Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America's Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry
Author: Mary Lisa Gavenas
For everyone who's ever slicked on lipstick, flirted with eye shadow, or browsed the bewildering array in any store's beauty de-partment, Color Stories offers an insider's view of all the brainstorming, bickering, and bitchery that go into those little sticks of color and pans of powder.
Former beauty editor Mary Lisa Gavenas takes us behind the scenes during the nine months that culminate in the launch of a season's all-important "color stories." We discover how one shade becomes the "must have," why makeup artists never use the same products as the rest of us, and exactly how easy—and impossible—it is to start a million-dollar makeup line.
Backstage at the runway shows, we're swept into the catty, chaotic work world of makeup mogul Bobbi Brown and supermodel Gisele Bündchen. At Estée Lauder headquarters, we see the achingly chic Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer spin societal trends into a lipstick lineup. We watch magazines cheat to make makeup work for layouts, find out how Cindy Crawford got to be worth every penny of her $10 million contract, and make the pilgrimage to Dallas as 35,000 of the Mary Kay faithful assemble for the fabled annual Seminar. Along the way, we also learn about marketing, media, and the manipulation of aesthetics, about the codification of physical beauty, and how this industry revolutionized the role of women in business.
Through its often funny, sometimes poignant scenes of seduction, courtship, and consummation, Color Stories reveals why women become besotted by beauty products—and why that love affair will never end.
Publishers Weekly
Following a year in the life of a product from concept to counter, former Glamour, Mirabella and InStyle beauty editor Gavenas offers a curious peek behind the closed doors of beauty editors' offices. She exposes the symbiotic relationship between manufacturers and magazines: advertising pays editors' salaries, while casual mentions by editors sell product. Gifts to editors abound for these much coveted credits and range anywhere from flowers to Cartier watches, depending on the quality of the product placement. Though Gavenas touches on some of the darker days of the business, such as blinding chemicals in Lash-Lure, a 1930s mascara substitute that went unregulated for years, most of her book praises the willful self-empowerment of some the country's earliest women entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires. Biographical sketches of make-up moguls include those of Helena Rubenstein, Mary Kay, Elizabeth Arden and Est e Lauder. Disappointingly, Gavenas pays highly successful African-American businesswomen Annie Turnbo and Madame C.J. Walker much less attention, squeezing their stories together into barely two and a half pages. Other than moving from door-to-door distribution to department store counters, the industry has changed very little over the years, according to Gavenas. "A century ago, beauty companies were pushing products with the same kind of romantic stories, pretentious promotions, and inspired goofiness that are still working so well." Gavenas effectively captures the attitude of the industry with her descriptions of photo shoots, runways and fabric shows, making this a well-crafted story of a booming industry. (Dec. 3) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A snappy tour of the method behind the cosmetics industry's madness, from the former beauty editor of Glamour, Mirabella, and InStyle. In cosmetics, Gavenas explains, "the most successful companies are the ones that spin the fantasies that the most women want to hear. And anyone with a good enough story can still make it big in the beauty business." That's big—as in $29 billion in sales last year in the US—and though the Revlons and Lauders and Mary Kays dominate, smaller entrepreneurs have also dipped into this bottomless paint pot. Create your own color story: if the big houses say, "For spring, the story [is] pink," then start your own line, call it Urban Decay, and push your shades of Roach, Smog, and Mildew with the slogan "Does pink make you puke?" Count $6 million to $9 million in sales the first year. The basically democratic nature of cosmetics strikes the author's fancy—a few dollars for some atmosphere, makeovers free and fun at the beauty counter—and she reminds us that early fighters for women's rights saw makeup as a badge of courage: "Painting your face meant writing your own story, independent of whatever your husband or father had drawn up." On a more cynical note, Gavenas declares: "Forget feminism. There's nothing like making money off other women to prove how powerful sisterhood can be." And women are powerful in this industry because "men just don't get it." The author revels in the dialectic of fabulism and the simple act of applying lipstick, the overstatement and the understatement, the rags to riches. Histories of cosmetic houses and the process of making cosmetics provide welcome doses of reality, but Gavenas really prefers the conjuring fromthin air: "Makeup will spin storylines for clothes that have none." Fundamentally, the beauty business is all about yearning and fantasy, promises and possibilities, fashioning the mood of the moment, and Gavenas explicates the fantasy so well that—yes—even men will get it.
Table of Contents:
| Preseason: What's in Store | 1 | |
| November: Product Development: Once Upon a Time | 15 | |
| December: Manufacturing: The Mother of Invention | 43 | |
| January: Packaging: All Wrapped Up | 73 | |
| February: The Runways: Tellers of Tales | 97 | |
| March: Advertising: Every Picture Tells a Story | 123 | |
| May: The Magazines: Truth is Stranger Than Fiction | 147 | |
| July: Sales Training: The Parable of the Pink Cadillac | 171 | |
| September: At the Counters: Another Happy Ending | 197 |
Books about: The Essential Difference or Coyote Medicine
No-Beach, No-Zone, No-Nonsense Weight-Loss Plan
Author: Jim Johnson
Created for the dieter who would rather follow science than the latest fad or celebrity, this book synthesizes years of research to present one dependable weight loss plan that really works. Using a combination of consistently proven diet and exercise strategies that require no special props or aids, readers are shown reliable ways to get weight off and keep it off. Information on calculating calorie needs, determining BMI (body mass index), and working out percentages of fats, carbs, and proteins in a diet are offered. The author leaves nothing to hypothesis, giving the truth about cellulite and how to tell when one's weight is a health risk. Fact is better than fiction where successful weight-loss is concerned and this book delivers all the scientific findings concisely in a convenient format.
No comments:
Post a Comment