Growing up with a famous last name is usually pretty helpful when it comes to forging a career, and none more so, points out the Financial Times, than in the beauty business, where you can either slot yourself into a cushy role within the family empire, like Aerin Lauder or Olivia Chantecaille, or use your ready-made brand identity to start your own company, like Vidal Sassoon's son Elan.
We hadn't seen Bruce Wasserstein—billionaire financier, Lazard chairman, owner of New York magazine—for quite some time until he made this appearance yesterday at a breakfast for Fortune. We're very happy to see he appears to be keeping up New York's "Best Doctors" issue: The new Bruce is trimmer, his skin looks is taut and smooth, and those unsightly bags under his eyes have completely vanished. We don't know who deserves the credit for this impressive transformation (Sherrell? Dan? Pat?), but whoever it is, please know that we fully approve of Bruce 2.0!
A cold-hearted, unfeeling Connecticut judge has thrown out a woman's claim that L'Oreal ruined her life by giving her brown hair. Charlotte Feeney says that a box of blonde hair dye contained brunette dye, and that as a result "she suffered headaches and anxiety, missed the attention that blondes receive and had to stay home and wear hats most of the time." Now who knows if she'll ever be able to put the pieces of her life back together? [AP]
You've probably seen the commercial: Avon Anew Clinical Advanced Dermabrasion System promises to fade fine lines and improve skin texture. Sounds great, and at $28 it's a lot cheaper than going to an actual dermatologist. But the authorities in the UK have called bullshit on the product's claims, and ordered the company to pull the ads. American TV audiences will be left unprotected from the deception, but we're still safe from the corrupting sight of Eva Mendes' boobs, thank goodness. [Daily Mail]
It's going to take more than a major economic crisis to keep women from their Botox appointments, say dermatologists who have seen absolutely no slowdown in business. The same goes for high-end skincare products, which have witnessed an increase in sales compared to the same time period last year. How could this be possible, you ask? "Women have a basic belief that they save on the things they have to buy in order to spend on the things they want to buy," opines an ad exec who works on beauty accounts. "It's like men and booze." And even easier to conceal: Whereas it's obvious what a man's been spending his money on when he arrives home slurring and smelling like a bar, a woman might have thousands of dollars worth of injections but no one has to know. "Most husbands," says plastic surgeon Robert Guida, "don't pay attention to what their wives look like."
Have you heard about the salon in Midtown that offers Botox in 30 minutes or less? SmoothMed has been open for more than a year now, but if you're interested in seeing how some New Yorkers spend their lunch breaks, the video is after the jump. Now you know why your boss occasionally comes back to the office in the afternoon with a puffy face and she's also unable to express any emotion.
Here's a newsflash: Pushers of facecreams slap lots of pseudoscientific words on their labels, leading consumers to believe said creams actually work. Terms like "nanospheres," "biotechnology," and "pro-collagen," lend a plausible veneer to claims that wrinkle treatments are going to change your life beyond the little rush of endorphins from opening a pretty package, reports the Times.
Nothing makes us drop our guard and fall for an expensive and dubious new beauty product more than a clever marketing coinage. The latest? Skingestibles! Naturally, this means something you swallow to make your skin youthful, smooth and generally look like you've never smoked a cigarette, drank bourbon straight from the bottle, and rebelliously foregone SPF. (Or that's the idea, anyway.) "Glowelle," which launched at Bergdorf's and Neiman's this week, is a powder containing various antioxidants that you dissolve in water and drink for an alleged, well, glow. The catch is that it's $112 for a month's supply. Much more economical is a product from our friend Dr. Fredric Brandt (left), the man responsible for tending to the facial needs of Madonna: His "Antioxidant Water Booster" is only $35, and while it probably won't actually have a discernibly different effect from a bottle of Snapple, on the plus side you won't risk looking like Dr. Brandt himself. After the jump, a totally unrelated video of Dr. Freddie in all his plasticky glory. Just in case you're falling asleep at the office this afternoon and a shock to your nervous system.
Natasha Singer's beauty trend beat at the Times has hitherto seemed like a pretty sweet gig: She finds out about the best wrinkle busters, talks to liposuction experts, and no doubt gets a bunch of free skincare and make-up. All in, it's hardly on a par with risking life and limb in Kabul, or even risking the will to live by interviewing monstrous celebrities. But with her latest assignment she has truly earned her stripes as a brave, intrepid journalist: She joined a manicure/pedicure team catering to Fashion Week and actually scraped dirt from models' finger and toenails.
When it comes to selling treatments that claim to get rid of fat and cellulite, these days doctors and estheticians can impute magical powers to a big slab of metal and plastic, throwing in words like "laser" and "light energy" and "high frequency," and pluck out of the air a price with a vague connection to both how much they paid for the machine and just how desperate/gullible/rich their potential customers are. Women will then eagerly sign up for the treatment, regardless of whether or not it actually does anything. And, according to today's Wall Street Journal, it probably doesn't.
