My Week in Beauty

Meryl - and her seldom-washed hair - in the wonderful 1979 film Manhattan

MONDAY 
I love Meryl Streep – and was delighted that she won her Golden Globe on Sunday night. I wasn’t sure about the country ‘n’ western lapels on the dress she was wearing on Sunday night but loved the Margo Channing-style dress complete with pockets – which I adore on dresses and skirts.

Apart from her exquisite looks (those cheekbones! that radiant complexion! the intelligent sexiness she exudes!), what I like about our Meryl is the fact that she comes across as quite human and fallible – and completely unthreatened by all the younger actresses. And she seems to be surprisingly down-to-earth.

Once asked by a journalist for one of her beauty secrets, she replied: “I don’t wash my hair often. My record was three weeks.”

TUESDAY 

Weirdly, I was reminded of Ms Streep on Tuesday when I met with two of the PR team from Guerlain – Helen, with her long fair hair could easily have passed for one of Meryl’s daughters, or Meryl herself, circa Manhattan.

The Guerlain girls were in Edinburgh to show the beauty press some of the French company’s latest launches – though the guys at the table next to us could have been forgiven for thinking that I was being recruited as a secret agent, and being shown the latest spy gadget. Why? Because the tantalising item of beauty hardware which was being demonstrated was Guerlain G Noir (£35; available from Harrods now, and nationwide on Feb 1), the new, refillable, mascara inspired by their phenomenally successful Rouge G lipstick which comes in a bullet-style case complete with pop-up mirror.

The G Girls took me by surprise by presenting me with a belated birthday present – of three of my favourite Guerlain staples: Orchidee Imperiale Exceptional Complete Care Cream, Meteorites and Precious Light, the best eraser of signs of tiredness under the eyes that I have come across – and believe me, in recent months, insomnia has guaranteed me plenty of opportunities to test them out!

WEDNESDAY

Apart from going to see Grease at the King’s Theatre in the evening (brilliant, escapist fun – just the antidote to the January blues), the highlight of Wednesday was lunch with the Estee Lauder girls at Le Chardon d’Or in Glasgow to hear about their latest launches. These include a gorgeous, light, anti-ageing foundation – Estee Lauder Invisible Fluid Makeup – which I’ll be trying nearer its February on-counter date, and some beautiful-looking new blushers, Pure Color Blush, which are due out in the spring.

But first comes their jewel-like Estee Lauder Pure Color Cyber Eyes (£19; www.esteelauder.co.uk), extremely shimmery and vibrant shades of individual eye shadows – which would have been perfect for Christmas. Luckily, I have a glamorous, 1930s Shanghai-themed banquet to attend this weekend –  here’s hoping I end up with pretty Cyber Eyes and not messy panda ones….

THURSDAY

I had my first treatment of the year at the Clarins Spa in Frasers, Glasgow, on Thursday and it was just what the doctor ordered. I slept like a baby for the first time in weeks – not, unsually, during the “chill-out massage” itself, but later on. At bedtime..

While I was in the spa, I sussed out some great promotions that they’re currently running. One is the Clarins Moisture-Rich Body Lotion is currently on sale in a 400ml size (double the normal size) for the 200ml price of £29 – while stocks last. Also, until February 5, you will receive a special size night cream plus a mini mascara when you buy any Clarins Face Treatment
Oil (the praises of which I was singing last week) or day cream.

FRIDAY

I’m having a domestic day today – gutting my study (I feel such a sense of accomplishment whenever I throw something out – or reclaim a bit of floor space) and pondering the sartorial possibilities for Sunday’s 1930s Shanghai banquet… Since we’ve been asked to wear frocks with a Chinese flavour, I figure this dress code should extend to the beauty choices I make too.  So it’s lucky that Helen and Sophie from Guerlain gave me a bottle of Guerlain Shalimar Parfum Initial L’Eau (from £37, available from Feb 5) a new, light and refreshing twist on one of the original orientals (from 1925). I’ll try it out over the next couple of days and if I don’t take to it, then I may give its younger sister, Vol de Nuit (from 1933) an outing – as she is a longstanding favourite of mine … and was probably all the rage in 1930s Shanghai.

My Week in Beauty

MONDAY

I got ahead of myself quite a bit last week as I couldn’t resist trying out some exciting beauty products which won’t be launched for some time.

On Monday, I gave the next addition to Chanel’s mascara collection an early outing. I’d say “a trial run” – but one thing that the marvellously versatile (it lengthens and curls) Chanel Sublime de Chanel (£22.50, from April 15) didn’t do was run, even though I was very watery-eyed during the Glasgow Film Festival’s Monday matinee showing of the romantic epic Out of Africa, with Meryl Streep (pictured) and Robert Redford. The real test, however, will be to see how it fares when I next watch my favourite-ever romantic weepie, Somewhere in Time, which – like Out of Africa – has an achingly beautiful John Barry score.

