Glossed Over

Lucky's "Beauty Strategies" Take Luxury for Granted

Have you seen the MTV show Exiled? Starring the spoiled kids from My Super Sweet 16, the program plucks them from their posh surroundings, sentencing them to a short-term stay with a family far less privileged than their own. (They even have to do chores!) In theory, this is a show about loosening the kids’ grip on material possessions, forcing them to gain a little perspective, and teaching them to appreciate their wealth.

So, then, isn’t it a little strange that the producer of Exiled would appear in the January issue of Lucky magazine, a publication that seemingly exists solely to celebrate the acquisition of overpriced bagatelles, to reveal the $105 face cream she always travels with and discuss how beauty products make her feel “so much better”?

An InStyle Assessment of Purchasing Priorities

This appears on page 246 of the December issue of InStyle:

Thanks, InStyle! Like so many women across the nation, I was only driving to work because I was completely ignorant that I could trade my gas money for a fancy potion from Saks! It had nothing to do with the fact that there is no other way to get to my office! How can we former car commuters ever pay you back for pointing out that we should be taking public transport? Preventing potential wrinkles clearly trumps any other concern.

Next month, InStyle answers whether you should buy a month’s worth of groceries or a new jar of eye cream. Hint: Obviously, the eye cream. They think you’ll look much better after eating nothing but whatever dented canned goods you can manage with the change you find on the sidewalk. A bout with food poisoning is a very effective weight loss method!

Lowest Common Denominator: Lucky, November

$2.99: Lucky’s cover price

$30: Suggested retail of Kim France and Andrea Linett’s new book, “The Lucky Guide to Mastering Any Style,” excerpted in the November issue

97%: Oddly enough, the amount of content in those excerpted pages that looks exactly like every single issue of Lucky

1: Number of times each that the alleged word “fashiony” is applied to the Gap and Banana Republic

2: Staffers who publicly admit to “converting” to Jessica Simpson’s new fragrance, Fancy, after Simpson appeared on October’s cover

31.5: Months, at the current rate of 2 employees per month, until the rest of the editorial staff is engulfed in the Great Simpson Perfume Convergence

10: Brands of non-Simpson perfume advertised in this issue, including—so help me—Fairy Dust by Paris Hilton

“Hugely”: Amount powder could potentially change your appearance, according to “Loose Powder: How and Why” in “Beauty Spy”

3: Number of “dramatically different looks” that can be achieved simply by using a different mascara, according to page 144 of “Beauty Spy”

47: Other life issues, approximately, I need to tackle before I’ll have even the slightest motivation to test  on my own face Lucky’s gripping hypotheses about the transformative powers of cosmetics 

“All the time”: Frequency with which beauty editor Jean Godfrey-June buys “things [she] can’t afford,” as divulged in “The Beauty Closet”

$86,483: Total retail value of all jewelry featured in “The Lucky Fall Jewelry Guide”

56: Number of adjectives and adjectival phrases in “The Season’s Best Coats”

26: Number of apparel items described by those 56 terms

30: Even more meaningless descriptors—like “nonchalant crisp” and “cozy meets flirty”—applied to the ensembles in “A Month of Outfits”

Infinite: Desperation emanating from the pop-up that screams “WAIT! SUBSCRIBE TO LUCKY!” when leaving Lucky’s website

Glamour Undermines Its Under-the-Skin Message

The October edition of Glamour is all about age. You know, it’s the issue where they divide women into incredibly broad and stereotypical categories based on one small facet of our existence and then expect us conform exactly to one of those groups.

Oh, wait, that’s every issue.

I’ll start with the upper right hand of the cover:

Love Your Looks

Rachel Bilson, Ali Larter & Diane Lane Tell How

Awesome. There’s nothing I love more than a woman on the cover of a fashion magazine explaining to me how I can learn to appreciate my appearance. The obvious: If I resembled one of those three, I’d have no trouble loving my looks.

So what enlightenment does this trio offer? Let’s check out “Gorgeous at Any Age” to find out!

Rachel Bilson is dubbed “Confident at 27.” Well, wouldn’t you be confident if you could be described the way she is?