The beauty industry will never, ever run out of ridiculous new ingredients that allegedly have magical anti-aging, anti-blemish, anti-whatever-might-be-making-you-ugly powers. And when that ingredient has the reputation of being precious and expensive, so much the better! The substance that one cosmetics company is pretending will make your skin look better this time around? Caviar, as Joshua David Stein discovers at a press event for Pevonia Botanica, a brand which we're sure you don't need us to tell you is "spa exclusive" and "synergistically unite[s] science and nature." Caviar, you see, has the "same amino acids" as collagen, which is just as convincing as every other bit of pseudoscience in skincare ads, so who cares if you smell like a Russian breakfast?
It's the kind of story tailor-made for a slow news month. To go into the annals of creepy/gimmicky treatments along with cupping and leeches (did you know they're back?) here's a pedicure for those who find having their toes buffed and scrubbed by an actual person just too pedestrian: Instead, you can stick your feet in a fish tank and have all your rough skin nibbled away by tiny karp. Allegedly the practice started in Turkey, is popular in some Asian countries, and has of course been enjoyed by Vanessa Williams' Wilhelmina in Ugly Betty. Still, we wouldn't recommend holding your breath waiting for it to come to your local Korean salon. After the jump, see Diane Sawyer break out the "fish-cam" and let the hungry fish loose on her feet, a sensation she describes as like "tiny little kisses."
If you ever selected a plastic surgeon or LASIK doctor based on a random YouTube video, it's probably apt that that video only happened as a result of an under-the-table payment and the doctor was really incompetent and now you walk around blind and ugly. But what about the victims of the future? Plenty of doctors have gone right ahead and offered patients rebates or huge discounts in exchange for posting glowing videos about their procedures online, although something like that would be patently unethical in the "regular" media. Docs are like, "Huh, rules, really? I just thought it would be nice!" Patients are like, "Sweet, cheap surgery!" The loser is you, the affluent, narcissistic consumer. A couple of typical videos are after the jump; just because "a famous celebrity (name undisclosed for privacy)" gets LASIK from Dr. Feinerman doesn't mean you have to, too:
There's not much to be said about this ad for HeadBlade, a nifty head-shaving product, except this: when you're putting a double entendre in your tagline about guys getting oral sex, do you want them to also associate that process with a blade? Seems a little too "John Wayne Bobbitt's most memorable razor" to cause a very positive psychological connection with the target audience. The full, misguided, gay-targeted ad, after the jump.
I don't claim to be an expert on hair, or sexiness, but I'd be willing to wager that far fewer people have heard of "Sexy Hair Concepts LLC" than have heard of Victoria's Secret. Nevertheless, Sexy Hair Concepts somehow managed to persuade a Trademark Board that "consumers were likely to confuse the lingerie giant's 'So Sexy' trademark for haircare items with Sexy Hair Concepts' various trademarks using the word 'sexy' for its coiffure line." Consumers will be wandering around in a sheer sexiness daze! Victoria's Secret's response to the ruling: you trademark people must be crazy:
The aftermath of last week's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" photo retouching scandal remains unclear. It all started with retoucher Pascal Dangin telling the New Yorker that he had cleaned up photos for the campaign featuring ostensibly "Real" women, which would be a hugely hypocritical move. Dove, their ad agency, and celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz all denied it, saying they did nothing to the pictures except "to remove dust and do color correction." Today, Ad Age tries to decide whether or not the fiasco will hurt Dove—and the company is still stonewalling, while the New Yorker is standing by (most of) its story.
You know that Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty," which featured women slightly less skeletal than the average model, and therefore demonstrated that Dove is the greatest, most big-hearted company ever in the world? Well now there's a scandal about it! A new New Yorker story about Pascal Dangin, the world's "premier retoucher of fashion photographs," contains this tidbit on Dove's campaign, which ostensibly celebrates authentic, unadulterated womanhood:
The Dermatologist-Sunscreen Industry cabal is trying to kill us all! They want us to be pale, shivering closet cases, scared to venture outside for fear of being melted by the sunlight, like bloggers. Luckily, the fearless Indoor Tanning Association is here to bring the truth to light, ha. The group, which represents the major industry of Long Island, is running an ad in USA Today decrying the health nuts' attempts to "wrongly scare people out of the sun." They point out that a little sunlight gives you Vitamin D, which protects against many cancers! Except the skin cancer you got from being out in the sun. After the jump, the Indoor Tanners' press release [via AgencySpy], with the type of foolproof logic you would expect from those who spend hundreds of hours under artificial radiation lamps:
Remember that whole "Campaign For Real Beauty" by Dove that was all about showing that real, non-model women can be pretty too? Well, they're moving on from all that. They have a new, more fitting face now: beautiful, famous, shapely singer Alicia Keys. Screw you, real women! Dove is sponsoring a new "micro-series" called "Fresh Takes" starring Keys. It will air, appropriately, during The Hills on MTV. They've also used research to uncover this critical fact: "96 percent of women in their twenties say their inner voice speaks to them on a typical day." Psychosis? From the looks of the preview, this show will be stilted and terrible; the trailer, after the jump.