TUESDAY

The lovely ladies from the Origins press office hosted a lunch in Glasgow on Tuesday, to brief local beauty journalists on the latest must-try serum.

Plantscription (£45; from March 3 at department stores and www.origins.co.uk) is its name, and if that sounds a little bit medical then that’s because it seems to be the ideal prescription for ageing skin since it enables it to repair itself. The test results and before-and-after photos which we were shown were pretty impressive – so much so that I started using my tube that very same night!

The medical-sounding name also alludes to the fact that this serum was designed to take on America’s leading prescription wrinkle ingredients, retinoids, and to do so without producing any of the associated unpleasant side effects – photosensitivity, burning, redness, dryness and stinging among them.

I can report that after using the serum religiously for just five days, I’m impressed – not by any line-reducing activity (yet – though the clinical tests showed significant improvement after just four weeks!) but by the brightness and evenness of my complexion.  And this from a rosacea sufferer … Watch this space.

WEDNESDAY

On Tuesday after lunch – and feeling somewhat mischievous after quaffing champagne in the middle of the day – I sneaked through to Edinburgh to see one of my favourite romantic comedies at The Filmhouse cinema – the sublime, Snow White-inspired Ball of Fire.

When I wasn’t lusting after Gary Cooper (who, to paraphrase a colleague, “does things to my innards”), I was hankering after Barbara Stanwyck’s glossy locks. My own hair was still not 100% cured of its dryness and tangledness so I was very relieved to discover that there’d been an Aveda delivery while I’d been in Edinburgh.

I started using the three key products in Aveda Damage Remedy – Aveda Damage Remedy Restructuring Shampoo (£18; www.aveda.co.uk); Aveda Damage Remedy Restructuring Conditioner (£19.50) and Aveda Damage Remedy Daily Hair Repair (£18.50) – on Wednesday and have been thrilled with the results. I’d already tried the Dry Remedy range and, although the condition of my hair had improved, it was still not back to where it had been pre-Aveda colour. One of the Aveda hair experts at James Dun’s House salon in Glasgow then advised me that the range I should be trying was, in fact, Damage Remedy as I do not have naturally dry hair. So far, so brilliant. I haven’t yet dared try just using the shampoo and conditioner; I’ve been using the Daily Hair Repair – a leave-in conditioner-cum-styling cream which protects the hair from heat damage when you’re blow-drying it.  This trio of products seems to be working so I’m going to stick with it …

THURSDAY

I do love a proper, old-fashioned liquid or cream eyeliner which you can use to create a fifties-style flick… I’ve been using eyeliner pens and brushes for years, since I realised that pencilled-on eyeliner just did not stay put and always seemed to give me panda eyes.

The latest eyeliner in my make-up bag is No7 Spring Limited Edition Gel Eyeliner (10.50; www.boots.com), part of No7’s lovely, Riviera-inspired, spring collection. I’ve got the navy blue shade (it also comes in black and turquoise) and it’s really easy to use, though if you want a fairly well defined line, you need to build it up with a few layers.

Oh, and if the flicked-up eye line is a style you might want to commit to, shop around for a longer brush than the awkward little one that comes with the eyeliner…

FRIDAY

Great excitement here on Friday when I received a sneak preview of the new colour collection from Chanel for summer 2011. The arrival of Les Fleurs d’Ete de Chanel could not have been better timed as Friday was a glorious spring day here in Glasgow, the first hint that winter might be over.

This being a Chanel collection, I immediately looked for the nail varnish destined to be the next must-have (people are still searching this blog regularly for information on the greeny shade from last year’s Nouvelle Vague range) – and I didn’t have to look far… All I am going to say just now is that it’s not a colour I expected to like on my nails, but I am smitten. Oh, and the little chick on the right is a bit of a clue …

P.S: Before the summer collection comes out, Chanel is launching a new hydrating and sheer lipstick collection called Rouge Coco Shine.  If you live in Glasgow, book yourself in for a complimentary mini-makeover using the range, followed by a unique photographic experience in a Chanel photo booth. This event is taking place at Frasers on Friday, March 11, and Saturday 12. To book a place, call 0141 221 3880, ext 2038.

She’ll Have What She’s Having – Julie & Julia review

If ever there was a poster girl for butter, it’s Julia Child, the doyenne of TV cooks, whose story – or at least the part of it that began in France – is told in the new Nora Ephron movie Julie & Julia. This comedy-drama cuts and splices the lives of Child, who brought French cooking into every American home thanks to her TV shows in the 1960s, and Julie Powell, a young New York office worker who writes a blog about spending a year cooking her way through all the recipes in Child’s landmark French cookery book for Americans.