She’s already starred in a successful TV series, The O.C., bought a home and launched a brand new fashion line for DKNY Jeans…[To Rachel] You’re a young woman with a successful career at an age when a lot of your peers are starting out. You probably have a little money in the bank and a sense of direction about what’s coming next.

See how easy it is to feel good about yourself? Just star in a TV show and design a clothing line in conjunction with a major apparel label! There is one glimmer of hope here, though: 27 is considered young!

It gets better, though. Next up, Ali Larter, who is “Sexy at 32”! (Sexy, eh? Like women of 32 are typically asexual prunes?) Here’s what she has to say about the purported subject of this section:

I actually think I look better now [than when she was in her twenties] because I feel so much better about myself now. And that’s what’s so exciting. As you get older, you get better…Look at all these incredible women, like Vanessa Redgrave, who are still so beautiful. The reason is because they embrace who they are.

That may be the healthiest, most reasonable attitude about aging ever printed in a women’s magazine.

Finally, there’s the “Red-Hot at 43” Diane Lane, who offers a similarly sensible approach:

...there is something wonderful about coming to terms with time—that it is finite. You want to have as much joy in your life as possible, and you take responsibility for your own joy.

How does Glamour follow up all this talk about surrendering to the inevitable and learning to respect yourself? With two pages full of expert advice, makeup, and skincare products to “work your looks.”  Loving yourself is spectacular, but you’d like yourself even more if you got rid of that frizzy hair and applied some bronzer!

Admittedly, appreciating “the skin you’re in now” involves loving your actual skin. But if self-esteem starts on the inside, as the rest of the article suggests, shouldn’t the advice for developing that go beyond, well, skin deep? I think so, but that’s probably because I haven’t shelled out for the Glamour-endorsed $155 anti-aging cream. Hey, why bother developing inner beauty at all? There's always someone at the cosmetics counter willing to sell it to me in a jar.

Jennifer Garner Hawks Neutrogena Night Cream for "Bad Girls"

According to a new Neutrogena TV commercial, “Every girl has a past.” Even Jennifer Garner! Apparently, visible signs of aging are a punishment for all those times we “did some things that maybe we shouldn’t.” How convenient that Neutrogena has invented a potion that fights wrinkles and absolves sins! Because, you know, what I really look for in a night cream is forgiveness. Watch the commercial here.

Screencap from L.A. Deli via Oh No They Didn’t!

Update: An edited Jennifer Garner-only version of the clip has popped up on YouTube. 

Debate Rages in W: Just How Beautiful is Charlize Theron?

We can all agree that Charlize Theron is a lovely woman, right? That might be why more than half of W’s June profile (imaginatively titled “Charlize Theron”) is about her looks. To be fair, this is a well-researched profile: writer Gabriel Snyder relies not just on the actress’ self-assessments of her appearance, but he also did the tireless footwork of finding multiple men who agree that Theron is fetching.  He even manages to inject his own evaluation of Theron’s attractiveness. So in-depth!

That’s not to say the topic of Theron’s appearance should be off limits. There’s a serious exploration to be done somewhere, though probably not in the pages of W, about why average-looking actresses aren’t cast to play average-looking characters, why a stunning actress downplaying her attributes wins awards (see Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Theron herself in Monster), and whether beauty is a liability to a performer who wants to do more than look hot onscreen.

But little of that makes it into this article. We get this instead:

In fact, the surest way to rile her is to suggest that she’s somehow “transformed” herself yet again in several post-Monster roles, among them, a female miner battling sexism in the Minnesota iron mines in the 2005 film North Country, a Tennessee detective (who’s a brunette) in 2007’s In the Valley of Elah, and, most recently, a desperate single mom in this year’s Sleepwalking.

Love the equation of brunette with less attractive. This is Theron’s rebuttal:

“Oh, no, you better not be bringing up ‘ugly,’” she admonishes when I broach the subject…But after [Monster], she points out, whenever she’s played “women in middle America living normal lives,” she’s heard cries of “ugly,” no matter what they looked like. “North Country was dirt. That’s what happens when you go into a mine. In the Valley of Elah—that’s when I took real offense, because that was just my real hair color and me with no makeup.”

