Tongue in Chic

by Kirstie Clements

  I studied the portrait with rising dismay. Jade was bone thin. There was no expression on her face and her eyes were dead. This perhaps wasn’t surprising, given that, as the it girl of the season, she’d been tramping up and down the runways for a month before the shoot and had been existing on 500 calories a day. The image we were looking at was about as inviting to your average reader as the suggestion that crop tops were all the rage.

  We then embarked on the customary charade with a problematic cover, when we talked ourselves into liking it, rather than admit defeat. This went along the lines of:

  ‘I can warm up her skin tone and take out the hollows under her eyes.’

  ‘I’ll fill in those bits where you can see gaps in her hair. Yes, I can make her arms look bigger in Photoshop; no problem.’

  ‘The dress looks great, though. Just fill in her breastbone. Gee, Erica will be pleased.’

  ‘I think she looks fabulous. She’s so cool. I’d like to look like that.’

  ‘But she looks sick.’

  ‘We don’t have anything else for a cover.’

  ‘What we need are some really compelling cover lines that will make people buy it.’

  Something was wrong with this picture.

  4

  The Sharp End of Beauty

  It was early spring and we were hard at work on our big October issue, which promised to carry the most editorial and advertising pages of the year. I poked my head in the door of the beauty editor’s office to find her hard at work, tapping out a story on exfoliators. Beauty editor was one of the magazine’s most highly sought-after positions, mostly due to the amount of free products, treatments, lavish lunches and luxurious overseas travel that came with it.

  I had been a beauty editor for more than a decade before I became Chic’s editor-in-chief, and loved every moment of it; hence I expected a lot from my beauty girls. The beauty editor role was a difficult one to fill. She needed to have a superior creative flair, in order to write articles that would please both the reader and the advertiser. She needed to be punctual with deadlines, and precise with facts, while having a vast well of originality to draw on, so that she could reinvent the subject of lipstick every month. She also needed the patience to sit through hundreds of inane presentations about the dermis and the epidermis, and how a smoky eyeshadow would change your life, without leaping up and throttling someone. The current beauty editor, Nikki, was excellent at the last of these, and good at scheming up extended all-expenses-paid trips to Paris in order to write 2000 first-person words about a facial. She was as thick as a Dead Sea mud mask, but terribly pretty.

  I am hazy about how she came to be on staff in the first place, but I do recall that she was hired as a maternity-leave cover and had then obviously decided she was never going to leave. In the few face-to-face meetings I’d had with her, I could actually see Nikki trying to think. She was like a transparent cartoon robot, straining to find a potential personal pay-off in any conversation, while the cogs in her tiny brain turned, perfumed steam came out of one ear and a bolt fell to the floor. She hadn’t yet started accepting free cosmetic procedures, as she was still green enough to stick with wrangling free trips out of the PRs, but I was certain it would come. Mind you, it’s not that I could—or even should—pass judgment on that, as I’d never met a procedure I didn’t like the results of or wasn’t at least interested in trying. During my tenure as beauty editor, I’d been happy to be the guinea pig for no end of new non-surgical approaches in return for writing editorial stories. I suspect I was having Botox and collagen injections long before they were governmentally approved, but with no real mishaps.

  OK, maybe there had been a couple of mishaps, like the time in 2005 I had too much Botox injected into my jaw to be able to relax the muscles, and couldn’t swallow properly for a few weeks. Then there was the time that one of the needles pierced a blood vessel close to my eye and I ended up with lurid shiner the colour of a Christmas beetle. That was hard to explain away; while an overly smooth and immobile forehead was easy for people to politely ignore, a black eye was not, and saying, ‘I walked into a door’ was not cutting it.

