Am in a heap here. Just home from six hours at the Rosemont/O`Hare Expo Center. Did not enter doorway marked, ”Welcome to Carwash Expo.”
Went the other way. So did 10,199 others. Maybe Carwash would have been the wiser choice.
Once past banner marked, ”Glamour Beautyways Expo,” sustained these blows: Big toe trampled. Ribs jabbed. Accused of living in Cosmetological Dark Ages.
Sins: Have not learned that foundation is a ”must, must, must.” Fail to put blush in hollows of cheeks. (Didn`t know had hollows.) Won`t wear lip gloss. Eyebrows ungroomed. Liner on bottom lid must go.
”When I see a woman so out of step with the times, I just wonder if it is that she cannot read,” said Stan Campbell Place, a man who has powdered the probosci of Cher, Cybill Shepherd, Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Carter.
It got worse: Standing there asking probing questions of John Frieda, the man who has coiffed tresses of Princess Di, Jackie O, Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger, tables suddenly turned.
”May I take it down?” asked Frieda. Before a nod could be mustered, out slipped bobby pins, and down tumbled locks that had not been expecting public inspection.
Fingers ran through hair. His fingers, my hair. ”How often do you get a trim? I absolutely insist that you trim it at least every four or five weeks,” said the Englishman, who charges $200 an hour for such prescriptions at his London and New York shops. ”Just the smallest amount. Or you will get all these split ends,” he said, shaking said ends in face.
Have you ever wished you were an Etch-A-Sketch? And that you could shake, rattle and, whoosh, disappear?
And so, here I lie, soaking aching bones and bruised ego in Fa soft foam bath with copaiva. Haven`t a clue what copaiva is, but feel better just knowing that I have chosen to submerge my misery in ”No. 1 bath line in Europe. 100 percent biodegradable. Packaging 80 percent recyclable. No animal testing.” That`s what the lady at Booth No. 59 told me. And I believe her.
Suddenly I find myself so cosmetologically up to date, I do not know where to begin.
The beginning: It is the first Saturday of summer, a day when most right- thinking women, and a smattering of men, should be out at the beach, engrossed in a page-turner, sipping cold fluids, appropriately shrouded in SPF 30.
Instead, they have flocked by the thousands to a cavernous expo hall in the exhaust trail of the world`s second-busiest airport. They have come seeking Truth. Wisdom. And beauty everlasting.
They have come from Bridgeport, and Schaumburg, and East Moline. They have chartered a bus from Davenport, Iowa. And driven five hours from a small town in Missouri that lost its five-and-dime a few years back, leaving the ladies without a cosmetics counter or someone to tell them which mascara would best plump their lashes.
Most left male companions at home. ”You out of your mind?” asked one Gold Coast beauty maven, when asked if her mate was out parking the car. ”The masseuse is coming in, then he`s going swimming.”
”Men have sports, women have this,” opined Courtney Gibbs, Miss USA 1988 and Ultra-Slim Fast spokesperson, taking a backstage breather.
Five hundred of them pooled at the door a full hour before it was unlocked. Then they laid down $10 apiece. Looped a pink-purple-and-azure Glamour Beautyways bag over their wrists. And took off.
A maze of 59 booths awaited them, each one a trough for free samples of cutting-edge products holding these promises: Frizz-Ease Hair Serum, ”creates a frizz-free surface”; Condition Curl Refresher, ”allows you to scrunch and shape curls into styles you want”; Nivea Visage Facial Nourishing Creme,
”reduces the signs of premature aging.”
At each booth was an Expert, someone to extoll the virtues of, say, Ultra-Slim Fast New Juice Mixable Powder: ”It`s the rage! It`s awesome!” Or the horrors of photo-aging: ”Ladies, this is a facial moisturizer with sunscreen in it,” said the salesman from Johnson & Johnson, already hoarse only 1 1/2 hours into the very long weekend. ”So what it does is prevent photo-aging. That is wrinkling of the skin because of the sun.”
And, as is the uncanny way with these crowds, the paying public had scoped out, in a matter of half an hour, which booths passed out the richest booty.
”Flex `N` Go is a good one, you get a whole thing. At Max Factor, you get a full-size mascara, so that`s a good one. And two eyeshadows, so that`s like $10 worth of stuff,” gushes Jodi Hurst, 32, a Rosemont homemaker whose pink-purple-and-azure bag was already cutting off the circulation at her left wrist.
Half an hour later, Hurst is still giving pointers: ”Hey, get in line!
There`s no Booth 60, so if you turn in coupons for 59 and 60, you get two.”
Of what? ”I have no idea. All I know is you get two.”
Marketing the Myth
There was, indeed, a strategy to all this: ”Here`s the game plan,” says Mary Jewers, 30, of Bridgeport. ”You run around and get all the free things, act like a teenager, then go back and get the information.” She likened the beauty expo to Taste of Chicago without the grease.
The expo is not without casualties. ”I just got my toe run over with a stroller,” says Jewers` companion, Kerri Watanabe, 30, of the Northwest Side. ”And someone stole my coupons out of my bag.”
”Our problem,” says Jewers, who said this was her first all-girl outing since her baby was born nine months ago, ”is that we`re too polite. We`re gonna get pushy pretty soon. Get those elbows ready!”
