Welcome to Skin Talk With Laura Love, our video series in which stars of fashion, film, television, and beyond share their beauty secrets with the licensed model and esthetician.
The final episode of our first season of Skin Talk With Laura Love features Stephanie Suganami best known as Steph Shep, who first became a household name as Kim Kardashian’s assistant but has since moved on to acting stardom having most recently been featured in 2025’s Opus with Ayo Edebiri.
When it comes to her beauty goals, the Ohio native—who moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago to pursue a career in dancing (her goal was to be a Pussycat Doll)—is looking to “defy gravity at all times. Just fighting gravity.” She’s a fan of the double cleanse, using micellar water to take off makeup and excess grime before using iS Clinical’s Cleansing Complex and the brand’s Warming Honey Cleanser. It’s all part of what she jokes is her “50-step beauty routine. I don’t pretend to be low-maintenance.”
Like many millennials, the actor’s biggest beauty regret is over-tweezing her eyebrows, until they were “nonexistent.” (They’re back now, but “it was a long road to get here,” Suganami says.) She also reflects on her experience using filler, saying she’ll be “the first one” to call out a girlfriend who’s doing too much with the injectables. These days, she sticks with skincare, often giving her husband, the producer Larry Jackson, facials and lending him her favorite products.
Suganami also talks changing her name, recalling not wanting to be associated with her Japanese heritage as a child. “Growing up in Ohio, being the only Asian kid, it definitely formed everything about me,” she says. “It wasn’t something I was really proud of.” She discusses an experience from her childhood, when she’d visit mall beauty counters for makeovers with her friends. The blue-eyed, blonde girls in her crew wound up looking fabulous, while Suganami felt as though she’d “done really bad drag.” However, “rather than it deterring me from beauty and makeup, it was the catalyst for me to learn how to do my own makeup for my face.”
Of course, Kardashian gets brought up. “I’m forever Kim Kardashian’s assistant,” Suganami says good-naturedly. “But I’m fine with it. It makes me work a little bit harder to be taken seriously in a different way.”
For the complete season of Skin Talk With Laura Love featuring Carolyn Murphy, Paloma Elsesser, Devon Lee Carlson, Karen Elson, head over to W’s YouTube channel to subscribe.