Snyder again:

Looking at her, you have to conclude that Theron is being unduly self-deprecating, and that the truth lies somewhere between the red carpet and North Country.

Is that what you have to conclude? Can I conclude that she’s an actress whose job involves changing her appearance? Can I conclude that dithering over whether Theron is beautiful may be the least important and least interesting debate to ever make it into print?

But what does my opinion matter? Let’s get someone with a penis in here to settle this.

Her friend Woody Harrelson, her costar in North Country and Sleepwalking, notes that her glamour belies her tomboyishness… “She’s not like a delicate girl,” Harrelson says. “She’s like a classic broad, in terms of being a beautiful woman…”

Even when Hancock co-star Will Smith somehow manages to keep the focus on her talent, that sentiment is undermined by a quote about how she’s, like, totally hot.

“She seemed like the perfect actress to understand that this is funny, but this is a drama too,” says Smith… “What better way to make sure that texture is captured than [to hire] an Academy Award-winning actress? She brings the power and truth that Tommy Lee Jones brought to Men in Black.” She also brings her beauty, notes director Peter Berg. “Who is a better actress that looks like that? No one.”

The implication being that there are indeed better actresses, just none as statuesque as Theron?

Ultimately, the article veers away from her corporeal qualities long enough to mention her boyfriend, her desire to be a mother, and the difficulty women have veering between big-budget blockbusters and more thoughtful films. (Good news! That transition is “a lot easier for men”!)

In any case, there is far more space devoted to pictures of Theron than to text about her. Which, considering the overarching emphasis on how lovely she is, must be exactly the point.

Elle: Skin Care Routine Goes Beyond the Pale

In Elle’s June issue, writer Elizabeth Hayt advocates a life ruled by the pursuit of perfect, sun-free skin. As she explains in “Something New Under the Sun,” she’s upended her existence to rehabilitate her tanned hide. Is it worth such sweeping reform to attain the look of a “Bain de Soleil girl who failed”? There’s only one way to find out! This is a step-by-step guide to the Hayt skin care regimen.

1. Find a mercilessly blunt boyfriend to jump-start your lifestyle change.

“You’re going to look reptilian if you keep on baking,” he warned with brutal honesty. “Once your skin ages, it gets crepey, and that’s a real turnoff because you’ll turn into a premature hag…”

What a charmer. There’s more:

“...and you’ll have to keep adding tan over tan because what looks worse is untanned overly tanned skin…”

What? That doesn’t even make sense.

“…I love virginal skin…”

Red flag! Hello!

2. Get ready to shop, but only online or after dark.

Hayt purchased these items to ease her into a tanning-free existence: Guerlain bronzing powder, which “got me through the fadeout phase, sparing me the sallow complexion of a consumptive”; Photoderm Max SPF 100, a sunscreen not yet approved by the FDA; “a wardrobe of wide-brim, coolie-style hats and gauzy long-sleeve tunics,” linen shawls, scarves, and cardigans to wear backwards over low-cut dresses (instead of, you know, dresses with a higher neckline); and SPF 50 parasols from New York boutique Rain or Shine, which retail for $95-$245 apiece.

3. Reconfigure your commitments to become what Hayt so pleasantly terms a “mole person.” Sacrifice is key to a sunless lifestyle.

I remained indoors from 10 a.m. till 4 p.m., the peak hours of the poisonous rays, and during daylight hours I refused to swim outdoors or even ride in open convertibles…I went so far as to reprogram my circadian rhythms in order to become a high-functioning nocturnal being. [emphasis mine]

4. Seek a dermatologist whom your grandchildren won’t mind being indebted to. 

For the past 11 years, I have been consumed by all procedures and devices of cosmetic medicine that promise to revitalize my subdermal layers of decrepitude. To be clear, I’m not referring to plastic surgery and injections of Botox, fat, Hylaform, Perlane, Restylane, Juvederm, or the like—all of which are part of my current repertoire…

....I underwent a four-month course of monthly microdermabrasion followed by chemical peels made with TCA, or trichloroacetic acid (it smarts!), and daily use of his private-label creams…

Lo and behold, after following [the doctor’s] regimen for 16 weeks, it happened: I got the postorgasmic glow even when I hadn’t earned it. [emphasis mine]

5. Finally, develop a cliché-ridden rationale for your extreme devotion to avoiding the sun’s poisonous rays.

Your talking points, cribbed directly from Hayt: The procedures are a “commitment to me”; “The bottom line is, I do judge a book by its cover”; and “First impressions do count.” Got it!

