How Hung Vanngo Built a Beauty Brand on Not Cutting Corners
Long before Hung Vanngo Beauty, and long before Selena Gomez's wedding-day face, its founder was packing his makeup kit every morning as if a job was already confirmed.
Before Hung Vanngo did Selena Gomez’s wedding makeup, before the four million Instagram followers, he was a kid whose family fled Vietnam. “My brother and sister and I got sent to a refugee camp in Thailand,” he told Coveteur. “We were stuck there for three years and then, finally, we got accepted by Canada and immigrated… in the early ’90s.” He grew up in Calgary from there. It’s a past that has taught him to work hard before anyone was watching, and to show up prepared long before there was a reason to.
He has since carried this into Hung Vanngo Beauty, the makeup line he launched in 2025. When California banned a pigment used across fifteen of his eyeshadow shades, he reformulated all of them rather than sell a weaker version in that one state. His new foundation that was released this July has followed the same pattern. Rather than rush out a basic starter range, the brand waited two years and released it as a full 38-shade line with a dedicated brush.
Vanngo didn’t start in makeup at all. He trained as a hairdresser first, and was skilled enough at it to win awards while styling weddings and graduations at a Calgary salon. By every outward measure, that should have been the career. Then he started messing around at the salon’s makeup counter on slow days and the whole plan changed. “I always wanted to work in beauty when I was younger,” Vanngo told FASHION Magazine. “I just never thought that makeup could be a career.”
And so, he started over. He moved to Toronto in 2004 with no portfolio, found representation through a small modelling agency, and took whatever combined hair and makeup work he could get. A test shoot he did with Heather Marks, a fellow Calgarian model who’s walked for Givenchy, Chanel and Burberry, caught the attention of Holt Renfrew’s creative team. That led to both of them being booked for a campaign with Lida Baday, a major Canadian fashion label, and it became his first real break.
By 2006 he was in New York, dropping hair to focus on makeup alone, working small catalogue jobs before slowly moving into editorial. Before he had an agent, he woke up every single day and packed his kit as if a booking was already confirmed. “Even when I wasn’t booked, I woke up as if I was going to work,” Vanngo told Gloss Angeles. “That habit created my career.”
His early reliability opened doors, including a relationship with Danish supermodel Helena Christensen, and eventually a working partnership with Selena Gomez that’s now run more than 13 years. When Gomez married Benny Blanco, Vanngo did her wedding makeup. He opted for something “simple and classic but still beautiful,” he’s said, adding: “I wanted to do something not too dramatic, pretty natural, but still timeless.”
For Vanngo, everything starts with the skin rather than the eyes or lips, so blush and shadow blur seamlessly into the base instead of sitting on top of it. He’s an unhurried worker by design, studying each face fresh rather than applying the same formula to everyone who sits in his chair. He named the brand after himself, the same name he got teased for in high school. “I learned to love my name,” he’s said, “and that’s the legacy I want to create for myself.”
