A few days ago, I had the honor of doing Pat Mitchell’s makeup for a very special night.
Pat was being honored at the National Jewish Health Legends of Atlanta Gala at the Woodruff Arts Center—an evening called A Breath of Fresh Air: A Tribute to Pat Mitchell. It was a celebration not of one job or one accomplishment, but of the extraordinary reach of her life.
If you don’t know Pat, you should. Read more about her here.
Pat Mitchell has spent decades creating platforms, telling stories that otherwise might not have been told, opening doors for women, connecting leaders, and using whatever influence she had at each stage of her life to move something forward.
She led CNN Productions. She became the first woman to serve as president and CEO of PBS. She helped create TEDWomen. She has served and led across organizations including V-Day, the Sundance Institute, and the Women’s Media Center. She is also the author of a book. Today, much of her attention is focused on Project Dandelion, a global women-led climate-justice campaign.
Those are the things you can read in a biography.
The Vantage Point of the Chair
I have had the privilege of knowing Pat from a different vantage point.
For several years, I have been her makeup artist.
I have gotten her ready for public events, book launches, major conversations, celebrations, and deeply personal moments. I have stood behind her with brushes in my hands while she prepared to walk into rooms where consequential conversations were about to happen.
And our relationship began in one very large room.
In 2008, Authentic Beauty went to New Orleans for V TO THE TENTH, the tenth-anniversary celebration of V-Day. The event transformed the Superdome into a gathering devoted to the women of New Orleans and the Gulf region after Hurricane Katrina.
Authentic Beauty operated the Beauty Lounge. Alongside medical care, yoga, healing spaces, advocacy, performances, and conversation, women could come sit with us and receive beauty services and attention.
Pat was on the V-Day board.
That is where we first met.
Over the years that followed, our worlds kept crossing through V-Day, women’s advocacy, Atlanta, and events connected to women making change.
Eventually, Pat became my client.
And every time she sat in my chair at Authentic Beauty in Atlanta, I wanted to know what she was doing.
Where are you going?
Who are you meeting?
What are you working on now?
Where are you trying to make a difference?
And I would tease her: Don’t you need your makeup artist?
Eventually, apparently, she decided she did.
“You Should Go”
In 2019, Pat was sitting in my chair telling me about an upcoming trip to South Africa with ROAR Africa.
It wasn’t simply a safari. The trip brought together an extraordinary group of women working across leadership, conservation, human rights, philanthropy, social impact, and global change.
Pat looked at me and said there had been a cancellation.
“You should go.”
So I went.
I still laugh when I remember arriving and hearing everyone introduce themselves. I was surrounded by women doing astonishing things in the world—protecting wildlife, working in communities devastated by violence, leading organizations, influencing policy, changing lives.
By the time it came around to me, I started laughing.
I essentially said, “Well… I make people pretty.”
Pat immediately corrected me.
“You do more than that.”
I knew then, and I know now, that I am a makeup artist. I love my work. I love faces. I love helping a woman look in the mirror and recognize the woman she wants the world to meet.
But Pat was seeing another dimension of influence.
That matters to me because Pat has spent much of her life thinking about who gets seen, whose stories get told, who gets access to a platform, and what those of us with any degree of influence choose to do with it.
Visibility, Authority, and Appearance
Beauty and visibility have also been part of Pat’s own story.
Long before social media, women in television were subjected to extraordinary scrutiny about their appearance. Pat has spoken publicly about consultants telling her to change her hair, lower her voice, and change the way she dressed. She has written about the expectations placed on women who wanted to be taken seriously on camera.
Years later, I had the honor of getting her ready in New York for the launch of her book, Becoming a Dangerous Woman: Embracing Risk to Change the World.
I remember reading parts of that book and crying.
Because underneath a remarkable career is also the story of a woman navigating the rules women were handed about how much space to take, how ambitious to appear, how feminine to be, how old to look, and how visible to allow themselves to become.
And Pat is still asking those questions.
After Dolly Parton died, Pat wrote an essay about influence that stopped me.
She asked:
“At what point does humility become invisibility?”
That is a serious question.
