Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

Redken Real Control

I was very happy to get samples of Redken's new Real Control line of haircare products for "dense/dry/sensitized hair" in the mail a couple of weeks ago, as my fried-to-a-fare-thee-well bleached mop has the texture of something you could use to exfoliate a rinocerous.

Today I made time to use the Intense Renewal mask. I find hair masks to present certain scheduling issues. Like, what am I supposed to be doing for the recommended 15 minutes conditioning time, and where should I be doing it? Does this mean I should shower twice? Or just stand there until I prune or freeze? I compromised by leaving the mask on for just five minutes while shaving, but that was plenty; lo-and-behold, my hair has resumed its pre-bleach job texture, which is pretty miraculous. It's as if I have the hair of a 12 year-old Danish girl.

Tia Williams at Shake Your Beauty reports similar results from using this stuff on her naturally curly Dominican hair, and adds something else she learned from Kaz Amor at a Redken event: "The reason my hair gets frizzy in humid weather is because it's lacking its own moisture, so my hair needs to draw it from the air. If it's already moisturized--ie, these fab products--it won't need to do that."

Unfortunately, the shampoo in this line includes a sulfate, which I can't tolerate (lauryl, laureth, they're all itchy to me), but the daily conditioner is very nice when used after my Aubrey Organics, if not as miraculous as the mask. It's worth noting that Jackie tried the shampoo and conditioner and found it too weighing on her "normal" hair, so this really is a specialty product line for those of us with Brillo hair.

I wish I could give you a link, but the stuff ain't available until June, and Redken's website is mum on its very existence.

Beauties: Kiki Smith

I am going to be waiting outside the Gap when it opens on the 15th, to make sure I get one of the limited edition t-shirts designed by the art world goddess Kiki Smith. The Gap, in partnership with the Whitney Museum, is producing shirts by thirteen artists, including such sirens as Smith, Marilyn Minter, Hanna Liden, Barbara Krueger and Sarah Sze, and such sirons (which I hereby declare to be the masculine form of siren) as Chuck Close and Jeff Koons.

Last year Target issued a limited edition of artist-designed bath towels and I happily snapped up one by Cindy Sherman. I am all for mass-produced art, and I'm glad to see this from the Gap, which has been struggling of late to find its mojo.

Pic of the t-shirt after the jump!

How thick is your line?

  I love low resolution cameras 
  Originally uploaded by dynamist.

I am almost always displeased with my eyeliner. I don't have a steady enough hand to do liquid liner, and my pencil lines always strike me as way too thick (or too thin). As ever, I am a woman of extremes.

How about you? Any tricks up your well-starched sleeves?

Jealous

How absolutely stunning is M's hair color?

Few women could carry such a color off so well. Could you?

Super Vixens Chapter Four: Eartha, Ava, Sharon and Me

Chapter Four of Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge happens to be the big makeup chapter, in which I gather tips and tricks from  Sharon Stone's makeup artist and Rita Hayworth's choreographer, and even eyelash queen Eartha Kitt herself. The chapter starts out like this:

My favorite shade of lipstick is a color called Silent Red. It's a liverish, bloody, voluptuous unction, heavy with complicated pigments; the saturated hues of love and anger mixed together in a neurotic, regal, murderous, transcendent red. Over the years I've had long auburn curls, Louise Brooks bobs, and platinum buzz cuts, but always the red lips...

A new chapter appears every week on the way to the new print edition.

I left my tweezers in San Francisco

  Jeremy Pepper's goodbye party 
  Originally uploaded by dynamist.

My good ones from Rubis, anyway. All I have are a flimsy little pair that breaks the hairs off rather than pulling them out by the root. (This picture is from March, but is an accurate representation of how my brows look when they haven't been pruned properly for a while.)

I did my best today, with wax strips and a prayer. It's not even close to sufficient. Good thing I'm flying back to the Bay Area tomorrow...

Spring Fragrance Makeover: Tea For Two

My favorite teas tend to be dark, smoky and oriental--as opposed to the weak, milky westernized teas you sip in a drawing room with your elbows resting on lace antimacassars while nibbling digestive biscuits. I'll take a fermented puer "camel tea" or a lapsang souchong over English breakfast any day. So I was very eager to try L'Artisan Parfumeur's Tea for Two, which LuckyScent described as rich and smoky, with some chai-like spice and a vanilla drydown.

But when I sampled my decant from The Perfumed Court, I smelled not tea, but strong tobacco, a note that only intensified through the drydown. Now, a little tobacco can be a good thing. A commenter on basenotes said of Tea for Two: "My uncle grew tobacco on his farm and that is what Tea For Two smells like to me. If you have never smelled large amounts of tobacco hung for drying you are missing out on the greatest smoky scent that exists!" And I have long loved Grandiflorum's Blond Tabac, which to me smells woody, but the charm of which which has been dulled by familiarity over time.

