Beauty fades, this we know all too well. Even the tools of beauty, the lipsticks and creams, have a shelf life that ends well before our affection does. Blush crumbles. Foundations separate. Mascara dries up. Fragrances oxidize and decay. Don’t we all?
It’s the story of life. “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens, the poet, wrote. “Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
There’s a sense of defiance when beauty products and tools are designed for some measure of longevity. The perfume bottles we keep for decades on our shelves may have lost their original purpose, but they still hold the dream of the self we imagined when we dabbed our pulse points and headed out into the night. Their role shifts to decoration, souvenir.
Some of those old bottles and desiccated cosmetics might even have value. Marilyn Monroe’s makeup case, filled with moldering lipsticks and wisps of false lashes, sold at Christie’s for more than $250,000.
Celine has been doing its part for longevity by quietly bringing combs, hair claws, embossed scented soaps, and handsome travel cases to its boutique’s vitrines. Each has the look of a collectible. And several take the unglamorous necessities that fill the aisles of CVS and elevate them from objects to objets. A tall gold cylinder is filled with a stack of cotton pads. A gold-faceted tube is home for a toothbrush. A soap dish, also gold, has a vented bottom and logo-stamped top for travel. Where will you take your toothbrush and soap? Not on EasyJet. Perhaps you and Lady Mary Crawley will board the Orient Express on a jaunt to Constantinople. Bon voyage!
Now Celine is fully committing to makeup, starting with a single red lipstick. The bullet has a satin finish and the powdery scent of lipsticks past. It’s debossed with the house’s logo and sheathed in a fluted gold case with a satisfying magnetic closure. If you’re fancy, you can slip it into a red lizard holder and take it for a spin. It’s called Rouge Triomphe, after the Celine emblem, which was inspired by the Arc de Triomphe. As in triumph.
Hedi Slimane, who was the creative director at Celine until a month ago, masterminded the collection. It includes a gold lipstick brush for home and travel, two gua sha tools in shiny black obsidian, graceful hand mirrors, a small leather travel pouch, and lipstick carriers in leather and exotic skins suspended from long chains, like a disco bag for Thumbelina. Slimane calls them grandes classiques. They’re made for Francophiles. I’m picturing Anouk Aimée in A Man and a Woman gliding Rouge Triomphe over her lips before she turns to gaze moodily out the window of a vintage red Mustang.
More products are coming: mascara, nail polish, eyeliners, loose powder, and a lipstick palette that looks as if it holds bonbons. The collection makes me slightly delirious, and if you doubt that, check out my search history. I have a vanity table on hold on 1stDibs. I might as well fulfill the fantasy, arranging the tubes, brushes, and tools before heading out to the disco in my dreams.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look
