... Artistic freedom pretty much everywhere, people helping people do what made them happy, acceptance for being who and what you were, and encouragement for what you wanted to do. It was in San Francisco that Damon became a street artist, blending his artistic ability and makeup techniques he had learned in theater classes, and started body painting naked guys and girls. He made money from the tourists on Powell Street and the police never bothered him as long as he painted the "private" parts while draped under a towel so the audience could not see "that part" until painted. One eventful day, near the end of the "hippie movement", a well-known makeup artist suggested Damon move to Los Angeles, apprentice with him, and then hopefully become a makeup artist too. Within a year, Los Angeles was Damon's new home. Intensive makeup training began and Damon learned willingly. When he started working professionally, he was one of the youngest makeup artists in the business (most makeup artists then were age 30 or older). Because of his youth, talent, outgoing personality, or perhaps a combination of them all, Damon found himself requested as a personal makeup artist for some of the top actors of the 1970's. The majority of those performers however happened to be gay. Damon could keep the secrets that were meant to be kept. He even worked under a variety of names to protect and hide the fact that he was probably the only artist at the time making up the majority of closeted performers. In the early 1980's, requests came in from Ned Tanen, the then president of Paramount Studios, as well as other studio executives and industry professionals, for Damon to open a makeup training school teaching updated techniques that were so desperately needed in the industry. With more coaxing and financial backing from these sources, Damon opened The Institute of Studio Makeup, Ltd. in 1984 with a 10 year plan of accepting no more than 48 students per year and graduating no more than 480 students by the end of that period. The backers figured that this was the number of people and time needed to replenish the dwindling stock of qualified makeup artists in the industry. With The Institute's 10 year plan to end approaching, Damon and his spouse Andrew Levinson decided in 1992 to branch out and create their own line of skin and hair care products. The result was an infomercial called The Damon Charles Total Rehydration System. It was the first all gel skin and hair care system, and was sold exclusively on television. With the success of the infomercial, Damon in 1996 reentered the industry doing makeup and was financially able to pick and choose only the projects he felt viable, and only worked with people who enjoyed the business as much as he. Damon continues to teach privately and still works on film and television, and continues working as a ghost makeup artist, personal makeup artist, and key makeup artist. Damon married his life partner of 37 years, producer Andrew Levinson, on June 20, 2008 when the California Supreme Court made same sex marriage legal. July 24, 2021 marked Andrew and Damon's 50th year together.