  Probably the most perilous incident I was involved in, though not directly, was when I convinced the then managing director, Eleanor, to have her own fat harvested from her thighs and injected into the lines around her nose and into her lips. Eleanor’s reaction to the procedure was extreme, her face becoming a painful, throbbing mess of swelling and bruising, which resulted in two weeks’ downtime at home. Feeling dreadful about having caused the poor woman to undergo such extreme discomfort, to make amends I arranged a nice contra trip for her—a five-star cruise in the Pacific for a week. Eleanor, who was deeply chic and very clever, was almost apoplectic with rage when she returned and recounted the tedious horrors of geriatric cruising. I realised that if I wanted to keep my job, it would be better just to make sure Eleanor got discounts on luxury handbags.

  * * *

  At any rate, Nikki had obviously been enjoying the spoils of the job: her normally frizzy hair had been straightened to within an inch of its life, she had been dipped in fake tan and had undergone some very obvious teeth whitening, which made her appear to be wearing dentures.

  ‘I read somewhere that your teeth shouldn’t look whiter than your eyes,’ I said, to unnerve her, but also knowing it would take a while for her to process the information. ‘And what feature do you have planned for the next issue?’

  ‘“Get your body summer ready!”’ Nikki pronounced triumphantly, as if it were the first time this story had ever been written.

  I had produced quite a few stories myself on that very subject and, as I stood there, more than two decades down the fashion-magazine track, I realised that my body had never been ‘summer ready’ and probably never would be. Did any woman ever truly think she was ‘summer ready’? I was so unready to wear a swimsuit, I was ready for therapy. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that maybe these inane stories were making women feel worse about themselves. So, in my small way, I tried to turn the fashion-world juggernaut around.

  ‘It’d be good to perhaps do a story on something that actually produces real, tangible results, no?’ I said, leaning over Nikki’s shoulder and perusing what was on her computer screen. The last sentence she had typed read: ‘The nose is often the first area to be sunburnt. Why? Because it protrudes from the face.’

  * * *

  Still, the wearing of sunscreen was an important health message, I rationalised wearily. More than one frozen-faced Hollywood actress had credited her Dorian Gray–style ageing to ‘sunscreen and lots of water’, niftily leaving out any mention of the plastic surgeon on speed dial. I was hoping that by having every non-surgical procedure my face could possibly take, I could circumvent the need ever to undergo anything requiring a scalpel. General anaesthetic scared me; there is something so counter-intuitive about willingly signing a form stating that you accept the possibility you may die on the operating table, while undergoing a painful surgery meant to make you look a bit younger or slimmer. The last treatment I had endured, called Ultherapy, I had had with the intention of firming my jaw line. For thirty excruciating minutes, the nurse sent electrical jolts into the base of my facial muscles, which resulted in searing pain that cracked through my jaw and teeth, exploded behind my eyes and felt as though it were blowing out the back of my head. The results had been positive, though—people commented that I looked good, but they couldn’t put their finger on why or on what I’d had done. This was the best possible result of having a procedure. You could blithely pretend you were following the miraculous Nicole Kidman regime of rigorous sun protection and a positive mindset, and that gravity was making exceptions just for you.

  The acceptance level of surgery and procedures had changed a great deal over the years since the ‘Has she or hasn’t she?’ eighties, when we tried to guess who had undergone facelifts, looked for telltale scars behind the ears, and no one was brave enough to admit publi
cly that they had had work done. Much of the work done back then was not exactly subtle, and you would often come across a woman with her skin stretched so tautly she was having trouble speaking, and a hairline so high you could project a movie on her forehead. One of the most heavy-handed procedures was the creation of bee-stung lips; though designed to make one appear more youthful, in reality it just looked wrong and a tad desperate, but nobody was impolite enough to point that out. Come the early noughties, it was fine to hint that you may have had a little collagen, and a bit of Botox, and perhaps the odd peel, but facelifts were still on the down-low. But, as cosmetic surgery became ever more prevalent, the secrecy around it was relaxed. Who had had what work done, and who had had better work done became an open point of discussion: the question was ‘Who did your face?’ as opposed to ‘What have you done to your face?’

