Do You Want to Know a Secret?

The secret is that it's very, very late [or very, very early, depending on how you view the time] and I just handed in a beauty article and I should be tired but I actually feel invigorated--because I love to write precisely about potions, treatments, hair products, trendy nail polish shades [it's nude this fall] and more.

I guess these things have always intrigued me, since I was a tween and teen and read my rare copies of Seventeen cover to cover in the green and white upstairs bathroom, and wrote away to companies like Coppertone to see if they'd send me free trial sizes. They often did. I loved getting the little bottles in the mail, and also the way the products smelled. [Is it possible to ever forget the scent of Coppertone? For me, it's the quintessential bouquet of long, sun-dappled summer days, Rockaway Beach on weekends, the ad with the girl in the diaper, and my mother's love, all wrapped up in one.] I arranged the tiny bottles lovingly on my shelf in the bathroom.

Other Voices, Other Rooms
Tonight, I could hear my past editors, and could see their editing marks.

Beauty writing has evolved from pure fluff to more serious reporting, with magazines like Vogue and Allure digging beneath the surface of product claims and promises.

It all started, really, with Linda Wells, the excellent editor of Allure since its inception, who used to report on beauty for The New York Times. In fact, when Conde Nast launched Allure to great fanfare in 1991, I was a writer at Good Housekeeping, and wrote a letter to Ms. Wells to tell her how much I loved her reporting style and looked forward to the magazine. She wrote me a nice letter back.

Read Between the Lines
Be sure to say a product "can" or "may" help improve appearance of skin--flatly saying it improves appearance of skin is a quicksand trap fraught with legal and health missteps. Some woman or girl in South Dakota might take your word for it, spend a lot of money on the stuff, and end up suing or at least losing all confidence in you and your magazine when she finds out the stuff does nothing for the way her skin looks.

Likewise, don't say anything makes skin softer, but you can say it helps skin feel softer, feel being the operative word. No guarantees in life, especially not regarding beauty products.

Right now, I'm thinking of Janet Chan, Kathy Hubert, Ellen Levine, Annemarie Iverson and Donna Bulseco, editors and colleagues who taught me a lot about beauty writing, with what they did and did not say. Thank you. It wasn't always easy to hear that something had to be revised again, but I learned so much from the process.

Need my beauty sleep now, for sure, so I can be fresh for my next project tomorrow [I mean today].