I had hoped Tea for Two would be my new smoky scent, but on me, I fear the tobacco note is too dominant. I will try it a few more times, but I'm thinking this unisex scent will end up in the hands of my brother Din, who often smells of a good cigar and would probably carry this off brilliantly. I may have to order a sample of CB I Hate Perfume's Burning Leaves next.

Nancy Sinatra & Me

Chapter Three of Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge went up today, about a pool party at the Playboy Mansion circa 1996. Here's an excerpt:

I make my way back to the pool. I need a loo, and find one in a pool cabana that looks like a seventies wine bar, the kind of place that was always called The Hobbit. There's a dimmer switch next to the commode, and a bowl of bobby pins next to the sink. On the way out I bump into a woman in a tuxedo. She has a cigar in one hand and a sushi roll in the other.

I spot Mel Torme.

At the bar, I try to get a drink, but instead I end up in a pitch meeting with a loathsome, tubby creature who claims to be a movie producer. «It's a John Wayne, Tom Cruise kind of thing!» he exclaims. «A musical kickboxing thing!» As I turn to leave, he slips me his business card. «I went to college with Stallone,» he whispers.

I lose him, because the fifty-four-year-old Nancy Sinatra is about to make her comeback by performing «These Boots Are Made for Walking» on a cramped little stage...

Read the rest of the chapter here. I may have to tease my hair today, in tribute to Nancy.

Beauties: Kingi Carpenter, the Betsey Johnson of Toronto

Kingi Carpenter, owner of Peach Berserk in Toronto, is her own best advertisement; wearing a baby blue ruched top of her own design, with babydoll pink lipstick, her arms covered in ink from silkscreening fabrics, she is the very picture of the midwestern farm girl who made good as a fashion designer in the big city. This is what Dorothy would have looked like at 45, had she decided not to click her heels together and go home, but to stay in the big, bright Emerald City with her fabulous new friends and make a life for herself.

I have always thought of Toronto as a mecca of street style and alternative fashion, and was excited to visit Queen Street West, a neighborhood of shops, bars and restaurants which has grown up around the Ontario College of Art and Design. The first shop I stumbled into was Peach Berserk, where I instantly felt that old hungry-eyed yearning that only comes when you walk into certain temple-like stores. The shotgun shop is crammed to bursting with colorful garments in hand-silkscreened jersey, silk and taffeta that reminded me strongly of Betsey Johnson in the late 70s/early 80s, and when I mentioned this to Kingi she smiled and said, "I made a trip to New York in the early 80s, and when I walked into the Betsey Johnson store I said, 'This is what I want to do with my life.'"

I was surprised, when I began fingering the various garments, at how substantial the fabrics were and how impeccable the finish work was--something you don't see often in clothes with this much edge. Kingi and her lovely assistants print and sew in an open workshop in the back of the store, and will custom make any garment in any fabric. It's also hard to find clothes this youthful and fun that also fit a womanly body, and these are deftly cut to flatter the body.

Kingi is a great lifestyle example for my generation of artsy women who came of age in the 70s and now want to figure out how to approach middle age without succumbing to that dull urban classiness that seems to be the general prescription for how to look good after 40. There are a couple more pics after the jump!

Ruby Woo

The risk you with a dramatic change of hair color is that none of your clothes or makeup will work with the new look. The Kiehl's tinted moisturizer I'd been using happily for months now suddenly looked a bit ruddy with my new blonde, as did my earthier lipsticks, so off to MAC I went, in search of some colors with a bit more, ah, va-voom.

First, all bottle blondes need a perfectly pitched red lipstick, and mine turns out to be Ruby Woo, a bluish red that goes on bone dry and has a true eggshell finish. Because it's so dry, it can be applied with precision, stays in place well and never comes off on my teeth, smears or feathers, so I do not end up looking like a crazy old lady. It's the rare red lipstick that I can completely forget I'm wearing.

Next, I found a perfect color match in MAC Studio Fix Fluid SPF 15 foundation in NC30, and it, too, has a retro matte finish without feeling dry on my dry skin. Where the Kiehl's had a pleasantly warming effect when my hair was cooler and darker, this has a yellow cast and curiously enough, looks buttery instead of sallow now that my hair has a yellow tint to it as well. (I have noticed that right after I take the big heat curlers out, my hair looks like nothing so much as a giant kernel of buttered popcorn.)