  I could differentiate surgeons’ work at twenty paces. On spotting a socialite at a party, I could tell at a glance that Doctor X had done her eyes and Doctor Y had done her jaw and neck. We all knew who overdid the Botox; we all knew who did the best fillers.

  While clearing out contacts in my phone one January, I was shocked to discover just how many, shall we say, ‘beauty and lifestyle specialists’ were now on my speed dial. I had a hairdresser, colourist, facialist, injector, naturopath, iridologist, manicurist, masseur, waxer, spray tanner, reiki master, clairvoyant, makeup artist, cosmetic dentist, brow specialist, registered nurse and personal trainer—although I hadn’t called the last person for a few years. I would have had an eyelash-extension person too, except I thought that was a bit much.

  * * *

  As you will have gathered, we took beauty very seriously at Chic. I once noticed that one of the young fashion assistants was wearing the same teal-blue polish on her fingers and toes.

  ‘Oh, look, you’re wearing matching polish,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen that.’ I didn’t mean anything by it, but she looked at me with horror.

  ‘Is that, like, not done?’ she asked. ‘Is it, like, really un-chic?’

  No matter how much I protested that I’d just commented in passing and had no real opinion on the matter, she seemed to be traumatised permanently because she never did it again.

  There had been many beauty disasters in the Chic office over the years I worked there, including the great hair-extension experiment of 2007 that my deputy, Alicia, had endured. Although the magazine’s staff generally eschewed hair extensions, deeming them Lindsay Lohan–level tacky, the beauty editor had convinced Alicia to have long locks glued into her short, thick hair. When she returned to the office with her new extensions, the staff were respectfully discreet in their comments, edging around the fact that she looked like a naval officer from Master and Commander. Finally, I cracked and said, ‘Alicia, you look like a carnival worker.’ She reacted by pulling them out at her desk, then and there.

  We’d all seen colleagues with bad dye jobs and over-zealous spray tanning, and once some dodgy cheek implants had to be removed. We’d also seen frequent Botox bruising, sheets of skin post intense pulse light peeling; and, as time went on, more intensive interventions, such as breast implants. The brave few who entered the world of liposuction and tummy tucks had been surprised at the severity of the procedures, the level of post-operative pain and the largely disappointing results.

  As cavalier as the Chic staff often were about signing up for seemingly quick fixes, they had pitfalls that should not be underestimated. For instance, I never found the idea of having someone energetically pump fat out of your body using cannulas palatable. Over the years, several colleagues underwent major liposuction, and afterwards each was reeling with the brutality of the operation, the resultant bruising, the body stockings and seeping dressings, and the potential for infection. The fact that the pesky fat then reappeared within a year or so, in exactly the same areas, was the real kicker.

  * * *

  I was content to continue with my low-risk tweaking—if, indeed, the practice of burning my facial skin with lasers, causing it to go crisp, dark and peel off, constituted ‘tweaking’. Or if having fat injected into my brow bone to lift—microscopically—a sagging eye, or enduring hundreds of tiny needles being rolled over my skin, breaking the blood vessels and injecting hyaluronic acid into the subcutaneous layers in order to boost plumpness, and so reduce lines, could be considered ‘tweaking’. I considered these methods to be reasonably benign components of regular beauty maintenance, much like pedicures or bikini waxing. Slowing down the ravages of the ageing process was one thing, but having your face sliced off, stretched back and re-sewn on? How vain, shallow and dangerous, I tut-tutted.

  However, when I turned forty, I booked a consultation with Dr Forest, the best plastic surgeon in the country, just to have a chat about what I might need in terms of surgery. Eventually. Like, maybe soon-ish. I had also decided to investigate the genius who was responsible for Sharon Stone’s rather remarkable facial work. She just seemed to be getting better looking every year.