Child never tired of singing (or perhaps warbling would be a more appropriate verb) the praises of butter so it’s amazing that during her year-long cook-a-thon, Julie Powell (according to the film) didn’t seem to put on a single pound in weight. But then, she wouldn’t – because her part of the film, although based on real life, smacks of the aspects of Nora Ephron’s previous movies that were particularly unrealistic, irksome and formulaic.

There’s the wisecracking best friend (see Rosie O’Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle), the shabby chic apartment (You’ve Got Mail), the obligatory scenes of bonding in front of the telly (watching Casablanca in When Harry Met Sally, An Affair to Remember in Sleepless in Seattle etc). Somehow, Ephron even manages to sneak that old Annie Hall influence in there too: the lobster scene? Hello?

I have no aversion to movies that bear little relation to real life, but when you have a film in which the heroine – sorry, one of the heroines – works in a call centre dealing with the bereaved of 9/11, the glossy Hollywood sheen doesn’t seem appropriate.

Where it works just fine is in the scenes, woven through the film, in the Paris of Julia Child’s experience in the 1950s. Paris in any period has a romantic charm but Child’s Paris particularly so, because it’s where she discovered her calling, having already – as we know from documents released after her death – worked as a spy. In Paris, where her new husband works for the American embassy, she casts around for something to occupy her time and eventually comes up with the idea of taking classes at the Cordon Bleu cooking school.

As a Brit, I didn’t know anything much about Julia Child. And what little I did know about her – that she had a funny, high, comedy sort of a voice – was only through a hilarious (and now, I realise, totally accurate) impersonation by the brilliant jazz musician and off-the-wall raconteur Marty Grosz who used to offer an omelette signed by Julia Child as a prize if anyone could guess the tune he was singing, from its obscure verse.

Ever the chameleon, Meryl Streep does an amazing job of bringing Child to life (though it does come as a surprise to learn that she’s supposed to be just 37 at the start of the film). An ungainly, gallumphing, well-built (6 foot 2) and rather plain woman, Child comes across as having been quite at ease with her appearance – even amidst a sea of petites Parisiennes. While they may have been picking at their tiny portions like sparrows, Child devours food and relishes every opportunity for a new gastronomic experience. Streep gets the voice, the breathiness and the near-hysteria and certainly seems to embody the character, but it’s not a performance that really sheds much light on the character. She’s not onscreen enough.

Amy Adams, as Julie Powell, is onscreen plenty, however – and she is undoubtedly the less interesting and intriguing of the two heroines. She is also, as portrayed here, the 2009 version of Sally from Ephron’s best film, When Harry Met Sally. Once you notice the similarities between Meg Ryan in WHMS and Amy Adams in J&J, it’s difficult not to start playing spot the lack of difference. They have the same mannerisms (watch how the teary and tipsy Julie brandishes her wine glass), the same way of enunciating key lines (“I could write a blog. I have thoughts..”), and when Julie has her “meltdown” on the kitchen floor, you almost expect her to wail “and I’m going to be 40” a la Sally.

For me, the big surprises came towards the end when we realise that Julia Child was still alive while Julie Powell was conducting her blogging and cooking project. The next surprise is that Child lived to the ripe old age of 91, despite the copious amounts of butter she had consumed throughout her life. And the third is that for all this is a feelgood film, there is no attempt to avoid the fact that Child, when interviewed during Powell’s blogging/cooking project, expressed total disinterest in it.

Actually, here’s another surprise: that Ephron didn’t just call the film When Julie Didn’t Meet Julia.

The Wintour Issue

If I thought I was having a grim month in terms of persuading commissioning editors to part with their pennies, it’s nothing compared to how soul-destroying it must be to work on American Vogue. How do I know this? Well, because I spent the morning watching, sniggering, empathising and cringing at the eagerly anticipated film The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s utterly fascinating and hugely enjoyable documentary which charts the production of what is always the biggest edition of the magazine of the year.

One by one, staff members are crushed by editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s apparently breezy dismissal of photos, ensembles or ideas that they have sweated blood over. But it’s the veteran creative director, Grace Coddington who inspires the most sympathy. Although she and Wintour have been colleagues for two decades, she knows that her boss will make her decisions based on her own judgement alone – with no consultation. Every spread she completes is chopped by Wintour, and always when she is elsewhere in the building.

Indeed, Coddington’s editorial tussles with Wintour provide most of the drama and tension in the film. (Cutler was lucky that Coddington, being older and more Wintour-wise than the rest of the staff, was self-confident enough to speak her mind for the camera.)

Of the two women, Coddington is the one whose passion shines through. Next to her (and the insanely flamboyant editor-at-large, Andre Leon Talley – who we don’t see enough of), Wintour has about as much passion as a dead fish. While Coddington is always on the look-out for inspiration and ideas, Wintour, her head bowed at Lady Di angles and her eyes often hidden behind her heavy fringe or her sunglasses (or both), seems introverted – as someone who relies solely on their own judgement and opinion must inevitably be.

