Allure

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother and the way she shopped for beauty. She would go to a department store, head straight to the one makeup counter that had sales associates who looked like her (Fashion Fair Cosmetics) and purchase everything she needed. For skin care, she relied on her local Mary Kay saleswoman. Decades later, when it came time for me to wear makeup, my experience was pretty similar. My mother drove me to the nearest mall with a MAC counter (by that time, MAC had become the one brand that every Black woman under 40 relied on for foundation) to get my first set of makeup (foundation, mascara, blush, and my very own Chestnut lip liner and Lipglass combo). For skin care, I headed to a…

JC: As I’m thinking about Allure, I keep coming back to the word “evolution.” Not only the evolution of beauty journalism, but also of our industry and the culture of beauty. LW: [When we started Allure], the industry was shocked that we were asking questions about the safety and efficacy of products, about the way we look and why is it important, [as well as] the uglier side of beauty. We were staking out our territory, but also letting readers know that we have their interests at heart and are someone they can trust. JC: Today, Allure stands in that gap of being a watchdog for an industry that doesn’t have one. The FDA isn’t there. I like to believe that the reporting we do has made the industry better. LW: I think…

“I always think about the atmosphere, the camaraderie. There was such great joy in working at Allure. I was always laughing. The staff was fabulous. The music would be blaring in the fashion closet. We wanted to produce a great magazine and I think you felt that we were all in this together. Linda and I were both strict about what we wanted, but the strictness allowed us to produce really good work. When you’re working with a supermodel like Cindy Crawford on set, everything looks great. But can we one-up it? Can we make it better? Can we make an image you’re going to remember? We can do a nice image, but what we want is to make a lasting image.”—PAUL CAVACO, FORMER CREATIVE DIRECTOR “My first year as an…

Rhapsody in Blue What we call “twilight,” Guerlain calls L’Heure Bleue. We don’t know precisely when perfumer Jacques Guerlain first beheld the fragile minutes after the sun has just set, when the still-warm indigo sky glows like velvet and it’s not yet “night.” But we do know it was 110 years ago that he attempted to bottle the moment with a mix of tuberose and rose that settles in a powdery iris finish. Now, the house has reissued the big, blue hour in a very big, blue bottle that’s velvety to the touch, finished in matte International Klein Blue, as if dip-dyed into the twilit sky itself. (This ultramarine color was trademarked in 1957 by French artist Yves Klein, who created a famous monochrome painting with the shade.) The one-and-a-half-liter size,…

THE LOWDOWN Take all the elegance of a ballerina bun and multiply it by 1,000 when you nestle a simple black bow on top, like at Brandon Maxwell’s fall show (right). (Add a little French braid if you’re really feeling ambitious.) This math holds for low ponytails too. Hairstylist Sunnie Brook likes Jennifer Behr’s bow clips or simply tying ribbon to a bobby pin prepped with hairspray. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE No bun skills? No problem. Find inspiration from Sandy Liang’s spring show (left): Take the small section of hair that’s in front of your ear and pull it back with a bow, says Brook, “or the bow can play peekaboo if you pull your hair to one side and secure it almost at the middle-back [of your head]. First, for more grip,…

It’s the stuff of birthday cakes and ’90s perfumes: Vanilla is nostalgia bottled, and this winter there are many ways to spritz on sentimentality. Indie fragrance houses like Ellis Brooklyn and By/Rosie Jane are putting vanilla front and center in their launches. “You’d think we got together and were like, ‘Hey, let’s all do vanilla,’” says Rosie Jane Johnston, the perfumer behind her namesake brand. “But everyone gravitates emotionally toward the same things.” Right now, that’s one big olfactive yearning for the days of mall hangouts and baking with mom. “With the chaos over the last three years, I wanted something completely uncomplicated; the ’90s were a more innocent time for me,” says Johnston. “Everyone was wearing vanilla and everything smelled like it: The Body Shop, candles, vanilla-scented Beanie Babies—everything.” The…