When does stepping aside become disappearing?
When does not wanting attention mean our voice, experience, work, or wisdom doesn’t get heard?
When does a woman decide that being visible is vanity instead of responsibility?
Pat wrote beautifully about Dolly as a woman who understood how to be visibly feminine and deeply powerful at the same time. Her appearance wasn’t separate from who she was. It was intentional, joyful, unmistakably hers.
Pat wrote about appearance as part of the connection between our internal values and the way we present ourselves externally.
Obviously, that got my attention.
For most of my career, I have been asking women a version of the same question:
What do you want your reflection to communicate about who you are?
Pat and I have never sat down and had some formal philosophical conversation about the Image Journey, and I am not going to pretend her work and mine are the same.
They aren’t.
But after all these years, I find it fascinating that our work has repeatedly touched the same territory.
Who gets to be seen?
Who decides what a woman should look like?
How do we stay visible without allowing visibility to become the measure of our worth?
How do we make the outside an honest expression of what we value on the inside?
Moments That Stay
Over the years, I have gotten Pat ready for moments I will never forget.
I was with her in New York during Climate Week, where her work intersected with Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and one of the women whose leadership helped deepen Pat’s commitment to climate action. I have been with Pat and Mary more than once, and I have watched the kind of conversation that happens when women who have spent their lives leading sit together and think about what comes next.
I was also with Pat at Sundance in 2021, around my birthday, when she and her husband, Scott Seydel, celebrated their commitment to one another.
After the ceremony, I remember going to Pat, giving her my love, and telling her how extraordinary I thought she was.
And Pat turned the recognition back toward me.
“You are the spark,” she told me.
I have never forgotten it.
In my work with Tony Robbins, identity matters. The words we attach to who we are can become standards for how we choose to show up.
I took Pat’s words seriously.
I am the spark.
There have been hard days in building Authentic Beauty and in continuing to hold onto the larger reason I created it. On some of those days, I have remembered that one of the most extraordinary women I know saw something in me that I had a responsibility to continue honoring.
That is influence, too.
Stepping Into the Light
Which brings me back to this September.
Pat was in my chair again.
This time, the room she was preparing to enter was there specifically to celebrate her.
Judy Woodruff was there. Leaders from media, philanthropy, business, advocacy, and Pat’s life gathered around her. Lynda Carter was there too.
And there was Pat.
A woman who has spent so much of her life putting other people, other stories, other women, and other causes into the spotlight was finally the person standing in it.
What makes the night even more meaningful is that Pat had wrestled with agreeing to be the honoree.
In the essay she wrote around the gala, she explained that she finally said yes because National Jewish Health’s work aligned with what she cares about now: clean air, environmental health, and the climate crisis.
Her conclusion was that the intention justified the attention.
I keep coming back to that.
What is our influence for?
Most of us will never run PBS.
Most of us will never create a global conference.
Most of us will never sit with presidents or lead an international movement.
But every one of us has influence.
We influence our children.
Our friends.
Our clients.
Our coworkers.
Our communities.
We influence with what we say, what we model, what we pay attention to, what we support, and sometimes simply with whether we are willing to show up fully.
The question is not whether we have influence.
The question is what we are doing with it.
Planting Seeds for What Comes Next
Pat’s current movement is called Project Dandelion.
I love that name.
Dandelions survive. Their roots run deep. Their seeds travel farther than the flower itself.
And a dandelion is a perennial.
When I look at Pat’s life, I know what I see.
I see a woman whose accumulated experience has not convinced her that her most important contribution must be behind her.
I see a woman still asking questions.
Still convening people.
Still creating.
Still challenging.
Still using her influence.
Still planting seeds.
At this stage of her life, some of Pat Mitchell’s most consequential work may still be unfolding.
That is a life worth paying attention to.
Pat, thank you for trusting me with your face before so many meaningful moments.
Thank you for the conversations in my chair.
Thank you for Africa.
Thank you for inviting me into rooms I never imagined I would enter.
Thank you for seeing the spark.
And most of all, thank you for continuing to show all of us what it looks like to use a life—and the influence that comes with it—in service of something bigger.
Onward.
