Ugly Beauty (28 page)

Routine retouching of this kind has created an
ever-greater distance between what the beauty business tells us we ought to look
like and what is achievable. The pictures of the possible and desirable that we
carry inside our head are no longer based upon images of actual bodies. Jay
Nicholls, the dancer who so loves her Botox, is thinking of using it to prevent
underarm sweating. Not because sweating presents a particular problem: “I
already use a roll-on solution that stops me sweating for two weeks.” But she
“would love to be able to stop it for longer.”
36
What’s sweating, after all? A mere bodily function. And who,
these days, has any patience for those? Inside and out, we prefer the virtual
ideal.

Of course people are aware of this disjunction. And
the nervousness it arouses is reflected in their fury when the image of some
well-known icon appears so heavily reconstructed that it is no longer possible
to pretend these images reflect reality. With L’Oréal’s Beyoncé and Pinto
pictures, many of the protests were prompted by the perceived racism of the
alterations. But race played no part in the controversy surrounding the heavily
doctored images of actress Kate Winslet published by
Vanity
Fair
in November 2008. “Those of us who are not legally blind will
instantly realize that the woman on the cover looks
nothing
like the real Kate Winslet. Is the woman an imposter? An
evil twin? Or just the result of hundreds of man hours of digital retouching?
I’m going with ‘alien,’ ” typically announced one blog.
37

A video has recently been doing the rounds of
YouTube. Marked “Every Teenage Girl Should See This,” it shows a transformation
scene: a normally pleasant-looking young woman Photoshopped before your eyes,
her neck lengthened, her face thinned, her eyebrows raised, her complexion
clarified: duckling to swan. Photographically, she becomes the beauty no
“procedures”—and certainly no makeup—will ever make her in real life. How the
girl in question feels, faced with so clear and unattainable an image of what
she might look like if she only looked different, we are not told.

Unsurprisingly, the now habitual digital
enhancement of fashion and glamour images has given rise to a good deal of
agonizing. The British Liberal Democrat Party is so perturbed by its pernicious
influence on young girls’ self-esteem that it has proposed a new law. Just as
cigarette manufacturers must print a warning on every packet announcing that
tobacco is lethal, so they want every photographic image to be accompanied by a
message saying whether or not it has been doctored.
38

Our great-great-grandmothers encased their bodies
in whalebone in pursuit of the eighteen-inch waist; our mothers covered their
faces with paste and powder so that they might look like their favorite film
stars. And today’s women turn to the knife and the needle, liposucking off some
inches here, tightening a jawline there, plumping out this fallen cheek, lifting
that recalcitrant breast, in a never-ending, inevitably futile attempt to
achieve the ultimate unreality: Photoshop.

IV

W
hen Helena
Rubinstein started out in business, men held the upper hand, financially and
socially. And men decreed that respectable women should go unpainted.

Over the next half-century, the beauty industry ran
hand in hand with women’s progress toward an equal place in the public world.
Painting one’s face and cutting one’s hair signaled a new universe of choice and
possibility. It is no coincidence that lipstick, between the 1920s and the
1950s, was bright, bright red. Helena Rubinstein’s motives were of course
commercial: she wanted to be rich. But she also wanted independence, the right
to control both her life and her money. And the cosmetics industry not only
granted her wishes, it reflected her customers’ similar aspirations.

Today the wheel has come full circle. Cosmetics and
cosmetic “procedures,” far from being unthinkable, have become almost
compulsory. Who, now, dares be the only one in the room with wrinkles?
Ironically, although women’s independence and equality are enshrined in law,
their appearance is once again under someone else’s control.

And that someone is usually a man. Ninety percent
of those “having work done,” both in Europe and America, are women. And 90
percent of cosmetic surgeons are men. Although the British Association of
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons has 850 members, only 98 of them are women.
In America, not one of
New York
magazine’s nominated
“Best Doctors” for cosmetic surgery in 2008 was a woman. An online trawl through
plastic surgeons in New York and Los Angeles turned up only four women’s
names.

This gender imbalance does not mean that male
plastic surgeons exercise some sinister power over their female patients.
However, it does reflect the extent to which, in this world of supposed
equality, men rather than women still tend to be the active agents. And nowhere
is this truer than in the world the beauty industry now inhabits: the world of
big business.

