cooling and chemical-free in your handbag that won’t potentially cause any irritation.
In any case, Evian Brumisateur was successful in making itself a hugely desirable product, and in securing its place in every beauty junkie’s arsenal. I associate its packaging with the cluttered make-up table on countless photo shoots and filming sets and absolutely will concede that it launched an entire beauty category of facial spritzers, now a feature in most skincare brands with the addition of plant extracts, hyaluronic acid, glycerin and so on. I’ve also no doubt the dubious myth that a final spray of water locks make-up in place went on to inspire the development of true make-up fixing sprays like those by Urban Decay, MAC, NYX, Clarins and many others. But mostly I still see Evian’s original as little more than a status symbol born in an era obsessed with acquiring them. As with our obsession with buying wasteful plastic bottles of water in safe and plentiful supply from our own kitchen taps, I often think that future generations will look at Evian Brumisateur and wonder if ours had temporarily taken leave of its senses.
Benefit Benetint
Much like prawns, gin and bracelets, Benefit Benetint is something that looks so completely up my street, and yet, however persistently I try, I just can’t get onboard. My skin is too dry and too thirsty for this liquid rose-petal lip and cheek stain and so it sinks in well before I can blend it, and there it remains, like a clumsy Malbec spill on a white shag pile. On normals and oilies, Benetint is beautiful – but this isn’t the only reason I’m able to love it. Sometimes one quirky, interesting product can create enough mystique and ecstatic word of mouth, that it alone has the power to launch an empire – and never has that been more pleasingly demonstrated than here.
In 1977 an exotic dancer entered the tiny San Francisco beauty boutique of twins Jean and Jane Ford, and asked for something to stain her nipples (I do so enjoy hearing of a beauty gripe even I’d never considered), making them bright, perky and noticeable throughout a long show on a dark stage. The sisters took up the gauntlet and began experimenting in their kitchen, steaming real rose petals to create a deep, vivid red liquor to stain the skin. The liquid was poured in a tiny cork-stoppered glass bottle, hand-labelled with a naive line drawing of a single bloom, named ‘Rose Tint’ and delivered to the dancer. Needless to say, it was enthusiastically received, applied more widely than on the nips, and soon dozens of San Franciscan women wanted in.
Gradually, Benefit took off, arriving in the UK in the late nineties, where just a tiny handful of products were sold at Harrods. The press were captivated, the buzz about the by then repackaged and renamed Benetint in particular was huge. Now, Benefit is one of Britain’s top five bestselling colour brands. Some of their products are superb: they are particularly good at brows, bronzers and highlighters, but that original nipple tint remains its hero. When brushed onto the right skin and rubbed in with fingertips, it adds a pretty, effortless rose flush straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite watercolour that, sadly, I can only admire second-hand.
Mason Pearson Hairbrushes
I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in a hairdresser’s salon and witnessed your stylist find themselves temporarily unable to locate his or her Mason Pearson hairbrush, but I have on several occasions and can assure you it’s not pretty. Woe betide any chancer who attempted to make off with it. This is because a Mason Pearson rubber cushion brush remains, over 200 years after its original invention, the gold standard throughout the hairdressing world, with each owner feeling as attached to theirs as a chef to her favourite paring knife. I feel similarly about my own cherished brushes.
I encountered my first Mason Pearson at around six years old, when my aunt came to stay from London with a girlfriend who unpacked a large Mason Pearson and placed it ceremoniously on my tiny dressing table next to her Z-bed. Before then, I’d thought that hairbrushes were two quid jobs from the corner shop or chemist and associated them with tortuous and tear-filled detangling sessions in front of the fire – so fraught that my father once felt a yellow plastic handle, defeated by a knot as unyielding as a boulder, snap clean in half in my hair and sort of dangle, like Fay Wray in King Kong’s clutches. The Mason Pearson was different. Like the Mary Poppins of hairbrushes, it was firm, sturdy and no-nonsense but kind, modest and uncommonly elegant. Sadly, there was no way a family like ours could ever spend a week’s grocery money on a hairbrush, and so I had to wait until adulthood, when I was earning my own money and found myself in a traditional chemist in Mayfair ostensibly looking for Nurofen. That same 19-year-old ‘Handy’ sized Mason Pearson is still on my dressing table today, nobly doing its job, while an 8-year-old ‘Pocket’ size lives permanently in my handbag.
It’s endlessly satisfying to me that in an age of ceramic-barrelled, laser-cut, heated and rotating contraptions, this high-quality British-made icon prevails. Anyone who’s ever owned a Mason Pearson will know why. The weighty plastic handle (or a wooden one if you’re a purist – they’re still available on some models) feels smooth and solid in the hand, the bristles (natural bristle for fine hair, a bristle and nylon mix for normal hair, nylon bristles for thick and curly hair) glide through locks like a spoon through cream, gently massaging the scalp to dislodge dirt and distribute natural oils down the shaft, thus eliminating frizz. It backcombs brilliantly, neither scratches nor pulls, tames hair without causing static, and dries fringes or bangs better than anything (just pull the brush back and forth across your forehead while the dryer nozzle points downward). The Mason Pearson can also be used on children’s hair (I invariably buy the child’s size as christening gifts) without them wailing from bath to bedtime. The brush itself is extremely easy – and satisfying – to clean with a sturdy wide-toothed comb.
Of course, any Mason Pearson owner would be lying if they claimed not to have been drawn, at least in part, to its heirloom-worthy looks. The signature gold-blocked ‘Dark Ruby’ (black on first glance, a gemstone red when held up to the light) handle and orange rubber cushion make it utilitarian but elegant, and recognisable the world over. And despite the incomparability of the Mason Pearson, so many are still trying to copy it, even marking up the already painful price point. It’s wholly unseemly and I reject them utterly.
Clairol Herbal Essences
Let’s be perfectly honest, there’s nothing exceptional or special about Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner. They smell rather lovely, they do the job perfectly well, they come at a great price point, can be bought anywhere and their name sounds pleasingly like a reggae compilation album circa 1973. What makes them iconic is a single marketing campaign, conceived as a do-or-die last-chance saloon for a tired-looking haircare franchise at Clairol, at a time when Herbal Essences was a generic family haircare brand with no USP to speak of. By the late 1990s, beauty brands using natural plant extracts were a dime to a dozen, many of them doing it more thoroughly and more authentically. Herbal Essences had always been marketed at everyone, and thereby appealed to no one.
Ad execs decided to give the brand a boot up the backside with a campaign zoning in on women rather than the entire family. Borrowing heavily from Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally, the groundbreaking new campaign featured women, standing alone in the shower, loudly climaxing as they lathered up with Herbal Essences shampoo, suggesting that this run-of-the-mill brand was far from an unremarkable, stuffy seventies relic, but a ‘totally orgasmic’ experience. The ads were pretty tame – cheeky rather than softly pornographic – but for a generation of women who’d grown up in token sex education classes without ever hearing mention of the female orgasm, they represented a sea-change in middle-of-the-road beauty advertising and marketing. Herbal Essences was no longer about
