When You're Faithful to Your Lipstick and Your Lipstick Doesn't Return the Favor...

Monogamy: the condition or practice of having a single mate during a period of time

This implies an agreement between two parties, yes? So, what happens when one party is monogamous and the other party is not? Well, many of us are unfortunately familiar with this, right?

But what if your monogamous relationship is with your lipstick? That is to say, you have used none other than this one lipstick for years. Then one day, just like in any other relationship, you notice little things…like it’s not so easy to find anymore. It’s not on the front display shelf anymore. Maybe you have to ask for it specially, or “it’s in the back.” Maybe it’s just constantly out of stock. So you do the thing you know you’re never supposed to do for fear of getting the answer you don’t want to get: you ask what's going on. And what you find out is that it’s being discontinued. Like any betrayal, you never know the real reason it’s being discontinued, and if you ask, you probably will not be told the truth; all you know is that someday soon you will not be able to get it anymore, and you go into a panic.

This is happening to my friend Maggie, except that it’s not just any lipstick. It’s the only lipstick she wears, and, more than that, it’s the only makeup she wears. Period. When I found out about this, quite by accident one night by complimenting her on how great her lipstick looked (because I pay attention to these things), she told me of her challenge and her mission to find every last tube of MAC Lip Gelee in Moistly (terrible name) left in the New York City area or online. I understand her devotion. An already gorgeous girl with perfect skin, this not-quite-a-gloss, not-quite-a-lipstick with just a subtle punch of berry stain totally lights up her face.

I told her of my own journey, having survived a betrayal many years ago when Aveda pulled its Redwood Cerise lipstick for no apparent reason and I made my husband drive me around Manhattan to every Aveda store one Saturday, Visa card in hand, buying them all. I still have two tubes left. Of course it’s worth noting that my backlash to that betrayal was nothing like Maggie's: I did not pledge undying allegiance to my color. Instead, I turned into a lipstick whore, abandoning my color and wearing anything that came along, to the point where I now carry around at least 10 lipsticks in different shades to suit my mood and clothing. I even had to buy a bigger makeup bag to suit my loose lips.

But I digress...this is not Maggie’s style, so I pledged to help her find what was left in New York of what is rightfully hers. Her three solid months of work has yielded a total of 13 tubes, procured from online scores, back rooms at MAC counters at Macy’s, and as far afield as a Neiman Marcus or two. Now her friends know of her plight and when they find a tube, she gets them as gifts.

With this cushion of time, I have advised her to refrigerate all of them and when she gets down to her last tube and a half, she is to keep the full tube for herself to use, and bring the half to one of the great miracles of modern makeup, Three Custom Color, handily located in Manhattan on 22nd Street. In addition to their own roster of their own extraordinary products – blushes that make you look like you just came in off the ski slopes and lipsticks named after New York dance clubs from the ‘80s – they will literally replicate for you your long-lost anything…not just lipstick but blush, foundation, powder, brow gel, you name it. Even my very own Redwood Cerise is already in their database.

Are they a miracle? Kind of...or maybe they're just the nice, solid relationship you've been looking for all this time.

High Tea with Jo Malone

I am reminded now of how remiss I've been in never writing here of the fragrance genius that is Jo Malone, the British maven of natural fragrance blends, but going to the launch event for her new Tea Fragrance Blends at Bloomingdale's has slapped me on the wrist for my oversight.

For this was no average launch event. This was High Tea, complete with reserved invitation, service of three different teas, scones, finger sandwiches, waiters, china, silver and three-tiered dessert stands. Here we were, a group of Jo Malone groupies, all chit-chatting with one another about favorite Jo Malone fragrances, least favorites, what had been discontinued and what was best as a gift. All this taking place in a beautifully appointed tiny corner of Bloomingdale’s on the main floor while the rest of the store was a veritable zoo.

Enter Shaun Rowan, a Brit, of course, who explained the importance not only of High Tea, the inspiration for the new Limited Edition Tea Fragrance line comprising Fresh Mint Leaf, Earl Grey & Cucumber and, my personal favorite, Assam and Grapefruit – but of tea in general to British culture. While he gave us a verbal history of Jo Malone and her various inspirations, we were given an olfactory history with paper strips, often being asked to guess the fragrance (being groupies, most of the women knew immediately what they were smelling). The suspense was building. What is Jo Malone's most popular fragrance to date, he asked. Well, I knew that one...mine...English Pear and Freesia, which I stumbled upon as a sample merely two weeks after its introduction while buying a holiday gift for a friend. This was important because the same perfumer, Christine Nigel, who developed English Pear and Freesia, developed the three Tea Fragrances. He definitely had our attention.

Now this is where Blogger needs a fragrance function...how to describe them. They do, in fact, smell like tea...all of them. But, like all Jo Malone fragrances, they are so much more complex than that. If you simply went by her names you would be doing yourself a disservice because there is such complexity beneath the name. The Fresh Mint Leaf smells like, well, fresh mint leaf and will appeal to those who like an herb aroma on themselves, but underneath it is a little violet and water jasmine for depth, so on the skin it doesn't smell like a tea or cooking herb at all. When you first smell Earl Grey and Cucumber you do get the Earl Grey, but then you get the coolness of the cucumber, but it's anchored by vanilla and musk. The Assam and Grapefruit is, in my opinion, the most complex. It wasn't just that I was served some Assam Black Tea while smelling the aroma on a strip, but then I actually tried the scent, and it was intoxicating. As with all of them, you do get the tea scent, but underneath this one is some star anise, almond and vanilla (which I usually find too sweet but in this case works just fine), as well as cardamom, almond and a touch of patchouli, which Shaun kept describing as the "follow me, young man" factor in Jo Malone's fragrances. I'll take that.

That said, the wonderful thing about all Jo Malone scents is that you don’t have to apply them and then walk around a department store for two hours waiting for them to dry down, change and possibly turn on you. Her fragrances are so natural and pure that what you spray on and love is likely to turn into something you love even more. In fact, if there is any change in the fragrance at all, it's usually for the better (I’ve been seen on the subway voraciously smelling my own arm on the way home). Good thing, since Shaun taunted us by saying there were only 10 bottles of this one and 8 bottles of that one left of these limited edition fragrances. The stampede was real. Don't let these get away from you.