In January, Ankush Bahuguna made a stunning debut at Paris Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2025, walking for designer Rahul Mishra in a white botanical garden-themed linen jacket paired with a white shirt showcasing Rousseau-inspired foliage embroidery and appliqué detailing. A comment on his post read, “Here’s for eye make-up.” Last May, he walked the Cannes red carpet in custom Rosani menswear, sporting vintage finger curls in his hair and a touch of glittery silver on the inner corners of his eyes. “This one’s for an entire childhood spent hiding — feeling invisible, inadequate, ugly, uncool,” he captioned his Instagram post. “I do it for the child in me,” Bahuguna, 32, says, “Growing up, I hated how I looked. I was lanky, my eyes were big. Now, to have designers dress me in their creations is beyond what I imagined.” But, this road has been a rocky one. Hailing from Uttarakhand, Bahuguna grew up in Delhi in a middle-class household with his parents and two elder sisters. Though he dreamed of acting, like his mother, Manju Bahuguna, a regional theatre and cinema actor, his insecurities about his looks held him back. To fit in, he lied to everyone, including himself. This led him to enrol in a five-year architecture course in Gurugram in 2010. Even though he soon realised it wasn’t for him, he completed the course. His creativity, however, found an outlet in storytelling. “I would write humorous accounts of my friends’ drunken escapades on Facebook Notes,” he recalls. After college, he took a writing job, lying to his family that architecture jobs were scarce. The decision to relocate happened after a workshop with acting coach Rachit Singh. “I took up his workshop in Delhi and he asked me to move to Mumbai. Since then, he has appeared in Arranged Patchup (2023), a mini series, and Badboli Bhavna (2022), a short film, among other projects. As digital content boomed, Bahuguna wrote listicles and short-format comedy scripts, eventually stepping in front of the camera. Acting in sketches helped him admit his true passion: performance. He was among the early Instagram adopters leveraging social media for work, but his niche emerged unexpectedly. “During lockdown, we were posting regularly. One day, I had no content to post. I always did my own make-up for videos and I had filmed myself applying make-up while questioning why it was seen as a big deal. I posted that video,” he recalls. It went viral. “The response was overwhelming — especially from teenage boys, who had been secretly experimenting with make-up and from mothers trying to understand their sons’ interests.” Following this, Bahuguna created a separate account documenting his experiments with make-up, naming it Wing It with Ankush. Launched in 2020, it today has over 1.27 million followers. What perhaps sets him apart from other men in the make-up industry is his ability to make it accessible, fun and personalised — whether you are someone who wears only kajal and lipstick or just wants to conceal dark circles or hide grey hair in your beard. Like his followers, he too, is learning along the way. This doesn’t mean that he limits himself to only one section. “I cover luxury, too. But if I make a video about high-end perfumes, I follow it up with one on a full make-up kit under Rs 1,000 because I don’t want to forget where I started — when I used one blush for three things: as eyeshadow, lip tint and blush. The Indian sentiment of hacks is deeply ingrained in us, and that’s the core of my page: beauty is for everyone, no matter how many products you own.” Wing It With Ankush also brought him closer to his mother. “I got to know my mother in a way I hadn’t before. I always thought she wasn’t fond of make-up because I never saw her wearing it. But later, I realised she actually loves it — she just never learned how to do it,” he says. What’s his big dream now? “Two years ago, I’d have said I want to be a big actor. Now, my dream is to sustain myself and my passion and ensure the people around me live well.”