Finally, I found myself craving a true white eye shadow, to go with the creamy beige skin and red lips, so I picked up some eye shadow in White Frost. I have taken to using MAC Paint Pot in Bare Study, a nude with some shimmer, as an eyeshadow base, as it resists creasing and gives a little glint to the eye. This seems to be the new cult product, too, as it's currently sold out. I keep it below the crease, as a shiny browbone makes this look veer catastrophically into the 80s, then just dab the White Frost over the center of the lid as a white highlight.

That's Summer Look #1. From this picture I can see that I need a more defined brow to finish it off. Coming soon.

Bulgari at the Ritz Carlton

My man surprised me this weekend, as we drove from Chicago to Toronto, with a stopover in Dearborn, MI, for a night at the Ritz Carlton and a visit to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House. The Ritz has a partnership with Bulgari, which is a good thing if you are a connoisseur of amenities, which at the Ritz includes soap, shampoo and lotion lightly scented with the unisex Bulgari au Thé Blanc. I'm usually not a big fan of "white" scents, as they tend to be floral, but the notes here are white tea and white pepper over ambergris and musk. The effect is very white and clean indeed, but not in the way of laundry soap. I wouldn't even describe it as white, so much as clear. Yes, it smells transparent. Lovely, and appropriate in a hotel, where a fragrance really must be subtle enough to please everyone.

The Ritz experience was marred by an extraordinarily rude doorman, who scolded me publicly upon our arrival for accidentally tripping the safety lock on the revolving door (this happens, strangely enough, when you push on the door's handle). The next day, this same doorman was on duty, and when I looked daggers at him, he nervously skulked over and apologized, and then literally chased us into the parking lot offering to personally buy us breakfast, so sorry was he to have caused offense. I went from angry, to forgiving, to... kinda creeped out. A simple apology would have worked, but in the end it was just way too much doorman--doormen being another hotel amenity that should be transparent.

"Beauty pays more than anything."

So says Isabella Rossellini, in this week's New York Times Magazine "Questions For..." section, wherein the model, actress and filmmaker discusses the sex lives of bugs and why people really need to stop insisting that, single and at 56, dating is good for her.

Beauties: Aliza Shvarts

I seem to be a lone dissenter in my respect for the now-infamous Aliza Shvarts' position as an artist, and admiration for the grand joke she's perpetrated on all of us. To me, she is indeed an artist, working in the fine tradition of Carolee Schneeman and Kiki Smith, women who use the female body as a a medium in often disturbing ways.

In case you haven't heard: the Yale grad student claims to have artificially inseminated herself repeatedly, then took abortion-inducing herbs to induce miscarriage and created an installation piece out of the detritus. The latest storm has the University hastily denying that any of this actually took place, with Shvarts countering that she did indeed do these things, even if the question of whether or not she actually achieved pregnancy during the making of the piece cannot be definitively answered (though it's likely she didn't).

There seems to be a rather large contingency dismissing Shvarts' thesis work by saying, "She did it to get attention." Which as a statement about an artist is neither here nor there: the garnering of attention is and ought to be the goal of any artist, with the exception perhaps of someone like Henry Darger. What they mean is that she did it only to get attention, not for "art's sake." Which reminds me oddly of passage in The World According to Garp, where Garp admits he wrote his first novel for the most noble of reasons: to impress a girl. It is not, I think, entirely valid to dismiss Shvarts because she made her art for the wrong reasons, or to say that it isn't art on that basis.

Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge

Ten years ago, I wrote a book of essays titled Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge about life in 1990s Los Angeles. Although it is not a beauty book, there is quite a bit of lipstick throughout, some of it worn by me, some by Nancy Sinatra and Esther Williams. Eartha Kitt's eyelashes make an appearance as well. As do a fair assortment of nudists, masochists, drag queens, an earthquake and at least one handgun. The book was originally published by Buzz Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, and by Indigo Press in the UK.

I'm happy to announce that, as part of an experimental new publishing venture brought to you by the creators of Jack & Hill (ie, me and Jackie), Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge is appearing in a new online edition, with a fresh chapter going up every week. A new print edition is soon to follow. And unlike most books, this one has comments, so go read chapter one and say something pithy. Pithy enough and you might make the new book jacket!

I am beautiful when I'm angry

Friends of Jack & Hill Nancy and Amy have both sounded off today with some righteous fury about a recent trend in journalism: the wronged or disappointed woman who takes it upon herself to speak on behalf of all women (one of Nancy's commenters labeled this unpleasant creature "JournoBroad"), complaining about the boorish behavior of men, the imperfection of men, or the general disappointment they as post-feminist women feel at not being able to have it all and eat cake, too.

