“I am a chemist. I can do some good for your other products as well, not just my toner and moisturizer which you would like to steal. You may find a bad chemist who understands nothing about the product, and who will make you bad moisturizers. Your lipsticks, they also need someone to correct. It would be helpful to you, I think, to have a knowledgeable person overseeing your manufacturer’s work. Correct?”
“Doesn’t matter even if it is correct. We can’t afford that. Even my sister and I aren’t on a payroll. Not yet.”
“If you want my formulas, maybe you have to hire me. I can cost very little.”
“You can’t stand that job at General Electric, can you?”
“I cannot.”
“So you would cost very little?”
“At first.”
“Do you have to get permission from your family to sell them to us, seeing as these are family formulas?”
“I have no family. The formulas are mine to sell or not. To make or not.” She set the glass and bottle down beside her on the step. “All those years of study at university and what I have that the Americans want is what my grandmother cooked on her stove. So strange.”
“I have to talk to my sister.”
“Tell your sister that I will maybe accept a monthly retainer for at least one year. And we talk about a raise after three months.” I knew that she was looking at Be Your Best as an escape hatch, a way out of the dingy rooming house and the stool where she perched at General Electric and colored in fighter plane engine designs.
“I think we need her if we’re going to go to the next step, Lilly,” I said.
“Well then. Go tell the witch she’s on retainer and we want that moisturizer now. Also the toner, and after that we need to get the lipstick right. We’re already on the roller coaster. Let’s let the ride go on.”
Lilly threaded an arm though mine and bumped my hip with hers. I went back to Ruga Potts’s boardinghouse and we sat down side by side on the porch steps again. She accepted the piddly retainer figure on the condition that I promised to renew every month for at least a year and we would talk about a raise after three months. “Also,” she insisted, “I want at least one of the lipsticks to be packaged in little glass jars. My grandmother loved little glass jars.”
I held out my hand. Ruga Potts shook it. That was how Be Your Best Cosmetics got scientific.
NEAVE
What Technicolor Did for Us
Over the course of that year we whiplashed between being sure we’d be tycoons and sure we’d be bankrupt. Ruga Potts had to go for two months without her full retainer fee but she stayed with us in order to escape the alternative, which was a drawing board at General Electric. Then a miracle happened, and it seemed to unleash a whole little stream of happy things.
The miracle was Technicolor. Movie actresses started to appear on magazine covers in aquamarine eye shadow, rose-tinted cheeks, ivory skin, Chinese red lips, and a black slash of eyebrow. For a while Veronica Lake’s face was everywhere, creamy and pink, more blond than possible, more like a tropical bird than a human. Images like this unleashed a river of imitators who had no idea, really, how to get that flip at the end of the eyeliner. Back in 1937 everybody looked at cartoon Snow White’s Technicolor face and held their judgment. That was a children’s movie idea of prettiness on a cartoon princess. Also there was the feeling, persisting still in some circles, that only actresses and prostitutes put that much color on their faces. But the door had opened. In the war years the first starlets began being photographed with the exact same blue eyelids and rouged cheeks as Snow White, and the game slowly changed. Women flocked to department store cosmetics counters, the older ones uncertain and the younger ones delighted, everybody looking for the New Look and that look still so new that a whole lot of women were walking around with faces that looked like children’s crayon drawings of women rather than women with their natural charms accented. Well, Lilly said—we can help them with that.
Lilly showed the salesgirls how to teach women to put a matte start on the lips, then the lipstick itself, then fixer powder, and a final color in pencil or angled tiny specialty brush: five products, each one presented as a necessary component of a coordinated regimen that had been formulated by Ruga Potts, who was proving to understand sales as well as ceresin. We had each and every one in stock. Lilly taught the sales force how to apply false eyelashes and put a foundation fixer on the face that was lighter than the natural skin before contouring with other brushes, deeper shades. Technicolor seemed to give everybody a sense of confident freedom with color. They wanted more and more of it. Gone was the norm of a single eye shadow lasting five years. Gone was the single tube of lipstick. We were in the money.
The biggest sellers were lipsticks and nail polishes. Our packaging was beautiful—perfect little robin’s-egg-blue boxes bound up in blue cloth ribbon. Our bags were high-gloss blue, visible from a block away and very, very pretty. I painted every room in the warehouse offices the same pale blue. I bought two more desks and moveable walls to divide the workspace. We advertised for an assistant.
We’d built up a head of steam and I was determined to use it. These kinds of moments didn’t last forever. They were windows of opportunity and we were supposed to fling ourselves through them before they closed.
That fall Lilly decided that what I’d been wearing at salesgirl training events wasn’t up to our ever-improving company standards. Nothing that a shopping trip with her couldn’t correct, she said. She marched me through Jordan Marsh and then into Filene’s, then onward into smaller shops below Chinatown that carried warehouse-direct sales, me reluctant and she hunting methodically. Then she found it, an aquamarine sheath with a tropical-flower design so detailed that the blossoms seemed to have been photographed onto the fabric. She pushed me into a changing room. It slipped on effortlessly, yet I could feel where it clung to my breasts and rear. When I stepped out to inspect myself in the mirror, the thing made me feel like there were bubbles in my chest. Lilly inspected me.
“Fabulous! Good lord, girl, you should see it from the rear! It fits like … what was her name? You know, that girl who I always said was the best-dressed thing in the senior class? Sexy girl. She bought all those cosmetics from me back when I was at the spa? Who was she?”
“Jenna Louise Bowles.”
“Right. This dress makes me think of her, and she was the master at the head-turning effect. That dress, trust me, will turn a head or two.”
Apparently my sister did not remember Jenna Louise’s fate, only her fashion sense. I felt my throat tighten around the image I saw in the mirror—someone who was me and not me, a piratical young woman in a Marais dress.
I bought it.
The next morning I told Lilly I wanted to test some new lipstick names. “Let’s switch out Night in Paris to something more like Wild Paris Night.”