Coddington, who could get a job as an Elizabeth I look-alike if she ever gets completely fed up with Wintour, dreams up the most ravishing images (that 1920s shoot! the French chateau spread!) but it’s clear that she gets carried away and, like most of us, takes it personally when other people start hacking away at her work. She doesn’t seem to know when to stop once those creative juices are flowing – so of course Wintour has to edit her output. As she says, decisiveness is her greatest strength.

Aside from revealing that her children are her biggest weakness, and apart from a brief hint of embarrassment at her own admission that her siblings are bemused by her career, Wintour gives next to nothing away about what makes her tick and what drives her. She must be passionate about fashion and about Vogue to devote so much time and energy to them, but there is nothing in her manner or in what she says that distinguishes her from anyone else doing a terrifically high-pressured job.

There’s no sense that she gets anything out of it, or that it’s fulfilling – or even that she loves clothes. Only once does she register pleasure when a dress is presented to her. Every other time, she looks bored or disinterested. At YSL, she almost defies designer Stephano Pilati to impress her, and watching her making him squirm is embarrassing.

Some kind of explanation of how Wintour came to wield such power would have been useful because in no other context would an artist take direction and criticism from a magazine editor. It doesn’t happen in music or in literature or in art. Of course, fashion is a different world – but it’s shocking to realise that the Wintour-inspired character Meryl Streep played in The Devil Wears Prada was really not a caricature; in many respects it was a fairly faithful portrayal of someone who is terrifying but in a thoroughly understated way.

Wintour points out that she inherited a character trait from her father – his inscrutablity. Turn a camera on her and it seems to increase the inscrutability. She may have a fearsome reputation but, based on what we see in this film, she doesn’t appear to have a personality.

The Wintour Issue

If I thought I was having a grim month in terms of persuading commissioning editors to part with their pennies, it’s nothing compared to how soul-destroying it must be to work on American Vogue. How do I know this? Well, because I spent the morning at the Glasgow Film Theatre watching, sniggering, empathising and cringing at the eagerly anticipated film The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s utterly fascinating and hugely enjoyable documentary which charts the production of what is always the biggest edition of the magazine of the year.

 

One by one, staff members are crushed by editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s apparently breezy dismissal of photos, ensembles or ideas that they have sweated blood over. But it’s the veteran creative director, Grace Coddington who inspires the most sympathy. Although she and Wintour have been colleagues for two decades, she knows that her boss will make her decisions based on her own judgement alone – with no consultation. Every spread she completes is chopped by Wintour, and always when she is elsewhere in the building.

 

Indeed, Coddington’s editorial tussles with Wintour provide most of the drama and tension in the film. (Cutler was lucky that Coddington, being older and more Wintour-wise than the rest of the staff, was self-confident enough to speak her mind for the camera.)

 

Of the two women, Coddington is the one whose passion shines through. Next to her (and the insanely flamboyant editor-at-large, Andre Leon Talley – who we don’t see enough of), Wintour has about as much passion as a dead fish. While Coddington is always on the look-out for inspiration and ideas, Wintour, her head bowed at Lady Di angles and her eyes often hidden behind her heavy fringe or her sunglasses (or both), seems introverted – as someone who relies solely on their own judgement and opinion must inevitably be.

 

 Coddington, who could get a job as an Elizabeth I look-alike if she ever gets completely fed up with Wintour, dreams up the most ravishing images (that 1920s shoot! the French chateau spread!) but it’s clear that she gets carried away and, like most of us, takes it personally when other people start hacking away at her work. She doesn’t seem to know when to stop once those creative juices are flowing – so of course Wintour has to edit her output. As she says, decisiveness is her greatest strength.

 

 Aside from revealing that her children are her biggest weakness, and apart from a brief hint of embarrassment at her own admission that her siblings are bemused by her career, Wintour gives next to nothing away about what makes her tick and what drives her. She must be passionate about fashion and about Vogue to devote so much time and energy to them, but there is nothing in her manner or in what she says that distinguishes her from anyone else doing a terrifically high-pressured job.

 

 There’s no sense that she gets anything out of it, or that it’s fulfilling – or even that she loves clothes. Only once does she register pleasure when a dress is presented to her. Every other time, she looks bored or disinterested. At YSL, she almost defies designer Stephano Pilati to impress her, and watching her making him squirm is embarrassing.

 

 

 Wintour points out that she inherited a character trait from her father – his inscrutablity. Turn a camera on her and it seems to increase the inscrutability. She may have a fearsome reputation but, based on what we see in this film, she doesn’t appear to have a personality.

  * The September Issue opens at the Glasgow Film Theatre and nationwide on September 11.