All of this gratuitous self-pity put me in mind of a story: I once worked for a very bad man, who was universally reviled by all who shared the misfortune of reporting to him. Many of my female colleagues would routinely say of him, "You know what his problem is--he hates women." My response to that was always, "No, I think he pretty much hates everybody." In truth, I had seen this man denigrate as many men as women, and I was pretty certain that he did indeed hate us all equally. I also felt that labeling him a sexist gave him the courage of conviction--where I believed he had none; I was pretty certain that his vile behavior stemmed from a nascent, reptilian awareness of his own inadequacy. In other words, he was a garden variety bully. No more.

When people promote biological or even cultural determinism in matters of race, it's called racial profiling, and it's unethical. Why then is gender profiling so socially acceptable that it's positively in fashion in the pages of the Atlantic and the LA Times? Is it really considered cute when women hate on men? Enough already with these shrill, reactionary screeds about how "men" supposedly "are". We ought to be better than this. Our level of discourse ought to be higher.

That, or maybe the Atlantic can hire me to write a serious treatise on how it's true that blondes really do have more fun. Pshaw! Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Spring Fragrance Makeover: MAC MV3, Bandit

My man is out of town, I am alone in the house for the next week, so I am planning an orgy. Of fragrance. I dropped him at the airport this AM, and by the time I got home, I smelled like a French whorehouse. I had every intention of buying myself some Kenzo Jungle, but when I tried it on in the shop, I balked. After about ten minutes, the tuberose dominated the scent to the exclusion of all subtlety. I am not built for tuberose, and passed.

I did pick up a bottle of MAC MV3, an old favorite I ran out of years ago. It's a vanilla (M for Mac V for Vanilla), but has some leather and wood to it--I find many vanilla scents to be lacking in infrastructure, but this one has some shape to it. I also tend to prefer dark scents, and this dark vanilla can be worn during the day quite nicely. I also tried out the MAC MV2, which has a gold lid, whereas MV3 has black. It smells golden, like a cookie. I want to get some for Nancy, my sister-in-law, who is the only person I know who can make baking cookies sexy. She prefers white floral fragrances, and currently wears Fracas or Antonia's Flowers, but I think she could wear the hell out of MV2.

Then the little whiff of leather in the MAC, and the thought of Nancy's Tuberose-laden Fracas, made me remember that I have a bottle of Robert Piguet's Bandit on my dresser that I haven't touched in years, so I uncorked it.

Oh wow. I have finally grown into Bandit. It's like being slapped in the face with a leather riding glove. A glove being held by a blonde, smokey-eyed German vixen who has spent the day crushing flowers and grass under her heels, and who just may mean you harm.  This is an old-fashioned classic scent; there is nothing modern about it, whatsoever. This perfume smokes and drinks and has been married several times. It is eccentric and not the least bit sweet, but it still smells like perfume the way Chanel No. 5 smells like perfume--it's the first chypre, according to Luscious Cargo.  Did I mention that this fragrance was launched in1944? That Garbo wore it? Who would wear it among today's stars? I think that would have to be Daniel Day Lewis.

It's exciting to grow into a fragrance, after years of failed attempts. I am going to have to try to go to the Fassbinder film series at the SFMOMA next month now, I suppose. I might be ready for that, too. Good reviews of Bandit on Now Smell This and Bois de Jasmin.

Kiehl's Intensive Treatment and Moisturizer

Years ago, I heard the way you can tell a woman's age is by her hands and her neck. As far as I can tell, my neck looks the same as it did when I was ten, while my hands look, well, let's let my daughter tell you:

Scene: Driving in car, eighteen-year-old daughter sees mother's hands on the steering wheel; said daughter's face assumes a queasy, slightly fearful expression.

Mother: What?

Daughter: Your hands mom, they're so... so... old.

She's wrong, they're not that old, but they are beat, I mean a wreck: dry, cut, red; split around the cuticles and sometimes bleeding. I bought some fancy Italian stuff with olive oil; it sat on top of the skin. I tried creams with medicinal names, one of which I think contained urine. I dutifully rubbed a gift from my mother-in-law, which looks like a bar of soap but is actually a block of cream. Nothing made a measurable difference for more than a few minutes.