Near the front gate, where the flow of big-haired women with big-jeweled T-shirts seemed unceasing, Jack Kliger, publisher of Glamour magazine, a co-sponsor of the expo along with F&M Distributors in Chicago, explains the big draw: ”Women are so information-hungry and time-pressed. Particularly when it has anything to do with appearances.”
Watching the sea of outstretched palms yearning for a tube of Max Factor 2000 Calorie mascara-”Sweetie, the only thing that gets fat is your lashes”; or listening to a 12-year-old ask the A-Plus Talent scout if she should cut her auburn hair ”so I could look like Julia Roberts in `Pretty Woman,` ” you wonder if this could really be the same planet upon which some circles are buzzing about Naomi Wolf`s new book ”The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.”
Wolf reasserts the not-new argument that women are being sabotaged, if not enslaved, by male-imposed, media-reinforced standards of beauty. But she goes on to argue that with traditional ideologies of female virtue-”
motherhood, domesticity, chastity and passivity”-virtually shattered by the women`s movement, beauty is the last myth left.
The myth, she writes, encourages women to ”self-mutilate” through plastic surgery and routinely to ”self-starve” through non-stop dieting. The regime not only exhausts women but impoverishes them, she says, while enriching the $300 million plastic surgery industry, the $33 billion diet industry and the $20 billion cosmetics industry.
You wonder if Wolf would suffer apoplexy here.
Everyone has a flaw
As you contemplate this, you stroll past Booth 50, where the DuraSoft Colors contact lens rainbow computer lets you ”Try on a Different You,” in a video simulation that shows how you`d look with lenses designed ”to improve on Mother Nature.”
Kelli DuBuisson, 18 (yet another expo-goer whose first name ended in
”i” instead of ”y”), was born with brown eyes. She thinks she`d rather have ”Aquamarine-Enhance” where her driver`s license asks eye color.
”It just changes your personality,” she says in barely a whisper. ”You can look better. You feel more outgoing with blue eyes. With brown, you just sort of blend in.”
Just when you need it, you bump into Booth 56. There, in his white silk suit, is Stan Campbell Place, makeup artist to the stars, and the man who says of his disposable art: ”How can you take this too seriously? You`re going to wash it down the drain at night.”
He goes on: ”All of us, especially women, are very emotional about what we see in the mirror each morning. Thank God, to my observation, there is nobody on Earth without a flaw or an imperfection. My job as a makeup artist is to find the flaw and fix it, before anybody else finds it.”
And so, as the Maybelline Cosmetics Authority, Place treks from expo center to expo center. ”Hopefully, they regard me as the Messenger of Good News,” he says. ”I find women very reluctant to give up old fashions, even though they know it`s wrong. And they will argue why it`s best for them. Many want constructive criticism, advice and information. They want it slipped to them gently. They don`t want: `Well, you are a mess, girl, and you are out of step with fashion.`
”I do feel-I don`t want to be so grand as to say I`m a psychologist-but I do feel an absolute necessity to exude charm. If I`m successful, then I can win her over and manipulate her into my way of thinking.”
The finishing touch
Three hours later, Place is up to his eyelids in charm. ”Much too sparkly,” he says, holding up a mirror that brings back images of Romper Room, where the looking glass always told the truth. ”I`d like your lip color slightly stronger. It`s a little bit too blue-pink.”
Giggling, the object of his scrutiny asks: ”Am I a pink person?” After finding out that, no, she is a yellow person, and yes, she should blend her eyeshadow better, cut her eyeliner in half and lower her blush, Carol Herman, 40, an obstetrics nurse from Schaumburg, slides down from the Maybelline director`s chair.
”Anything that has to do with glamor, makeup, I`m always interested in,” she says, holding a pink-purple-and-azure freebie bag weighing in at about 25 pounds. ”I`m always conscious of how I look. Society makes it that way. It forces you. If you don`t look good, they don`t look.”
They? ”Men, I suppose,” she says, and walks away.
George Love, the marketing mastermind behind this marriage of beauty, women and bargains, knew it would be this way. For three years, he has been piecing together this series of expos that is wending its way across the country, with six shows unfolding from Boston to San Francisco.
Forty-eight vendors, each bearing 15,000 product samples, leaped at the chance to meet face-to-face with the women who gloss their lips, pluck their brows and paint their nails with their products. A handful of celebrities, from Princess Di`s hairdresser, Frieda, to Courtney Gibbs, signed on.
And the women came.
Four bites into a Snickers-bar ”executive lunch,” Love muses that it was the unintimidating atmosphere of the expo that kept most women captive for an average stay of three to five hours. ”No one`s going to say, `And if you buy this $35 jar, it`ll solve all your problems.` There`s no pressure to buy. In fact, there`s nothing for sale.
”These women want to learn. It`s like: `Oh my, God has just spoken to me about my hair. . . .` It`s the Voice from the mountain.”
Shortly after the Voice spoke, this mass of split ends checked out. Knees weak. Head spinning, it suffered cosmetology overload. Could not stand one more booth.
Silly me. Lying here in my Fa, I see that I missed the one booth that might have saved me. Morgan Fairchild was over at No. 39. Her spiel: ”Stress Management.”
