There’s a celebrity in my cappuccino

Susannah Guthrie
Mar 30, 2014, updated Apr 01, 2014

Want to see a face in your morning coffee? Michael Breach is your man.

The American “coffee artist to the stars” specializes in a particular kind of painting known as Baristart. Basically, he can do incredible things with a cappuccino.

Can you spot the celeb in the cappuccino? Check out Michael Breach’s work below

Using a bamboo skewer, Breach reworks the milk froth on a coffee into landmarks and faces, specializing in very accurate celebrity lookalikes. A trained barista, he started out by drawing a co-workers face in a coffee and it escalated from there.

Baristartist Michael Breach.

“Working at a café I just started going up to tables with groups of people and putting my work down in front of them,” Breach says. “I would walk away and just watch their reactions.”

Breach quickly got a celebrity clientele thanks to a job as a barista at a photography studio. Stars would come in and Breach would make coffee for their entourage, sneakily drawing a face into their morning brew.

“They would freak out and go grab the celebrity to show them,” Breach recalls. “I got to meet Denzel Washington after I drew his face in a coffee. He couldn’t believe it!”

The New York-based artist has also been able to share his work with Gisele Bundchen, Tobey Maguire, Mike Tyson and Chelsea Clinton.

Breach has to work quickly, doing his drawings in under six minutes to circumvent the difficulties of coffee as a medium.

“I make the coffee and then it takes me five or six minutes to do the art,” he explains. “The tricky thing with coffee is that the bubbles start to deteriorate and begin to look like stubble on the faces. All of a sudden Cate Blanchett has a beard and we can’t have that!”

Understandably, Breach, who is currently touring Australia, has a big coffee addiction and keeps an espresso machine in his room.

“Australia has the best coffee! You guys do something to it here that I can’t get in the States.”