Celebrity Makeup Artist Molly Stern Opens Up About Parkinson’s Diagnosis at 52: ‘I Assumed the Worst’ (Exclusive)

When celebrity makeup artist Molly Stern first felt her hands start to shake in March 2023, she chalked it up to too much caffeine.

She was on a work trip to Las Vegas with a client and she had gotten a strong cup of coffee to start her day. She tells PEOPLE she was rushing and felt the usual amount of pressure she did with her job, so the shaking didn’t immediately concern her.

But then it didn’t stop.

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“It kept happening, but then it wasn’t my hands shaking — my hands were completely steady,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I felt shaky on the inside of my body, but had no outside ramifications of it. Just that one time after drinking the coffee, and then I also developed a twitch in my left leg. It was like a frequent twitch.”

Stern admits she did what many of us do and googled her symptoms and diagnosed herself with a “zillion things.”

The makeup artist, who works with the likes of Julia Roberts, Maya Rudolph, Eve Hewson and more, says that at the time, she could still do liquid liner with ease, but internally, she knew something wasn’t right, so she went to her regular doctor, who sent her to a neurologist.

The neurologist ordered an MRI but told Stern at the time that there was no conclusive answer for what was going on with her. This was now November 2023, and Stern says she could feel herself physically slowing down — and she couldn’t relax her hands anymore. Despite noticing all of these changes in herself, the initial MRI showed that her brain looked great, which she says was a relief.

However, Stern says her symptoms only got worse, and she says the coming months were when she was the “sickest” — and it was when she dealt with them in silence while working with director Greta Gerwig through the 2024 awards season, at which Barbie made a strong showing.

The mom of three was largely keeping all of this to herself, which she tells PEOPLE was really hard on her, because she’s typically an open book. In the past few years, she also went through a divorce, moved out of the home she lived in for almost two decades and saw her oldest daughter through cancer — and she shared each of these stories with her clients, friends and community on social media. But her symptoms, which at this point were still undiagnosed, were still mostly a secret.

Stern’s symptoms — the slow-moving, the shakiness — got to a point, however, that they were very obvious, and she says people really started to notice.

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“I started to get really self-conscious, because I was like, ‘I don’t want everybody noticing that something’s wrong with me or off with me,'” she says. “Then another massive heartbreak during that period was I couldn’t dance and I love to dance. I could not connect my brain to my body, and I didn’t realize that it was because I was having a dopamine deficiency, which has everything to do with your motor skills.”

So she went back to the neurologist for more answers.

“I was moving as if I was in molasses,” she says of her life at this point in June 2024. “I walked into her office and just burst into tears. I apologized for crying, and just told her I feel like something is really wrong with me. She was like, ‘Clearly you have Parkinson’s.'”

Stern says the doctor diagnosed her just like that, like it was so obvious.

Once she got over the initial surprise of her diagnosis, she saw a motility specialist who helped her get on the right medication for her Parkinson’s — which is a neurological disorder that affects balance, coordination and movement — and she says there are days now when she feels upwards of 90% herself, which is a huge improvement from where she was.

She has had to slow down a bit with her work, though, because the high-intensity of Hollywood was not what she needed while figuring out her health.

“I’ve been taking a little more time to just get my rhythm, and first I needed to get over the shock of it and then regulate my medication, so that it actually was doing what it was supposed to do,” she says. “I hope to stay busy and keep doing what I do. I mean, oh my God, I’ve been doing it since I was 16.”

Stern has a surprisingly positive outlook for someone who was handed a Parkinson’s diagnosis less than a year ago at only 52 years old, but she admits that one of the hardest parts was keeping it to herself. She didn’t tell her clients, even though she’s known many of them for years, and she didn’t share on social media until December 2024. She says the secret was “stifling.”

“I wear my heart on my sleeve. I can’t help but be vulnerable. It’s just sort of my nature,” she says. “It was really hard for me and hard for my kids because I didn’t know how people would react. I didn’t want people to assume something like I did when I got my diagnosis, because I assumed the worst. I needed to give people space to understand.”

She says that once she felt like she understood her Parkinson’s, she felt more ready to share it, because she no longer had a “victim” standpoint.

“I’m good. I’m actually really freaking good. I’m so much better than I had been.”