In her groundbreaking book
The
Feminine Mystique
, published in 1963, Betty Friedan asked why so many
highly educated American women were effectively abandoning careers. Instead,
they were devoting their energies to homemaking, which, despite all the
propaganda in its favor, left them bored, frustrated, depressed, and
unfulfilled. Friedan concluded that in postwar America, women’s “really crucial
function . . . [was]
to buy
more things for the home
.” An entire industry of
advertising and market research devoted itself to persuading them to do so. And
since the marketing men had decided that “a woman’s attitude toward housekeeping
appliances cannot be separated from her attitude towards homemaking in general,”
it had become commercially imperative that as many women as possible spend time
at home being what business labeled “true housewives.” From the sellers’
standpoint, career women were considered “unhealthy.” And the persuaders had
conveyed their message so successfully that the American career woman had become
an endangered species.
39

Partly as a result of Friedan’s book, that changed.
But the sellers still needed to sell. So they expanded their sights to include
not just the home but the body—which of course accompanies you wherever you go
and whoever you are. And although the beauty business, the industry concerned
with bodies, had traditionally been a female enterprise, that now began to
change. The structure of the market thus remained what it had been pre-Friedan.
The buyers were mostly women, the sellers mostly men.

Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder,
the great names in twentieth-century cosmetics, got where they did because men
hadn’t yet cottoned on to beauty’s commercial possibilities. But by the time
Friedan began her research, they had begun to do so. Patrick O’Higgins, offered
a job by Helena Rubinstein in 1955, wandered uncertainly past the drugstore
windows, eyeing the products. His first thought was, “Golly! Who ever buys all
this crap?” and his second, “Women’s names! Women’s work?” Only when he noticed
the other names—Max Factor, Revlon, Charles Antell—did he reflect that “The
beauty business is an enormous industry.”
40
And
that made it suitable for men. Once the likes of Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden
had made beauty’s commercial possibilities apparent, the boys moved in.

Now they have taken full control. The beauty
business has become very big business indeed—and big business in the
twenty-first century is a male preserve. A survey released in March 2010 found
that only 10 percent of directors in Britain’s top 100 companies are women, and
twenty-five of the top firms had no women board members at all.
41
Whatever the potion, the firm manufacturing it
will almost certainly be run by men. And that firm will likely be L’Oréal, which
now owns more than 400 subsidiaries and 500 brands, spanning 150 different
countries, including (in addition to Helena Rubinstein) consumer products
Maybelline, Softsheen, Garnier, CCB; luxury products Lancôme, Biotherm, Kiehl’s,
Shue Uemura; the fragrance lines of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Cacharel,
Lanvin, Viktor & Rolf, Diesel, and YSL Beauté; professional products
Kerastase, Redken, Matrix, Mizani, Shue Uemura Art of Hair; cosmoceuticals
Vichy, La Roche Posay, Innéov, Skinceuticals, Sanoflore; The Body Shop; and
Laboratories Ylang, the main producer of cosmetics in Argentina, where L’Oréal
now controls 25 percent of the cosmetics market.

Seventy percent of L’Oréal’s chemists are women. In
Lindsay Owen-Jones’s words, “the future of the company is in their hands at that
level.”
42
But the board is another matter.
L’Oréal’s board of directors contains three women—Liliane Bettencourt, her
daughter Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, and Annette Roux, whose family runs a
yacht-making business in Brittany, not far from L’Arcouest. But none of these
sits on the ten-strong management committee, where all the firm’s real planning
is done. At the time of this writing, the committee contained just one woman:
the director of communications, Béatrice Dautresme—the same proportion as in the
British survey and, as it happens, an exact echo of the proportions of males to
females among cosmetic surgeons.

The constant concern of boards such as
L’Oréal’s—the ambition of all big business, as shareholders press for
ever-higher dividends—is expansion: to increase revenues and profits. And as the
main cosmetic market of mostly middle-aged women approaches saturation, new
avenues are being explored. One highly controversial trend encourages very young
women to start Botox treatment preemptively, to prevent lines before they form:
a 2009 market research survey found that there was particular growth of interest
in “procedures” among teenagers.
43

There is also the still largely untapped pool of
men. Helena Rubinstein’s wartime cosmetics packs for soldiers developed into a
postwar male market for such products as deodorants and aftershave. But despite
breakthroughs (such as President Reagan’s much-touted use of Grecian 2000 hair
dye) men never went for cosmetics in a big way. However, today’s fixation with
youthfulness and attainable perfection affects both sexes. As the world gets
fatter, and man-boobs (“moobs”) proliferate, more and more men are opting for
breast reductions. The British Association of Plastic Surgeons reported an
80-percent rise in demand for this operation in 2009.
44
And they’re worrying about their wrinkles. Boots’ “Protect and
Perfect” line now includes a special range for men, while in a recent
advertising campaign, a succession of aging male icons including Pierce Brosnan,
the last James Bond but one, fronted for L’Oréal’s tautening cream “Revitalift.”
If straight men can be induced to share what was once a dread exclusive to women
and gays, the potential market at once grows by almost 50 percent.