Follow these simple steps, and you too can follow Hayt’s lead in “[rising] to the challenge of aging beautifully.” She may be a “self-confessed narcissist and perfectionist” who never leaves her house during the day, but she is radiant!

Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase, The Merciful End

So, this Jean Godfrey-June book ?  It goes on for an awful long time about lunches.  Sometimes companies serve lavish midday meals at fancy restaurants in order to garner good press!  Real shocker there.  And there are about forty-seven explanations of why she hates having her picture taken.  And then there are a billion pages—approximately—describing various levels of intrigue she faced during her tenure at Elle, which might have been interesting, except that every player is saddled with a cumbersome code name like “Above the Fray.”  The French execs at the magazine try to use European photo shoots in the American edition, and Above the Fray tussles with Eminence Grise and the Playboy and the Fashionista, and, well, there’s a reason we don’t watch daytime soap operas.

We can barely get through the one page she pens in Lucky, so it was clearly expecting too much that we’d be entertained all the way through a 271-page book that consists entirely of poorly organized personal anecdotes and impossible-to-execute beauty tips.  (We tried that concealer stripe, by the way.  No dice.)

All we really wanted out of this book was dirt about Lucky and/or Kim France. And now that we've read every single page, some of them twice because they were so incomprehensible, we’ve compiled a list, based mostly on the book’s final chapter, of the details we gleaned.  We hope that these small morsels of information will be enough to prevent all of you from undertaking the onerous task of reading Free Gift with Purchase.

1. Jean’s office at the magazine is “private-but-not-exactly-private.”  We don’t know what that means either!  Apparently, Jean is so confident in her descriptive abilities that she doesn’t feel the need to expound on this.

2. Speaking of nebulous descriptions:

If Kim uses the word perfect to describe someone, it’s not a good sign.  “She’s overperfect!” Kim once said of an impeccable, extremely fashiony [agh!] staff member, who, incidentally, ejected herself early on.  (There are plenty of superhot gals at Lucky, don’t get me wrong, by perfect I mean that smug, overly groomed, tucked-and-folded-scarf thing that some pretty girls feel enhances their attractiveness.)

3. In a departure from the magazine world’s status quo, the fashion department is “not mean.”  What a ringing endorsement!

4. Kim France has banned the use of certain words in the magazine, which explains why they feel the need to make up new ones!

…we ripped through “bohemian” in the first year; “glamorous” and “amazing” are currently on the endangered list.  “Fashionista” has been banned from the start.

5. Flattery will get you everywhere at Lucky.

Kim is smart smart smart and beautiful and successful (I know, it’s kissing up to the boss, but it’s true)...

6. We believe this claim is a blatant lie:

My test for any piece of writing I’m involved with is known around the office as the “Say this aloud to your smartest friend” test.  Would the friend look at you as if you were crazy?  Don’t write it that way, then.

Really?  Really?  Either Jean doesn’t know anyone who’s very smart, or her friends have a high tolerance for insanity.

7. Finally, Jean once attempted to wear a pair of mold-encrusted shoes to party.  Which, presumably, is why she’s writing about makeup and not about fashion.

Next up in the Glossed Over book club? Falling Out of Fashion, written by Jane Pratt’s former assistant Karen Yampolsky, is the almost-true tale of the editor-in-chief of Sassy and Jane magazines.  We don’t want to give too much away, but we can tell you this much: editorial wunderkind Jill White has an absolutely stellar assistant! 

Lowest Common Denominator: InStyle, January

2: Number of pages devoted to Kate Hudson (“Her 10 best, ever!”)

4: Additional photos of Kate Hudson throughout the issue (pages 78, 112, 115, 149)

7, not counting writer Johanna Schneller: People who gush over Katie Holmes in “What Katie Wants” (The illustrious Kate Cruise Fan Club counts the following luminaries as members: Sherry Lansing, Giambattista Valli,  Diane Keaton, Giorgio Armani, Victoria Beckham, Callie Khouri, and Christopher Bailey of Burberry.)

