Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World. Sali Hughes
will style your hair in a way you previously thought impossible.
The impressively fast motor halves drying time, the three temperatures and speeds (in general, you want to start hot and fast and move down the settings during your blow dry, as a hairdresser would) give excellent shape and smoothness, and the high wattage makes a joke of your last dryer. Crucially, the Parlux has a proper cool shot setting, rather than a puny burst of tepid air offered by high street dryers. This allows you to properly set your style; leaving hair warm is like putting on a hot blouse straight from the ironing board. It’ll ruin again in seconds. The unit is sturdy too. I’ve dropped my Parlux many times, and while I’d caution against recklessness, I must commend my 11-year-old dryer’s stoicism – on and on it nobly goes. I’ve since moved on to a newer, similarly brilliant professional dryer (namely, the Hersheson) and bestowed the Parlux onto my gloriously thick-haired assistant, but only because the former is a little lighter. Age has not withered the Parlux, only weakened my right arm.
Dior Diorshow Mascara
I find natural mascaras to be rather missing the point. I don’t enhance my determinedly straight, short lashes to look like I have normal ones. I want them to be long, thick and fluttery like a Hereford cow’s. I want good separation and a brush that coats hairs, not eyelids, and a formula that doesn’t dry out in a matter of weeks. It seems so little to ask and yet is amazingly hard to find. It seems Pat McGrath, genius make-up artist, felt so similarly ill-served by the dramatic lash mascaras available that in 2001, she took a pile of toothbrushes backstage at the Dior catwalk show. The fat, dense bristles, when coated in black mascara, gave models a fanned, false lash effect that made lashes noticeable even to those sitting in the back row.
Inspired by McGrath’s ingenuity, the product development team set about designing a commercially available mascara that created the same look as the somewhat impractical toothbrushes. The result was Diorshow, a sleek, elegant silver and black tube housing a fat brush that could perhaps clean the loo in a crisis. It was an instant bestseller and in my experience is the mascara most likely to make a red carpet appearance on a starlet’s lashes. Make-up artists adore it, customers can’t get enough of it. It gives lush, dark, bovine lashes to those previously deprived, layers brilliantly, and has good staying power on most. It smudges on me, but unless you’re a serial mascara smudger, don’t let that put you off – my dry skin is so thickly basted in greasy moisturiser that it could smudge a tattoo. Diorshow now comes in an additional, waterproof formula and several permanent and seasonal colours. Which is all very nice, but my mascara motto will always be Go Black or Go Home.
Estée Lauder Double Wear Foundation
Sometimes a single beauty product is so huge, so instantly recognisable and ubiquitous, that it becomes an entire brand in its own right. Such is the case with this, the world’s bestselling foundation and the base readers most often rave about at my events. Launched in 1997, Double Wear was designed to stay on, come what may, and it certainly does that. It doesn’t transfer onto clothes and would probably survive nuclear holocaust to perfect the complexions of cockroaches and Keith Richards. Its shade range is ethnically inclusive, as is typical of American (as opposed to French) brands, its price is neither prohibitively obscene nor suspiciously low. The full coverage formula covers spots, blemishes, blotches, melasma and even faint scars but remains surprisingly comfortable to wear. It is, in my experience, what male and female popstars are most likely to wear on a hot, sweaty tour stage.
Despite my uneven skin pigmentation, Double Wear is not my own foundation of choice, because my skin is otherwise clear and to cover it so opaquely feels a little like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Others criticise Double Wear’s ‘heavy’ and not entirely natural-looking finish, but while I take their point (with the reminder that Double Wear still looks way more realistic than any foundation launched pre-1995), I’m not personally of the opinion that make-up’s role should always be that of ‘convincing liar’ anyway. How joyless and dull. If that were the case, there’d be no red lipstick. An unthinkable tragedy indeed.
Clinique Almost Lipstick in Black Honey
In 1989 Clinique launched a new type of lip colour. Almost Lipstick was ‘not quite a lipstick, not quite a gloss, but the best of both’, and I was instantly intrigued. There were six shades in the range (Ruby Melt – the first sheer red I’d seen – was given to me by my brother David, much to my giddy joy), but the jewel in the crown was Black Honey, a blackberry stain without the jammy stickiness. Black Honey was so sheer, forgiving and thin of bullet (Almost Lipsticks came in a slender, stylo-type applicator) that it could be applied in mirrorless nightclub loos or standing on a bumpy night bus, or even while driving a car, as demonstrated by Julia Roberts, who slicks on Black Honey while behind the wheel in nineties film Stepmom. It made the wearer seem dressed up without looking try-hard. I was, and am, a huge fan myself and wore it throughout the nineties, but it looks good on literally everyone. As long as you had Black Honey in your kit, you could make any woman, regardless of age, race, hair or skin tone, look pretty great.
The rest of the shade line-up failed to make as much of an impact and so, some years later, Clinique axed Almost Lipsticks, leaving only bestseller Black Honey as a stand-alone product. I can think of few other examples of a single shade becoming so popular that it outlives its entire product line, but in this case it’s wholly deserved. Clinique rolled again and relaunched Almost Lipsticks in the early 2000s, this time capitalising on its hero-shade’s popularity by namechecking it throughout the rest of the range (Flirty Honey, Lovely Honey, Bare Honey and so on), but by now lip stains and tinted balms were ten a penny and the second-generation shades failed to take off. Almost Lipsticks were withdrawn yet again, with one inevitable exception. We’re still sweet on Black Honey.
Max Factor Creme Puff
Max Factor’s Creme Puff face powder is one of the first make-up items I was ever really aware of. As a tiny girl I would sit next to my grandmother on the bus and, as we neared our destination, watch her reach into her handbag for a gilt Stratton compact housing a pan of Creme Puff. She’d sweep the sponge over her nose and chin briskly and unfussily before clicking it shut, but just long enough for the strong, sweet baby powdery-smelling particles to become airborne and scent the whole top deck.
That Creme Puff smell, unchanged in six decades, still does strange things to me. It is one of the most instantly affecting, most nostalgic of fragrances. It smells of my nan, yes, but mostly Creme Puff just smells unapologetically of make-up (much like Dior lipstick does, or Bourjois powder rouge) at a time when make-up often smells of nothing at all. None of this sensitive skin molly-coddling, the Max Factor face powder hits you with a proper old-fashioned dressing-table smell and you’ll bloody well like it. Fortunately, I love it. And if you’ve ever hovered over your gran’s open handbag, trying to breathe in the interior’s scent, then you will too.
Creme Puff is glamorous, feminine, special. It’s not minimal, or pretending to be state of the art – it’s an old-fashioned formula that made golden age Hollywood actresses like Ava Gardner, Vivien Leigh and Jean Harlow appear flawless and luminous on set. It continues to do the job extremely well today, in its seventh decade (though sadly, its nostalgia is misplaced in its Caucasian-only shade range). Creme Puff is soft and creamy, with excellent coverage, and gives a matte finish without ever looking chalky. It contains light-reflecting particles to mimic a smoother, clearer surface. It’s perfect with retro red lips, black flicks and falsies, but also its full, layerable coverage makes it a great way to skip foundation on a more natural face – just brush over moisturiser and concealer. It’s a product I use rarely, but I would never pack a full kit without it because sometimes it’s exactly what a look needs, and the only thing that will do.
The Max Factor brand, founded by the man who literally invented the phrase ‘make-up’ (yes, really), is no longer sold in the States, where it first went on