Whatever the sex of the consumer, however, the
world of cosmetics is still, as it always has been, associated with social
control. In Madame Rachel’s day, the argument was about keeping women in their
place. For Helena Rubinstein, cosmetics were her route to emancipation; for her
generation of women, they symbolized freedom. For Eugène Schueller, convinced
that control and authority were essential aspects of a good society in which
“Adam delved while Eve span,” they paradoxically conferred the means to enforce
dictatorship. And now, when Madame Rachel’s “Beautiful For Ever” is literally
and routinely attainable, the cosmetics world is the visible expression of a
society in which anything is available to those with the means to buy it. The
body has become a mere canvas, upon which the digital-age beauty business
remasters our image of what is physically possible. But since perfection is ipso
facto unattainable, what is really on offer, in the world of beauty as
elsewhere, is infinite discontent.

Coda

Two Old Ladies

Work has been my best beauty treatment! It keeps
the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young. It
certainly keeps a woman alive!

—H
ELENA
R
UBINSTEIN
,
1956

H
elena
Rubinstein died at ninety-two, in full command of her empire. At the time of
this writing, Eugène Schueller’s daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, is eighty-seven
years old and still an active member of the L’Oréal board. Madame Rubinstein
personified her own views of what a woman’s life might be; Madame Bettencourt
was raised in accordance with her father’s quite opposite views. Which is the
more successful life model? Or, to put it another way, which, if either, leads
to contentment?

If money is the key, then these must have been the
happiest of lives. Helena Rubinstein died before rich lists, but would certainly
have figured on them had they existed in her day. And in 2007 Liliane
Bettencourt, with a fortune of $20.7 billion, was, according to
Forbes
, the wealthiest woman in the world, and its
twelfth-richest person. By 2009, both her ranking and her fortune had slipped,
to twenty-first place and $13.4 billion, respectively (she was rumored to have
lost “an undisclosed amount of money” in a fund overseen by René-Thierry Magnon
de la Villehuchet, whose judgment was less impressive than his name and who
committed suicide after losing $1.4 billion in Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi
scam).
1
Her place as wealthiest woman had
been claimed by a Walmart heiress. But although comparable losses would
devastate public finances in the city-sized economies, sums like these more
usually represent, at the level of individual lives they can make no conceivable
difference. For a Bettencourt, the only real difficulty is in disposal. How can
one spend even a fraction of that money? Solving that problem has been one of
her life’s chief occupations. “Fortune is an opportunity,” she told
Le Figaro
in 2008. “You only need to look around—there
are actions that impose themselves—and then go for it. Simply, without ulterior
motives, without calculation, without waiting for a ‘return on investment.’
”

But money, however plentiful, cannot immunize its
possessors against misfortune. And poverty, though always an inconvenience, is
not always a fatal drawback. Helena Rubinstein was raised in poverty, but her
subsequent instinct always to include her sisters in her good fortune attests to
a strong sense of family solidarity. By contrast, Liliane Schueller, born to
parents who had already become rich, suffered a cold and lonely childhood. When
she was five, the rich little girl’s mother died of an abscess on the liver. And
this calamity would shape Liliane’s life.

She has only once spoken publicly about this, in an
interview with
Egoïste
magazine in 1987. “They came
to fetch me in the middle of the night and I saw my father on his knees at the
foot of my mother’s bed. . . . When she died there was no more music
in the house. She was a musician. A very beautiful woman, very tall, who got on
easily with other people. . . . It meant my father was left to raise
me as he wanted. When he had time, that is. . . . It isn’t easy being
raised by your father when your mother’s gone. There’s an absence of
tenderness.”
2

Liliane’s upbringing certainly presented her father
with a problem. His wife’s death occurred at a moment when he was diversifying
in numerous directions—celluloid, photographic film, Russia, paint. There could
be no question of looking after Liliane himself even had he wanted to (which he
surely did not, being a man for whom child-rearing was doctrinally a woman’s
job). So he sent her to a Dominican convent school, where she remained for ten
years. But the mother superior, though kind, was no substitute for the mother
who had died. Nor did the holidays bring any respite from austerity. Home,
Liliane remembered, was “all about the business, the economic climate, working
hard.”