I was recently at Kiehl's, which I am every few months to buy their Powerful-Strength Line-Reducing Concentrate and Cryste Marine "Ultra Riche" Lifting and Firming Cream (Note: either these products are miraculous, or I am, whereas the skin on my hands shows every day of their 46 years, my face is pretty much perfect, I have no wrinkles, and the sporadic flakiness/redness I struggled with for fifteen years, has not reappeared since I started using these creams more than a year ago), and asked Shay if she could recommend something for my hands. Always generous with samples, she gave me an entire tube of Intensive Treatment and Moisturizer, which contains avocado oil, shea butter and a lot of other emollient stuff. Though I have always been happy, sometimes deliriously so with Kiehl's products (but for one, which mixed into my hair about as well as cheese sauce), I didn't think the moisturizer would work; I thought it might be my lot to have witch hands.

Happily, I was wrong. It's lovely. It goes on easily, and seems to soak into the skin. Immediately, my hands were not dry. They also became less red. The cuticles started to heal. So long as I remember to use it, my hands look quite fresh.

Spring Fragrance Makeover

My fragrance wardrobe has grown a bit threadbare of late. I have dabbled here and there, but haven't added anything major to my collection in five or six years.  I just used up the last of Le Feu D'Issey, and am dangerously low on my Christian LaCroix. My tiny bottle of L'Or de Torrente is bone dry as well. I will inevitably replace them all, but I am taking this as a sign that I need a fragrance makeover.

Last night I spent several insomniac hours flipping back and forth between the encyclopedic reviews on BaseNotes, where the level of discourse is so high I feel like a bumpkin-nosed ninny, and my burgeoning shopping cart on The Perfumed Court, an equally brilliant ecommerce site where you can buy samples and small decants of just about anything, no matter how far-flung and exotic.

I should soon be getting a handful of exotic scents to audition for the spring fragrance makeover. Here for the sake of posterity is the current wardrobe. These are the fragrances I wear in heavy rotation, and that feel like signature scents to me:

• Byzance, by Rochas - floral oriental. A rather ostentatious, ornate scent that is at once exotic and comforting. For a world-weary traveler who feels at home everywhere and nowhere. Maybe her only true home is the memories evoked by this fragrance....
• Femme Rochas - She walks into the conference room, leather underwear beneath her sleek yet feminine pin-striped suit. The faint, subliminal whiff of warm tannin beneath the smooth exterior keeps everyone on edge.
• Le Feu D'Issey - She was raised by a pack of tigers in India. This is what her tiger-mother smelled like when she nursed, milky and peppery.
• Christian Lacroix - a pungent herbal that has an oriental soul. For an herbal, it has the authority of a great Caesar salad--ie, it's got body, tang and richness. Definitely a main course.
• Blond Tabac by Grandiflorum - This is what Laurent Bacall's cigarettes tasted like in To Have and To Have Not. Like burning exotic wood.
• L'Or de Torrente - Black coffee and bruised roses are what I want on Valentine's Day.
• Baby Doll Paris, by Yves Saint Laurent - I am so not a fruit and flower kind of girl, but this tangy grapefruit and rose scent has some musky issues. My Lolita.

Much as I love these, there isn't one of these I'm not ready to take out of rotation for a spell. Black Cashmere didn't made the above list because I haven't been wearing it long enough, but it's on the makeover short list, along with Kenzo Jungle.When I get my decants, I'll give you the full report. In the meantime, I'm open to suggestions. And I'd love to hear what your basics are.

Cinema Beauté: Chanel, Guess, Gianna Rose Atelier, FHI, Beauty Scoop

After 22 days away from home, these are some of the products waiting for me when I walked in the door. Will be collecting the rest from my neighbors in the coming days.

Cinema Beauté: My first NYC blow-out

I flew into town for a whirlwind (one night only) visit, feeling less than happy about how my hair was looking. At Grand Central Station, I found a salon (Francesco's) that could take me right then for a blow-out.

My concern started early in proceedings:

See that big clump of dripping wet hair in my face? Yeah, instead of clipping it back, Eliza let it slap me in the forehead and nose for a good ten minutes before I realized that my hints (constantly pushing it out of my eyes) were getting me nowhere and asked her to clip it. Things did not get better from there.

The end result? What I think of as newscaster hair...for the Retired People News Network:

I was meeting Dr. Jay Parkinson at Le Pain Quotidien, so had to do something fast to fix matters. I ran my fingers through my hair furiously, trying to comb out the hairspray and flatten things. No dice. I tried on a variety of hats at Filene's Basement. I even considered tying a scarf around my head. Finally, a $3 red stripey headband from Strawberry was my godsend.

The cool thing? I haven't had to wash my hair since the blow-out on Wednesday. All the teasing and hairspray has somehow managed to stave off the usual greasiness and itchiness that I experience if I try to skip even one day of shampooing. Right now I'm experimenting to see how many more days I can go with my hair still looking quite good (as it genuinely does). The excess poofiness has gone and now it's just bouncy. In the end, not such a disaster after all.