Clarins Cleansing Milks
My first foray into luxury skincare came via the Clarins catalogue, supposedly free but granted only after weeks of grooming a saleswoman who knew full well the schoolchild before her could barely afford a seven-inch single. I read this (and the ‘Clinique Directory’) like one might read a car repair manual, working out which products came in which order, where they were placed, how they might work, what they might do. The relative affordability of Clarins cleansing milks (and I really do mean relative, like gold to pavé-diamond platinum) made me save up my pocket money and Saturday job wages to get a bottle of my own, but not before I’d pinched some of my big brother’s girlfriend’s and sneakily refilled it with green Boots Natural Collection body lotion (I’m so sorry, Clare). It remains one of my more shameful decisions. I can only say in defence that I was stealing to invest in my future career.
Gratifyingly, the cleansers themselves (ivory ‘With Gentian’ and green ‘With Alpine Herbs’) remain unchanged since their launch in 1966 (the brand’s first products after their plant oils and an absolutely extraordinary bust firming contraption that looks like an industrial funnel attached to a garden hose) and I applaud Clarins’s apparent belief in ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. These cleansers really are still wonderful. They shift make-up very thoroughly when used with a hot cloth (though I tend to use them in the morning and a balm, cream or oil at night), they leave no sticky residue, only softness and comfort, and they smell blissfully cosying. The packaging has changed a little – I miss the fat, weighty glass bottles of my teenage dressing table – but the modern version maintains the simplicity of the old. The new squeezy cap does, however, prevent tampering, which in my case is probably for the best.
MAC Spice Lip Pencil
When someone sits down to write the history of the nineties, they should do so in MAC Spice lip pencil. This reddy-brown liner became the Canadian-born professional brand’s first ‘hero product’ and was the make-up accessory of the supermodel era; it graced a hundred glossy magazine covers and Linda Evangelista was never without it (I’m told she always conveniently needed to pee before shooting, then snuck on some Spice in the ladies’ loo if the make-up artist had failed to). It became the look for a generation of girls like me, who thought it the height of sophistication to wear a lip pencil five shades darker than the lips it outlined. After making a pilgrimage to buy my first Spice in Harvey Nichols (MAC’s only UK stockist at that time), and having nicked my mum’s peach CoverGirl lipstick, I debuted the look at a Salt-N-Pepa concert in Newport leisure centre. The band failed to show up but I didn’t care because I felt a million dollars.
Spice subsequently accompanied me to acid house clubs, to gigs and on capers, out on dates with inappropriate men. It accessorised Kookai hotpants, Lycra frocks from Pineapple, smiley T-shirts and red Kickers. I teamed it with fishnets, a velvet choker and beret and imagined myself in an Ellen von Unwerth shoot. I wore it with jeans and a wide headband and felt like Bardot, with a football shirt and Adidas Gazelles and thought I was Christy Turlington on the John Galliano catwalk. I was far from any of these things, but look back on Spice without a moment’s regret because, unlike so many products that completely sum up a fleeting moment in life, Spice is still a much loved, often used, part of my beauty kit. Only nowadays I wear Spice with a matching lipstick of brick red or terracotta brown, not a contrasting gloss the colour of Elastoplast.
Ardell Lashes
The age of the selfie has reintroduced so many old-fashioned beauty techniques that I’d quite happily have left in the history books with lead face powder and chastity belts, and yet I feel nothing but joy at the huge resurgence in popularity of false eyelashes. Falsies were invented in 1916 (later than one might perhaps imagine), on the set of the film Intolerance, for leading actress Seena Owen’s big close-up. The director wanted the lashes on Owen’s sad eyes to skim her cheeks, and so the film’s hairdresser threaded wig hair onto some gauze and glued it to her lashline. Reusable false lashes went into production – initially using real hair or animal fur – and became a key element in almost all iconic Hollywood beauty looks. Nowadays, lashes are synthetic and mainly come on strips, but there’s still something so brilliantly decadent and utterly mad about sticking fake hair onto eyelids with glue, something so satisfying about fluttering huge lashes more at home on Tweetie Pie. No one can be bothered every day, of course, but the occasional application of falsies is a wonderful thing when you know how – and it really is so much easier than you may fear.
First, the lashes must be cut to size (unless they’re half lashes – those designed to be worn on the outer corners only and often just the thing for a more natural look). Cutting is important because if a strip lash is even the tiniest bit too wide for your lids, then the end will hit the bridge of your nose and peel off at some point during the course of the night, and a droopy falsie is never a good look. Cut from the outside; it’s tempting to preserve maximum flutter and cut from the inside, but this will rob the fan-shape of its gradual incline, and look unnatural. Second, always, always allow the glue (preferably Duo) to become a little dry and tacky. Wet glue is too messy and makes the lash too mobile and prone to wandering maddeningly onto fingers during application. Third, apply a little black liner and black mascara to disguise any joins. That’s it.
There are hundreds of wonderful lashes on the market. I love MAC 20, Red Cherry Joan, We Are Faux Carey Red and a host of designs by Eylure, but the affordable drugstore brand Ardell makes my favourites of all – and not only because of their deliciously naff 1970s branding. Ardell’s selection of designs is vast and caters for all eye sizes and tastes: from spiky and Twiggy-like to sleepy noir-era Bacall, to sumptuous feline flutters à la Loren. They either come without glue (my preference) or with Duo (the best). The invisible bands mean they can be worn more convincingly by chemotherapy patients than many other lashes, and, on a similarly practical level, they come out of the packaging without tearing or warping, go on like a dream and the tapered shapes and soft materials ensure that, generally speaking, they look more Old Hollywood, less Spearmint Rhino.
Johnson’s Baby Lotion
Among my earliest memories is one of lying on a towel as a young toddler, fresh from the bath, toasty from the nearby coal fire, giggling hysterically as my grandmother ‘iced me like a birthday cake’ with Johnson’s Baby Lotion, squeezed direct from the bottle like a piping bag. Forty years on, it remains one of my favourite smells of all time. It’s the smell of comfort, of security, of uncomplicated and predictable times. One deep whiff is like being cosseted in a warm blanket and tucked tightly and cosily into a single bed. It’s a fragrance I always think of as smelling exactly how it looks – pink, mellow, delicate, old-fashioned, soft and sweet. It’s frankly no good on my dry skin (it works as a cleanser for light make-up at a push, and is a nice body lotion for normal skins), but I love the smell so much that I’m never without a bottle in the house. If I feel inexplicably sad or stressed out, I flip open the cap and inhale.
Clarins Beauty Flash Balm
I feel about Beauty Flash the way I feel about olives: I should like them, they’re very much my kind of thing, other people love them and I doggedly keep trying to join in, but I just can’t pull it off. This is a balm that goes over moisturiser to plump and blur lines, pep up tiredness and general haggishness, but on me – and apparently me alone – it has always peeled off in clumps as soon as I attempt to apply make-up over the top. No matter, because what is indisputable is Beauty Flash’s iconic status. This is the product, I think, that first tabled the notion of primer – a skincare/make-up hybrid to smooth and perfect the complexion in readiness for