This did not imply grimness—on the contrary,
Schueller enjoyed luxury. He filled his houses with specially commissioned
furniture, owned a yacht and a Rolls-Royce. But he was a particularly unsuitable
lone parent for an only daughter. Business was his sole interest: “Work was how
he communicated with me, and vice-versa. When he talked to me about a book or
some other thing, he was still talking about work. . . . Psychology,
action, ideas, that’s still all business.” Yet this fascinating world was one
into which, on principle, Liliane could never be admitted. Although she was sent
to work in her father’s factory during the last three weeks of every vacation
from the age of fifteen, starting by sticking labels on bottles, her father’s
writings made it clear that there was never any possibility she might succeed
him. Admittedly his wife had kept the business going while he was away during
World War I, but that was out of necessity. For Liliane there was no such
necessity. Nor, despite her obvious intellectual capacities, did she attend
university. It was her husband who became L’Oréal’s vice president, her husband
who, cushioned by his wife’s money, became a senator and a minister. Her job was
to support, partner, entertain, do charity work. That was what women did.

Of course it was not what Helena Rubinstein did—and
her father disapproved of her quite as heartily as Schueller would have done in
similar circumstances. But although Herzl Rubinstein hated what his daughter had
become, the home he provided, and the Jewish tradition of strong women that
underlay its culture, gave her (albeit unwittingly, and to his horror) the
self-confidence to break away. And the consequence was a life defined not by
money but by the business success that produced it. Like Eugène Schueller, of
whom this was also true, Rubinstein enjoyed her money—the more so since, like
him, she had once been poor—but it was their work, not their bank balance, that
mattered most to them. This was something of which Rubinstein, to the end of her
long span, was acutely conscious, and which she profoundly valued. Work was, as
she said, the best beauty treatment.

The upbringing Schueller gave his daughter,
however, meant that this satisfying life could never be hers. That would have
necessitated rebellion, which for her was unthinkable. Her love and respect for
her father were “visceral,” a friend observed, her admiration for him,
limitless. When he died, and she found herself owner of the business, she
became, above all, the keeper of his flame—which included his values.
3
Yet that same upbringing, with its constant
emphasis on achievement, also ensured that, paradoxically, she could never be
satisfied by the life for which it destined her. “As far as people are
concerned, if a woman’s rich, she can’t be intelligent,” Madame Bettencourt told
Egoïste
defensively. “People park you in a
corner and leave you there. Rich—it’s not an agreeable word. In fact it’s an
ugly word. I prefer fortune. That implies luck.”

The sense conveyed in that interview is of a life
pervaded by an undefined frustration. Raised to consume, able to possess
anything she might desire, consumption holds no glamor for Schueller’s daughter.
When an art critic cattily observed that Helena Rubinstein possessed
“unimportant paintings by every important painter of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries,” Madame retorted, “I may not have quality but I have
quantity. Quality’s nice but quantity makes a show.”
4
“Making a show,” though, is the last thing Bettencourt has ever
wanted. “I like emptiness more than clutter,” she told
Egoïste
. “Even if I fall in love with a painting, I’m quite happy to
see it on someone else’s wall.” Rubinstein kept her jewels in a filing cabinet,
sorted alphabetically, A for amethysts, B for beryls, D for diamonds, ready to
hand for instant use. Liliane Bettencourt owns an equally astonishing collection
of gems—bags of cut but unset stones, diamond necklaces, shelves of emeralds,
rubies, sapphires—but they are kept in a bank vault whose contents rarely see
the light of day,
5
while no photograph shows
her wearing anything more extravagant than a pair of stud earrings. Rubinstein’s
New York living room, like everything else about her, was tasteless but full of
gusto. It sported an acid-green carpet designed by Miró, twenty Victorian carved
chairs covered in purple and magenta velvets, Chinese pearl-inlaid coffee
tables, gold Turkish floor lamps, life-sized Easter Island sculptures,
six-foot-tall blue opaline vases, African masks around the fireplace, and
paintings covering every inch of wall space. But in Liliane Bettencourt’s
tasteful salon, gusto is conspicuous by its absence, the dead hand of the
interior decorator everywhere apparent.

