My final department-store cosmetics-counter job ended when I just couldn’t take listening to the distortions and exaggerated claims anymore and decided to go out on my own. I opened my own makeup stores in 1981. I didn’t sell blue eyeshadow, wrinkle creams, or toners that claimed to close pores. Along the way, I hooked up with a business partner who was at first thrilled with my ideas and concept, mainly because of the media attention my rather controversial stores attracted.
My stores were generating a lot of attention from the press, and in 1982 I was asked to make regular appearances on a local TV station in Seattle, KIRO-TV. I also started receiving national and international TV and print exposure.
Eventually my ideas and concepts no longer pleased my partner. The department-store counters were crowded with women buying blue eyeshadow, wrinkle creams, and toners, so why shouldn’t we sell them too? After all, if you saw women throwing away their money on those sorts of products, at prices ranging from $25 to $250 an ounce for items that cost 75 cents to $4 to produce, you wouldn’t want a partner like me either. I sold my shares back to her in 1984 and stayed at KIRO-TV for the next two years. I learned a lot about investigative reporting and writing during my time at KIRO-TV in Seattle.
I left the TV station toward the end of 1985 after finishing my first book, Blue Eyeshadow Should Be Illegal. I decided to self-publish after receiving several rejection letters from major publishing companies telling me that, although they liked my manuscript, I wasn’t a celebrity or a model, and no one would be interested in my point of view. I disagreed. I believed lots of women (OK, not all of them!) were tired of hearing useless, and at times incorrect, information from models and celebrities who were born beautiful and knew which makeup artists, photographers, and managers to hire, but very little about the cosmetics they promoted.
I was right, and I sold several hundred thousand copies of my first book (after several appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show)! And what happened was wonderful. Women were thanking me for opening their eyes to the reality of what did and didn’t work in the world of skin care and makeup—the perfect response. Yet despite all I had written, I still received thousands of letters from women asking me, now that they knew how crazy the cosmetics industry was, what they should buy or what I thought of the product they were using or thinking of using. It was one thing to have an overview of the facts, but quite another to have specific information about a specific product. How could anyone tell if the formulation of a product was effective? How would a person know whether the marketing claims were valid? How could someone find out if a company’s assertion about their impressive studies backing up their miracle skin-care product were true? That’s when I wrote Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me, which is now in its seventh edition. I’ve sold over 2 million copies of this book worldwide and it is now online, in an expanded, continually updated review database, at www. Beautypedia. com.
Meanwhile, the demand to know what works and what doesn’t has grown, mainly because the industry has grown. As is true in all the books I write, what I also want to do is to separate cosmetics fact from cosmetics fiction and reality from myth, because the fiction and myths spread by the cosmetics industry are nothing less than startling and frustrating. Compared to the information provided by the cosmetics industry, Mother Goose stories sound like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Perhaps the most difficult part of my job is keeping a straight face when I hear the crazy things cosmetics salespeople tell consumers. Combating this endless parade of useless and bizarre information can be maddening. But it’s my job and, thankfully, it has been far more rewarding than I ever expected.
You need this book because it will help you save money—lots of money!—and help you take the best possible care of your skin. Depending on how you spend money on cosmetics, it can add up to a savings of thousands of dollars. And it may literally save your skin if you happen to be using products that are poorly formulated or just plain bad for skin. The bottom line is simple: Wasting money on products that don’t work or don’t live up to their claims isn’t pretty.