Tom Ford’s new make up hits counters this autumn. Though I’ve seen nothing as yet apart from the lipsticks. Little samples or information has been made available. It’s typically Fordian to be so tightly controlling of the press coverage. Much as I love the existing lipstick range especially the white and gold packaging (very old Hollywood), I feel a little ambivalent about two things: the price point and the USP.
Firstly, the whole range is likely to be expensive considering the lipsticks alone are £35. For the same price you could buy a dress in New Look, Top Shop or Zara and even an outfit in Primark or Peacocks.
My second question mark here is: is there room for another cosmetics line in the marketplace? Burberry and D&G have both joined the melee in recent years which makes a lot of luxury make up lines out there. And how much of a market is there for this sort of ultra expensive product? Competitor-wise there’s Serge Lutens make up which is gorgeous but even more eye-wateringly expensive than Tom Ford and then Shiseido’s other superluxurious brand Cle De Peau which has been withdrawn from the UK – presumably due to lack of a market. Still, we wait with bated beauty breath.
As with gourmands (edible fragrances), I can now admit that I have been somewhat prejudiced towards celebrity fragrances. This wasn’t without reason; a lot of them genuinely were cheap, formulaic, derivative, overtly saccharine and obvious. Like gourmands, I reasoned they were often created with a young, uninformed, unsophisticated demographic in mind. There was very little artistry involved in the creation of these perfumes. But of course the minute you dismiss a genre of fragrance (or well anything in life really) something comes along and narkily disproves you. In this case it was Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely – which is really such a classy fragrance that it could be Chanel – and that’s a compliment indeed.
Anyway that was a few years ago now and hundreds of celebrity offerings have debuted since then. I can now admit there are one or two that I quite like – they are not all execrable. Namely Kate Moss’s Vintage Muse, which came out last winter. If you look at the notes on paper it does not bode well: plum, rhubarb and chocolate. It sounds like another sugary confection aimed at impressionable pre-teens. However when you actually smell it it’s really quite sophisticated – you get the tart, sour facets of rhubarb and plum rather than the juicy plumpness and it’s actually quite recherche.
It actually reminds me of how a stylist friend of mine used to smell – she blended her own oils – in other words not obvious and sweet but something a fashion insider might like. The other perfume that landed on my desk recently and that’s really okay, but maybe not great is Kim Kardashian’s debut. Now I had expected to hate this, not being afan of Kardashian herself (another fake tanned talentless wannabe famous for no reason) but it’s actually quite nice. What you get is a huge dose of tuberose – reminiscent of Frederic Malle’s Carnal Flower or Michael Kors’ eponymous offering. I love tuberose as much as the next person – what I’m slightly ambivalent about is the chocolate note used to underscore it which make it a very rich, dense sweet tuberose. I might have preferred a more translucent take on the tuberose, but then that might have been a bit too derivative or Kors and Malle.
Love tennis? Tomorrow Twin teams up with Nike to take over their relaunched 1948 Shoreditch space. To mark the Wimbledon Women’s Final, we’re celebrating female creativity with a series of one-on-one collaborative events. Watch the women’s tennis alongside exclusive performance from poet and musician Kate Tempest in a sound clash with the Bruccheri Strings, enjoy collaborative creative clashes between cake maker Lily Vanilli and illustrator Kate Merry as well as a live fashion shoot with photographer Letty Schmiterlow and stylist Alice Goddard.
Spaces are limited, but to come along to this very special 1 x 1 event which takes place from 1 – 6pm at 1948 email: party@twinfactory.co.uk
The problem with success is that once you have it it’s almost impossible to avoid being typecast by it. One of the biggest misconceptions about Tracey Emin is that her work is all about sex. In fact, as Emin’s first major London exhibition shows, it’s about far more than her sex life. It’s about intimacy. It’s about love. This is a love that takes no account of gender, race, or even – as we discovered via a video starring a bullmastiff – species. It appears many things go on in a bed besides sex.
Tracey Emin seems to take a lot of flak in this country.
Maybe the kind of poignant statements her work is littered with are a bit too close to the bone:
“You stop me from feeling anything”
“I do not expect to be a mother but I do expect to die alone”
“Every time I feel love I think Christ I’m going to be crucified”
“I whisper to my past, do I have another choice”
But for all the vapidity she’s accused of, this is strong stuff.
Tracey Emin: Love is what you Want spans the artist’s entire career to date, and includes many specially commissioned and previously unseen works. This show opens the eyes to the vast expanse of Emin’s oeuvre. She’s prolific – working successfully in many media. Add to that she’s feisty, controversial and fun. We don’t care if some love to hate you Tracey. We love to love you.
Tracey Emin : Love is what you Want is at the Hayward Gallery until August 29.
Soap is one of my grand obsessions. I generally shower once a day with a great block of it and have been known to take up to two baths in addition to my shower. I am a cleansaholic. And if I had a to choose just one item to take to a desert island (cliched though that thought may be), the one item would be soap (although mascara would come close!). My favourite destinations to shop for soap are Liberty‘s beauty hall and Fresh (I love their milk soaps). But a rather magical soap brand has recently come to my attention and it is called Dr Bronner. Dr Bronner is probably one of the only beauty gurus to have been locked up in a mental asylum and go on to found a beauty brand. This was just one of the things that endeared me to it! He’s long gone now but his soaps – liquid and solid- remain and they are rather fabulous too. Not only are they vegan and organic and free from the harsh detergent ingredient Sodium Laureth Sulphate but they smell delicious – almond and rose are my favourites. They are incredibly gentle with a sparse and soft lather that is not in the slightest synthetic and foamy. What’s more, the company gives between 30% and 70% of post-tax profits to various charities and donates 20p from the sale of every soap bottle in the UK to the charity War Child. It’s a truly ethical and caring enterprise, but equally importantly a really pleasurable product to use in the shower or bath. From Waitrose, Whole Foods, Planet Organic and Fresh and Wild.