These contrasting styles are partly a function of
milieu. Slender and terrifically elegant—in 2009 she was elected a permanent
member of
Vanity Fair
’s best-dressed Hall of
Fame—Liliane Bettencourt is a supreme exemplar of “bcbg,”
bon chic, bon genre
, a style to which all Frenchwomen aspire and
whose standards, of both
chic
and
genre
, are set by the couture-clad haute bourgeoisie
of which Madame Bettencourt is a leading member. In bcbg, taste is all, excess
is suspect, and a rather uniform, perfectly executed, expensive understatement
rules. The whole point is not to draw attention to oneself. The Bettencourts’
dislike of the public eye was legendary: for them, one of the privileges riches
bought was total privacy. When Bruno Abescat, a financial journalist at
L’Express
, set out to write a book about “France’s
wealthiest couple,” it was a year before he was able to get near them in the
flesh—and then only at a public distribution of prizes financed by the
Bettencourt Schueller Foundation.
6

For Helena Rubinstein, by contrast, the whole point
of spending money was to show you had money to spend. If nobody knew, half the
pleasure was lost. In her milieu, wealth validated every eccentricity, and such
was her status within it that even her ignorance was accepted as part of her
personality. During a lunch in New York the conversation turned to the sad fate
of Joan of Arc, burned as a heretic by an ancestor of Edith Sitwell, who was one
of the guests. “Somebody had to do it!” cried Madame—an observation so
stunningly crass that it would have barred her forever from bcbg circles. But
the New Yorkers simply turned the conversation elsewhere.

The essentials of personal life, however, are
unaffected by such details. And in that department Bettencourt, happily married
for fifty-seven years, with a happily married daughter and grandchildren living
just down the road in Neuilly, would seem to have beaten Rubinstein hands down.
In 1987, after thirty-seven years of marriage, Liliane described her husband as
“someone quite out of the ordinary”
7
; after his
death in 2007 she remained in love with his memory. He was “charming, alive,
intelligent. We were together fifty years, there was something indescribable
between us, and then business and politics—it was so exciting.”
8

By contrast, Rubinstein’s intimate life was a
disaster. Her first husband, whom she married for love, constantly ran after
other women. Her elder son bored her; her younger son, Horace, whom she adored,
quarreled with her incessantly, made nothing of his life, and died in his
forties. Artchil, whom she married for companionship, predeceased her by twelve
years. So she blotted out the unbearable (Horace’s death, Titus’s infidelity)
and compensated for the absence of real personal attachments with compulsive
hyperactivity. And yet—despite this catalog of emotional catastrophes—her life
was fulfilled in a way that Bettencourt’s never has been.

There is one striking similarity in the lives of
Helena Rubinstein and Liliane Bettencourt. Each, in old age, established a
friendship with a much younger man. As the years passed, these friendships
became the women’s most important emotional focus. But the two relationships,
apparently so similar, were quite different in emphasis. And those differences
reveal, perhaps more than anything else in the lives of these two formidable
women, their true vulnerabilities.

Helena Rubinstein’s young man, Patrick O’Higgins,
was the impecunious playboy son of Irish diplomats. He first noticed her in
1950, a tiny nexus of palpitating impatience barreling down the New York street
ahead of him, furiously tapping her foot when lights forced her to wait before
crossing the road. He had no idea who this vision might be, but soon afterwards
ran into her at a cocktail party and was introduced. She was then seventy-eight,
at the height of her power in the social and fashionable worlds. He was fifty
years her junior, handsome, charming, and disorganized. She at once took a fancy
to him, but although their conversation was noted by Rubinstein-watchers,
nothing came of it until a year or so later, when out of the blue she asked him
to lunch. After a copious meal (“I need to keep up my energy!”) they went on to
see
Ben-Hur
(“Most interesting! I’m glad the Jewish
boy won!”) then returned to her apartment, where, over a glass of whiskey, she
asked him, “What do you really want to do with your life?” When he hesitated,
she at once took over: “
Let Me tell you!
”
9
And tell him she did, from then on until the
day she died, fifteen years later.

O’Higgins’ role in Madame’s life was to do and be
whatever she required at the time. He accompanied her everywhere, as secretary,
nurse, escort, interpreter, PR man, social director, and majordomo. Her strange
and compelling personality mesmerized him. A floating bachelor (he may well have
been gay, though he never openly admitted it—in the 1950s and sixties, when he
knew Madame, homosexuality was still unmentionable), he received from her a
focus his life had hitherto lacked. After first Artchil and then Horace died,
they became increasingly close, until toward the end of her life he described
their relationship as that of “a devoted son and a demanding mother.”
10
“Who’s your goy?” the Israeli prime minister
David Ben-Gurion once asked her during a long and tedious dinner. “That’s
Patrick!” Madame beamed. “And . . . and, yes,
he
is my goy
.”
11