Saving Face

Behind every famous face is someone paying a price to keep it beautiful.

For nearly a decade, Eric Sakas shared a life and career with legendary makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin at the height of the fashion and celebrity worlds. His debut novel, Saving Face, draws on that rare insider perspective to explore the complicated relationships between those in front of the camera and the people they come to depend on behind it.

When Derrick Sands leaves small-town Texas for New York with his best friend Scottie, he has little more than two battered makeup kits, a rent-controlled apartment, and the hope that his talent might finally earn him a place in the world he'd escape into through the pages of fashion magazines.

Years later, he's still living month to month making up catalog models and influencers-close enough to powder the faces on the cover, his name buried in the credits.

Then he meets Lena Zembericos.

Singer. Actress. Fashion icon. Tabloid obsession. Lena Zembericos has spent a lifetime perfecting an image the world can't stop watching. Now, on the verge of a career-defining comeback, she sees in Derrick the rare artist capable of making the world believe in her again.

As Derrick earns Lena's trust, the fashion world he'd spent his life watching finally begins to take notice. Lena draws him deeper into her rarefied orbit, where being needed begins to feel dangerously like being loved.

But behind the glamour lies another world-one fueled by addiction, ambition, manipulation, loneliness, and the relentless pressure to remain relevant at any cost. As Lena's world begins to fracture, Derrick must choose between the career he's always wanted and the values that once defined him.

In an industry where beauty is currency and loyalty can become its own kind of addiction; Derrick must confront a question with no easy answer:
At what point does loyalty become self-betrayal?

Set against the glitter and wreckage of New York fashion, celebrity, and drag culture, Saving Face is a novel about ambition, chosen family, and the seductive cost of mistaking being needed for being loved. Perfect for readers of The Devil Wears Prada and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.