I Know You Are, but What Am I? Part 2

Free Gift with Purchase
by Jean Godfrey-June

(Page 2 of 2)

That's if I make it to ninety after they discover the hideous toxicity of self-tanner, in which I all but bathe.

"In my next life, I'm coming back as a beauty editor."

"Do you have any idea how good you have it?"

"Hands down, you have the best job in America."

"Now I've seen everything: You get paid for doing this?"

I remember the first time I walked into a beauty editor's office. It was delightful and disgusting all at once: shelves upon shelves choking with bath gel, perfume, foundation, lotion, conditioner, lip gloss, eye shadow, cellulite treatments, seaweed serums . . . to one side, a random collection of gifts, from Pucci scarves to yoga mats to novelty chocolates shaped like miniature blow dryers; to another, additional caches of lipsticks, soaps, and shampoos, along with the odd makeup bag and terrycloth robe stuffed in wherever they fit. Every day, cosmetics companies send the beauty editors dozens of packages — my office gets ten to twenty most days — carefully wrapped collections of whatever they're serving up next. We unwrap, and we evaluate.

Whether it's undeserved excess, American overconsumption in general, or blatant female vanity that sends you over the edge, my office contains enough incendiary material to fuel several thousand impassioned protest marches.

Then again, if you've ever waited stammering at a makeup counter while the salesperson wrapped up some overpriced item that you weren't even sure looked good on you (but since you'd wasted their time and they were so insistent, you bought it anyway), the concept of being able to try on a few colors without a shrill sales pitch attached to it is wildly compelling.

It's like candy, all those little boxes and bottles; a magpie would cock its head and turn its eye so as to take in all the glittering possibilities and probably lose its mind forever right then and there. Beyond my office, though, is the beauty closet, which is about a thousand times worse.

The word closet is actually a misnomer. When I worked at Elle magazine, the closet was actually an office the size of a large bedroom lined with beauty-item-crammed shelves; now, at Lucky, it's three huge walk-in-closet-size closets, again with the shelves, again with more hope in a jar than you can shake a stick at.

There are various cosmetic pioneers who lay claim to the phrase hope in a jar; whoever said it was very perceptive. Nowadays, the jars reflect all manner of hopes and dreams, thanks to all the target marketing and brand building and niche identifying: You've got the wrinkle-erasing dream and the clear skin dream, but you've also got much more, from a cleaner earth (Aveda) to a more glamorous life (Chanel) to an edgier, punkier sense of femininity (Stila). You've got the hard-core-city-girl dream (M•A•C, Urban Decay), and the Park Avenue (Estée Lauder), and the dermatologist stamp-of-approval dream that started with Clinique and has recently escalated into Dr. Brandt, Dr. Perricone, and StriVectin SD.

The hands-down most popular dream, cosmetics-brand-wise, is what I like to call the Simone: Simone isn't real, she's an imaginary, dewy, health-exuding French girl. Simone is maybe nineteen, spends a lot of her time naked in spa-like settings, and when she speaks she purses her plummy, puffy lips

to say the word pure — or, because she's French, it comes out "puuurrrrh." If you want to convince people to buy skin care

of any sort, Simone is the woman to sell it to them: Clarins, Lancôme, Chanel, L'Oréal, Remède, Sothys, Darphin, Yves Rocher, Caudalíe, they're all selling you a Simone. The accent in Estée imbues the Estée Lauder brand with lots of Simone. Simone is why there's French on the back of the Origins bottle, the Shiseido compact, and the Maybelline lip pencil, despite those brands' respective, utterly un-French pedigrees/attitudes. It's confounding, but it works: Intellectually, I know I don't want to be a French exchange student in any way, but Simone is wildly compelling nonetheless.

Like fashion, beauty items are an easy way to try on a new identity — like a kind of costume. As in fashion, some of the options are ridiculous and some are fantastic; at the very least, trying everything on can be a lot of fun. The beauty closet is like a giant costume box full of potential identities that are otherwise under heavy guard from smiling, heavily made-up salespeople armed with perfume spritzers.

The freedom to sift through all the possibilities without having to deal with the "Fries with that?" advisers — with all their advice about what you need and what you don't and what they're supposed to push on you that month — is enough to make most people's heads spin. People tend to freeze up when the door to the beauty closet is finally opened: What to look at first? Who to be?

I get between fifty and two hundred products a day (the packages usually contain numerous items), some of them new, some of them just reminders, some of them gorgeous and innovative, and most of them just some dull cream purporting to moisturize some portion of your body, often wrapped up in an equally uninspiring package. The good stuff goes into the closet — either to be photographed for the magazine or to be saved as gifts. The less-interesting stuff goes straight onto the office help-yourself giveaway pile — the place where the fashion editors put the mismatched socks and the discontinued necklaces; the design editors, the oddly patterned pot holders; and the beauty editors, the shade of nail polish that didn't make it into the article.

The thing that constantly amazes me is there's a market for even the most cretinous, obvious, ridiculous, straight-to-the-giveaway-pile items. The world is full of statistics about how many small businesses fail and how likely it is that the restaurant you're opening will be out of business in three years, but the reverse is true of beauty products. I've seen beauty companies go out of business, but relatively few of them, to be honest. The really good ideas are rewarded with zillions: Somewhere near her mansion in the Steven Spielberg/Kate Capshaw sector of the Hamptons, makeup artist Bobbi Brown docks a boat with the name TYLL (Thank You, Leonard Lauder — Lauder being the company that bought hers); Jeanine Lobell, the makeup artist who created Stila, told her husband, Anthony Edwards, he could quit being Dr. Green (on ER) when she sold her company to Lauder. Roxanne Quimby, the woman who created Burt's Bees, bought the largest piece of land ever sold in the state of Maine (happily, so it could be preserved forever rather than logged or built on) with the proceeds from her business; hairdresser John Frieda was already a wealthy man when Jergens bought his ten-year-old hair care company for $450 million.

While they're busy making their millions, whatever they send that's truly irresistible goes straight into my bag; if I love it as much as I think I'm going to love it, we call in a new one to photograph. It's exactly like shopping, except the mistakes don't cost money and the salespeople are much less with holding.

So I do love my job. What I love most, I think, is that it's impossible to take seriously. So much of it is inane and ridiculous and silly. My beloved shrink tries valiantly to float a "but you're helping all these women feel better about themselves" argument every so often, but you know, I've got a cousin who sits in front of a microscope all day, helping find cures for pediatric cancer.

Me, I ponder lipstick. There are shining pots of ruby gloss, sheer washes of cheek stain, velvet black sweeping lashes. I'm surrounded by mountains of face cream and shampoo — certainly not all of it beautiful — but somehow it speaks to me.

Copyright © 2006 by Jean Godfrey-June. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Jean Godfrey-June is the beauty editor of the runaway-success shopping magazine Lucky and former beauty and fitness editor of Elle. She lives with her husband and two children in Upper Grandview, New York.