face in one application.’
Snort.
Of course, internally I’d be all oohs and aaahs, and praising modern science, but I was a fickle beast. The next week I’d be oohing over another product with similar zeal. However, I figured disloyalty was part of the job. I had to stay impartial. I mean, imagine if I only used the first products that ever impressed me? Completely unprofessional.
Besides, it invariably gave me currency at dinner parties: women
always
wanted to know about the latest new beauty products, and I
always
knew what they were. It was a beautiful dance.
‘Hiiii, Hannah!’
I had just,
just
stepped into the ye olde-style tea-gardens café and the PR had already zeroed in.
‘Oh, hey, Olivia!’ I smiled and air-kissed her, careful not to mess up either of our gloss jobs.
‘I
love
coral on you – you look amazing,’ she gushed.
‘Speak for yourself,’ I said, commenting on her beautiful, obviously expensive frock, which, with its busy colours and high floral quotient,
should
have looked atrocious, but actually looked amazing.
‘Sooo, how’s everything?’ she asked.
As I answered that things were good, but busy – the standard response – her thickly glossed smile didn’t waver. But her eyes slid down to my chin.
To them.
The twins that had sprung up that morning like tiny volcanoes, waiting to erupt and ruin my complexion for a good five days.
Olivia obviously realised she’d been caught staring, and so jumped in and awkwardly started her own version of how busy things were. But she couldn’t help it:
everyone stares at a
beauty editor with a blemish
, no matter how small.
I’d come to realise that as a beauty editor, you are not, by law, allowed to carry a flaw. There was an unspoken expectation that because you had every form of prevention, correction or concealment at your disposal, you had to look perennially flawless.
In addition, because you had elected to spend your working days advising/lecturing the public on how to avoid acne/cellulite/greasy hair/bad eyebrows/chipped nails/yellowed teeth/fake-tan lines, in theory you couldn’t ever sport any of those things. You had to live and breathe your gig. Your job shouldn’t define you, but in the beauty-editor game it absolutely, utterly, have-you-ever-seen-a-badly-dressed-fashion-editor did.
This had come as a bit of a shock to me, as pre-
Gloss
I rarely wore foundation, let alone concealer, which I was nowexpected to know how to master in the same way a model masters her calories.
I found that I’d actually come to adore this part of the job – I loved playing dress-up each morning with all of my ‘toys’ – but simultaneously it was very tiring. It bred vanity, induced insecurity, and paved the way for obsessive paranoia and way too much compact-mirror-glancing and surreptitious concealer-dabbing.
Friends had noticed. Well, some of them. When Gabe and I had gone for schmucktails – as he called them when I had suggested we go to a bar where there were lots of handsome, suit-clad men – he’d commented that I had reapplied my lips no less than four times in the one-hour sitting.
‘You’ve become a touch-up tart,’ he said dismissively as he sipped his gin fizz.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’re one of those painful beauty girls who touches up her make-up a thousand goddamn times whenever she’s further than a metre from the mirror that sits on her desk in place of her computer monitor.’
‘Gabe, I am
so
not a touch-up tart! Um, maybe the fact there are good-looking men everywhere has something to do with it?’
‘Forget it, honey. They all think you’re with me. You’re not getting any let’s-catch-up phone numbers tonight.’
‘You’re
such
a bitch.’
‘
Totally
. Do you love it?’ He’d said this in the style Paris Hilton so often did, and it always made me laugh, even when he was being nasty.
But today I was definitely being a touch-up tart. Just a very stealthy one.
On days when I had
Snort.
Of course, internally I’d be all oohs and aaahs, and praising modern science, but I was a fickle beast. The next week I’d be oohing over another product with similar zeal. However, I figured disloyalty was part of the job. I had to stay impartial. I mean, imagine if I only used the first products that ever impressed me? Completely unprofessional.
Besides, it invariably gave me currency at dinner parties: women
always
wanted to know about the latest new beauty products, and I
always
knew what they were. It was a beautiful dance.
‘Hiiii, Hannah!’
I had just,
just
stepped into the ye olde-style tea-gardens café and the PR had already zeroed in.
‘Oh, hey, Olivia!’ I smiled and air-kissed her, careful not to mess up either of our gloss jobs.
‘I
love
coral on you – you look amazing,’ she gushed.
‘Speak for yourself,’ I said, commenting on her beautiful, obviously expensive frock, which, with its busy colours and high floral quotient,
should
have looked atrocious, but actually looked amazing.
‘Sooo, how’s everything?’ she asked.
As I answered that things were good, but busy – the standard response – her thickly glossed smile didn’t waver. But her eyes slid down to my chin.
To them.
The twins that had sprung up that morning like tiny volcanoes, waiting to erupt and ruin my complexion for a good five days.
Olivia obviously realised she’d been caught staring, and so jumped in and awkwardly started her own version of how busy things were. But she couldn’t help it:
everyone stares at a
beauty editor with a blemish
, no matter how small.
I’d come to realise that as a beauty editor, you are not, by law, allowed to carry a flaw. There was an unspoken expectation that because you had every form of prevention, correction or concealment at your disposal, you had to look perennially flawless.
In addition, because you had elected to spend your working days advising/lecturing the public on how to avoid acne/cellulite/greasy hair/bad eyebrows/chipped nails/yellowed teeth/fake-tan lines, in theory you couldn’t ever sport any of those things. You had to live and breathe your gig. Your job shouldn’t define you, but in the beauty-editor game it absolutely, utterly, have-you-ever-seen-a-badly-dressed-fashion-editor did.
This had come as a bit of a shock to me, as pre-
Gloss
I rarely wore foundation, let alone concealer, which I was nowexpected to know how to master in the same way a model masters her calories.
I found that I’d actually come to adore this part of the job – I loved playing dress-up each morning with all of my ‘toys’ – but simultaneously it was very tiring. It bred vanity, induced insecurity, and paved the way for obsessive paranoia and way too much compact-mirror-glancing and surreptitious concealer-dabbing.
Friends had noticed. Well, some of them. When Gabe and I had gone for schmucktails – as he called them when I had suggested we go to a bar where there were lots of handsome, suit-clad men – he’d commented that I had reapplied my lips no less than four times in the one-hour sitting.
‘You’ve become a touch-up tart,’ he said dismissively as he sipped his gin fizz.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’re one of those painful beauty girls who touches up her make-up a thousand goddamn times whenever she’s further than a metre from the mirror that sits on her desk in place of her computer monitor.’
‘Gabe, I am
so
not a touch-up tart! Um, maybe the fact there are good-looking men everywhere has something to do with it?’
‘Forget it, honey. They all think you’re with me. You’re not getting any let’s-catch-up phone numbers tonight.’
‘You’re
such
a bitch.’
‘
Totally
. Do you love it?’ He’d said this in the style Paris Hilton so often did, and it always made me laugh, even when he was being nasty.
But today I was definitely being a touch-up tart. Just a very stealthy one.
On days when I had
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