29: Percentage of paragraphs in “What Katie Wants” in which Katie gushes about Tom Cruise or “being a wife”

Way, way too much: Amount Katie is trying to make her marriage appear sound

1: Ludicrous statement about femininity in “Figure Flattery.”  The collarbone is, according to InStyle, “arguably one of the most feminine parts of a woman’s body.” Wait, are they really claiming certain parts of a woman’s body are more feminine than others?  No word on which parts are, like, unacceptably gender-neutral.

1: Animal whose fur is suggested as a “problem solver” for upper arms in the same article (That’d be the rabbit, and there’s a shrug and a capelet crafted of its pelt.)

$54.80: Average price of the “positively affordable” items in “Deals & Steals,” which is—surprise!—actually affordable

3: Photos of Jennifer Garner in the same magenta Zac Posen dress (pages 75, 76, and 110). We love us some Sydney Bristow, and it’s a gorgeous dress, but three times?

1: Number of animate objects listed in “Designer Lust List” (Jenni Kayne says a French bulldog is a must-have.  Dogs, yes!  But pups as fashion accessories?   God, no.)

10: Steps involved in a “simple…approach to getting it right in the new year and beyond,” per “Beauty 2008: Your Master Plan”

Absolutely none: Amount of interest we have in developing a “master plan” involving a “signature scent”  and hair accessories.  Like we have nothing better to do?

42: Percent of ad pages in this issue which tout cosmetics, skincare, and haircare products

26: Words we read in the Vanessa Williams story.  They were: “Can a native New Yorker like Vanessa Williams find true bliss—and a really good soy chai latte—way out West?  You bet your sweet Buddha.”

Approximately a billion: Number of times we’ve seen the story about a New Yorker moving to L.A.  Doesn’t anyone east of the Mississippi realize that we do, in fact, have bagels on the West Coast?

Infinitely: Degree to which we were bored with this issue

Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase, Chapters Two-Four

Chapter Two:  This is the chapter that made us almost—almost—like Jean Godfrey-June.  (Don’t worry—the feeling quickly faded.)  Her tale of sneaking into the bathroom to apply makeup before her boyfriend woke up struck a chord with us.  Her recollection of a science teacher who turned slaughterhouse remnants into Viking helmets did not.  There was an actual point to the story, something trite about how beauty rituals allow people to have control in a chaotic world, but we aren’t sure how the science teacher anecdote related to it, and we refuse to read those paragraphs again.  Ew.

Chapter Three: Jean’s father eats tuna covered in ketchup and molasses every morning.  We’re sure there was more substance (or at least more text) to this chapter, but that disgusting concoction is pretty much all we remember.  Oh!  And she’s always had the obnoxious habit of adding suffixes to extant words to create, well, non-extant ones.  As a child, she added “-ington” to people’s names—Jeanington, etc.  And, in a stunning display of naivete or stupidity, she chose to attend the University of Colorado because the subscription cards in her favorite magazines were addressed to Boulder, and she therefore assumed that the city was a hotbed of periodical publishing.  Sure, we’ve made life choices based on false information too, but you don’t see us writing about them for the world to see, do you?

Chapter Four: In what is surely its first appearance ever, the phrase “nasolabial-fold-emphasizing” appears in a story about getting a pedicure with a porn star.  (And we’re not sure what this says about our reading material, but we’ve seen that  “nasolabial” everywhere lately, usually followed by the admonition that it’s not dirty.  Enough!  We know!)  There are multiple tales of beauty rivalries with friends that are neither interesting nor vicious nor revelatory.  Beauty tip: Lauren Hutton suggests drawing a concealer stripe down the center of your nose  to make it look smaller.  And news flash!  Models endorsing beauty products are just there to collect a paycheck.  One unnamed model floundered when it was her turn to present the products to Jean; another anonymous mannequin admitted publicly that she had never smelled the fragance she was touting.

Next up: Jean continues her series of stories that are probably charming if you know her personally but are inexorably dull to the those of us who don’t.  Also, she goes out to lunch!  A lot!