  Although we had a long-standing rule at Chic that the magazine did not promote dieting, we had no issue with publishing articles on cosmetic surgery and procedures, especially as they continued to grow in popularity with the general public. We didn’t push them, and we always made certain that we included the facts, the outcomes and the possible downsides. If we went anywhere near the topic of weight, it was to suggest fitness options like boot camps or personal training, but only to improve your health, not to lose unwanted kilos. The bubble that magazines like Chic inhabited imagined, and suggested, that everyone was naturally slim, happy and fulfilled and had more than $200 000 to spend on fashion and beauty.

  Interestingly, the fashion editors always had a different viewpoint on beauty from other members of the editorial team. Ironically, given the world of artifice they inhabit, a lot of editors and stylists embrace the natural, and don’t wear much makeup or like strong perfume. The very specific look that they considered to be beautiful didn’t vary much from decade to decade. They liked the models to be tall and lean, with loose, slightly messy long hair and strong features. When I was at Chic, the fashion editors wanted to look like the Canadian model Daria Werbowy, and would have booked her for every shoot if they could. She was considered the epitome of cool. They liked models—Kate Moss was another one—who didn’t seem to be trying too hard, who looked naturally sexy, but cool sexy. They couldn’t be sexy sexy, FHM sexy, someone-a-heterosexual-guy-would-slobber-over sexy. That would be cheesy. Yes, Lara Stone and Gisele Bündchen were sexy sexy, but they had something else about them that was a bit edgy and therefore cool. Editors and stylists might favour racial diversity in their chosen models, but again they have to fit within a very narrow definition of appropriateness. While most models would think they are booked on their beauty alone, it’s surprising how much whether they are booked is based on this amorphous high-fashion credibility they may or may not have. And everybody wants to shoot the top girls, because it proves you are a major player. You are in with the in crowd; you have what it takes to work in the inner sanctum. I hope that just some of the hundreds of gorgeous models who are not booked each season realise that it says a lot more about the doubts and insecurities of other players in the industry than it says about them.

  * * *

  Later that day Alicia, sans hair extensions, marched briskly into my office clutching a clipboard.

  ‘We’re all in the art department, ready for the production meeting,’ she advised. Joining them, I settled into my regular spot, sitting on the desk next to Simone. The team had developed a habit of sitting in the same seats for our meetings. If a new member unwittingly took someone else’s place, it was interpreted as a major faux pas. On one occasion, I walked in a few moments late to discover a new staffer sitting in my place. I thought it was amusing and moved to another chair, but there was a collective gasp from the rest of the team. Particularly as she was brash and not especially popular already, it did not bode well for her.


  As I looked around to see what everyone was wearing, which was one of my favourite pastimes, Tracy from production caught my eye. She had become addicted to Botox, fillers and—judging by the unnatural shine that was emanating from her skin—to dermabrasion. She had begun to adopt the ‘lioness’ look that so many socialites sported: with over-pumped cheeks; feline eyes; strangely fixed, angled brows; and a pudgy, spread upper lip. It was a shame, as Tracy had been so attractive and was only in her late thirties. I was reminded yet again of a cosmetic-surgery truism: as evidenced by women like those on the Real Housewives reality television shows, too much work did not necessarily mean a person looked more youthful. A weirdly inflated top lip won’t fool anybody about your date of birth. Anyway, I like thin lips. And strong noses.

  The team began to run through the stories they had planned for the next issue. I listened to the fashion trends with a bare modicum of enthusiasm. Techno fabrics. Mod. Print on print. I had heard these same influences mentioned over and over though the years. The trends just kept reappearing, although most of the time there was something slightly new about them. But I was surprised by my own lack of interest. Had I been doing this too long? Were we all not trying hard enough?

  With the slew of fashion-related material on the internet, the constant social-media updates, the blogs and the selfies, and the behind-the-scenes apps showing models having their hair blow-dried in the studio, I felt overwhelmed with banal information. We had always spent so much time deliberating over choices and presenting only what we felt was the very best. Now it seemed to be a race to see who could publish the most and how often, quality be damned.