How many bronzers or lip glosses does a woman need? As is patently obvious, the whole multi-billion-dollar beauty industry has nothing to do with need and everything to do with desire—the desire to be prettier or younger-looking, with more angled cheekbones or fuller lips or smokier eyes.
I ask this question not as a bluestocking who has read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse four times (though I have), or who pulls a comb through her hair in the morning and calls it a day (which I don’t). I ask it as a committed beauty junkie who teaches English literature at Barnard College and writes reviews of dense biographies you have never heard of—someone who has all the same spent hundreds of dollars on the promise of a moisturizer that will infuse her skin with all sorts of esoteric ingredients and who stalks the aisles of the more elite department stores to suss out the latest brow pencil or lash-extending mascara.
“Why?” you might well ask. What is the enticement behind this passion to spend often ludicrous amounts of money ($510 for a Tom Ford moisturizer or $235 for a Dries Van Noten pocket mirror) on artfully packaged potions and foundations that, no matter the latest research into stem cells or fruit derivatives or hibiscus flower, are not and will never be truly and adequately transformative? At the end of the day, when the makeup comes off, you will look like yourself, which might be nice enough but a tad disappointing.
Then again, although we all recognize that the realm of beauty is not a democracy—“To see her in sunshine,” Harold Brodkey wrote of Orra Perkins in his notorious story “Innocence,” “was to see Marxism die”—we can all aspire. When Charles Revson chose to raise the price of lipstick during the Depression, he is supposed to have said that hope is expensive.
So it is that on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in late August, when my sweat-infused pores strike me as unattractively enlarged, I arrive at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue. There looms Bergdorf Goodman, an ode to triumphant capitalism, an emporium of all that is curated, covetable, and extravagantly priced.
Not to overlook two shoe departments, featuring the latest in wedge heels and Gucci biker boots, or the seventh-floor home section that is like something out of Alice in Wonderland, featuring intentionally misshapen resin pitchers, a Fornasetti butterfly umbrella stand for $2,050, and beaded placemats for $150 a pop. The restaurant, always filled to the gills, offers the store’s beloved Gotham Salad, which includes cubed beets, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and ham.
Once you descend to the lower level, you will find yourself thrust into a softly lit enclave—15,000 square feet in all—divided into glass displays devoted purely to beauty products, perfumes, skin care, and tools to enhance or, as it may be, brutalize the epidermis. There are niches within niches and riches within niches.
Against a back wall is an area devoted to “clean,” or “green,” beauty brands, aimed at those who are suspicious of peptides and hyaluronic acids and concerned with “phytoactive” purity. These include Royal Fern, by Dr. Timm Golueke; Vintner’s Daughter; and small batches from Esker, Costa Brazil, 8 Greens, Skin Research, Eighth Day, and Plant Kos that are probably produced on an idyllic farm in England like the one Paul McCartney moved to after the Beatles broke up. Korean brands, such as Sulwhasoo, that have no added fragrance, parabens, or sulfates are all the rage. (Mani Trokel, who’s married to Yan Trokel, a brilliant cosmetic surgeon, and has the best skin of anyone I know, swears by Biologique Recherche and uses a concatenation of 21 other products.)
If you have to ask what, exactly, is P50, which has been worked on for 22 years, you’ll probably be better off at Ulta, which is outfitted with products that don’t require complex explanations detailing their lineage and uniqueness.
Bergdorf’s sales staff is sworn to secrecy; after the manager of the floor asked me to e-mail him a list of questions I actually put some thought into, he refused to answer any of them. The official line is that Bergdorf maintains a certain dignity about allowing clients to browse without a specific destination in mind.
There are exceptions, like the bald, tanned salesman wearing oodles of handcrafted jewelry who works at Pat McGrath and approaches me when I cruise aimlessly by, wondering whether I should stop at Chantecaille or Clé de Peau before meeting my friend Elizabeth at the Chanel counter. He calls me over and tells me he has an eye cream that would make me look 12 years younger.
Now, who, in their right mind, would resist such a pitch, eliciting anxiety and offering solace at once? He is also imparts hard-earned wisdom as he dots my cheekbones with highlighter, such as “genetics loads the gun; lifestyle pulls the trigger.” Since my genes are average at best, and my lifestyle includes obsessive tanning and loads of anything sugary, I fear I am doomed.
Except there is a La Prairie Skin Caviar Luxe Sleep Mask ($445) that might improve my fate while I sleep, a palette for $160 at YSL that might convert my eyes into mysterious pools, and a $75 balm by Hermès that will keep my lips permanently supple. Then there is the salesperson with turquoise-blue eyes and a down-to-earth manner who assures me about an under-the-radar brand called 111Skin that “this is probably one of the best skin-care lines I’ve ever used”—and thus, presumably, rewards an expenditure of $995 for the Black Diamond Cream.
Since my genes are average at best, and my lifestyle includes obsessive tanning and loads of anything sugary, I fear I am doomed.
Bergdorf prides itself on being a launching pad for a lot of brands, the placement of which is crucial—among them Charlotte Tilbury (no longer at the store for reasons unbeknownst to me), Victoria Beckham, and Westman Atelier, a line of refined, barely there products from the makeup artist Gucci Westman. What it offers is a luxe, boutique feel within a department store.
Within this cosseting atmosphere, there is no more elegant destination than the Tom Ford section, walled off from the other cosmetic zones by black glass and stocked with Ford’s ever expanding line of scents. The sales staff seems especially well trained, and I walk away, after sitting in an old-fashioned hairdresser’s chair placed cruelly in front of a large mirror, having parted with many hundreds of dollars on products I don’t need and will probably never use, including a variety of almost identical-looking eye brushes that blend and define and blur, a $46 lip liner, and a $190 tonic that looks exactly like water but is meant to “prepare” your skin before you apply moisturizer and cosmetics.
If there is an art to the proper use of all these products, and there certainly is, it would appear to be primarily in the blending, which takes skill and patience. I would wager most women possess neither and thus never look anything like they do after submitting to an expert who shades the sides of their noses and buffs blusher into cheeks, leaving a faint, unclownish touch of rose or peach that suggests you have just risen from some flush-inducing activity.
So here’s what I learned, in a nutshell: Mature women shouldn’t use shimmer. A salesperson should never use the word “old” or ask, “Is that your daughter?” Lipstick is the most requested product. Hourglass is “cruelty-free,” which suggests that other lines torment their ingredients. Most women don’t know their color undertones. Some salespeople get a salary and others work on commission, although all this information is top secret.
Blush and mascara make the most difference in a person’s appearance. A makeup artist I take a liking to reveals that even though the official institutional attitude is hands-off, anybody who walks by is a potential customer—you have to “hustle” them. “Women get stuck in the rut of their 20s,” he explains, “and should change their makeup like underwear while at the same time not overthinking it. The goals are plumping, hydrating, lifting, and firming.” From every passing counter, I hear “the beauty of this” or “this would go with …,” seducing some women and overwhelming others, who probably go home and order on Amazon.
As I leave the floor with my purple bag, I suddenly feel a great sadness, a sense of having wasted time while I could have been volunteering in a hospital or running for political office.
I think of my friend Susan, who moved to Los Angeles some years ago and used to accompany me to Bergdorf’s with lists of products she had painstakingly copied down from various magazine editorials. The “snapping-turtle pond” is how she characterized the floor, partly in response to the salespeople who tried to look inconspicuous as they sprayed an unforgettable perfume on the inside of your arm, waiting for the fireworks of craving to come.
Snap. Snap.
Daphne Merkin is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of numerous books, including the memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression and the novels Enchantment and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love. She is currently working on a book about her experiences in psychoanalysis