Last night’s Twin party to celebrate the launch of Twin IV was road blocked.
The lucky few were recipients of a rather generous bag of goodies. Here’s the breakdown:
In addendum to my post a few weeks ago about beauty shopping online there is another destination that I have only recently discovered that is absolutely amazing for beauty brands. Unexpectedly, it’s amazon.co.uk. It’s usually my number one stop for books – the marketplace for second hand books is excellent – the only place that rivals it is Abebooks for older, rarer titles. Anyway Amazon also happens to stock some fabuloulsy recherche French haircare that you could previously only find in Harrods. I’m talking about Leonor Greyl, which I know Chanel muse Lady Amanda Harlech used to rave about and disappeared from these shores several years ago. But who knew!? Amazon are now stocking it, and they produce some magical oils and treatments that are worth tracking down. They’re also home to another cult French haircare range called Rene Furterer which I discovered years ago in French pharmacies. It’s cheaper than Greyl – their shampoo is about £7.50 – and equally good for treatments and day-to-day haircare. I’m really surprised I didn’t know about Amazon‘s health and beauty department before – they also have French pharamcy staples such as Klorane and Biotherm – another two of my favourite brands – Klorane‘s dry shampoo is unsurpassed. Another shop to bookmark on your browser for competitively priced beauty shopping.
Twin joined forces with Labour party women this weekend to march against the cuts to government spending. Protestors all dressed in green and purple – the colours of the suffragette campaign. Record numbers turned out at Temple tube station on London’s Embankment (the head count was estimated between 250-500,000) before joining the main march to Hyde Park. Harriet Harman, Yvette Copper and the young Luciana Berger were all showing support in the rally. We even spotted a couple of celebrities including Sienna Miller. It all ties in very well with the theme of the upcoming issue – REBELLION.
Last season’s vogue for minimalism wasn’t something I could buy into wholeheartedly. To eschew brights and patterns from my wardrobe, and colour from my make-up palette would make me very sad and disheartened indeed. Minimalism was something I quite liked to buy into on occassional days – days when I felt rigour and understatement were called for – a visit to my therapist for example! So there is the odd day when I find that natural make up, nay a dearth of make-up and clothes in camel and black are appropriate. These are like detox days in a sense, a holiday from the rabid sartorial mayhem that usually makes my heart sing. I wash my face, scrape my hair back and apply the bare minimum of maquillage – usually Givenchy Phenomen’eyes mascara in black, eyebrow pencil by Laura Mercier and if I’m feeling particularly lavish some Clinique Chubby Stick in Richer Raisin. The latter is Clinique‘s latest innovation for lips and its rather wonderful. A fat, waxy little stick that you stroke on lips and that imparts nourishing balm and a veil of colour. Richer Raisin reminds me of a cult lip colour that Clinique used to make in the Nineties called Black Honey. Everyone wore it for that slightly enhanced nude look that so epitomised the nineties.
Anyway, those are my tips for a reductive make up routine. I’m loathe to say less is more because in general I don’t really agree with the aphorism, but there are occassional days when it feels like it really is.
Despite the on-going globalisation of beauty – Estee Lauder is expanding rapidly in India and China – not everything is now American. I still believe that the French and the Japanese are the go-to cultures for skincare. The French for reasonably priced pharmacy brands such as Biotherm, La Roche Posay, Nuxe, Caudalie, Darphin and Decleor – with these products you really can afford to do as chic French women do and stock up on every item in the range.
The Japanese excel in hi-tech anti-ageing (as they do with technology generally) and in creating ultra-light gossamer textures packed with nutrients and advanced scientific ingredients. Perhaps my favourite Japanese skincare brand of all (and I’m a huge fan of Shiseido, Kanebo and especially Shu Uemura) is SKII, a wonderfully futuristic skincare brand that is heavily used by superstar make up artist Pat McGrath when she’s making up models backstage at the shows. A caveat: these products are expensive and only available online at harrods.com. But they do really work. The narrative of how the brand started is also rather lovely. Some scientists were visiting a Saki brewerey in Japan and noticed that although the workers faces were wrinkled, their hands were incredibly soft, pale and line free. Investigations and experiments followed to identify what was causing the workers to have such youthful hands and the scientists found out it was Pitera, a by product of yeast and the brewing process. Thus is 1980, over 30 years ago, SKII was born, a skincare regime based upon the active ingredient Pitera. It was subsequently bought by the US beauty giant Proctor and Gamble, so it’s perhaps not quite as authentically Japanese as it once was. Best products to sample are the Skin Signature Moisture Cream, an excellent anti-ageing moisturiser with a nice light texture. Out this month are Cellumination Mask-In-Lotion and Brightening Derm Specialist – the former helps lock in moisture and even out skin tone pre-hydration and the latter is a dark spot and pigmentation eraser.
Identifying a comfortable and trendy dog cloth is turning out to be difficult, as more and more cute dog clothes are venturing in the global market on regular basis.
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