Lip Shtick
At the Neiman Marcus in Northpark Center, more women buy more makeup for more money than anyplace else in dallas—maybe in the world. No wonder I couldn't resist.
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My friend from Highland Park reads great meaning into the fact that she wore her makeup to bed for years and wonders if it's the plight of Dallas women to be afraid to look imperfect, even in the dark. "I read that Angie Harmon, who went to my high school, used to sleep in her makeup too," she wrote. "I wonder if more Dallas women go to bed with their faces on? I think we all knew exactly what Mary Kay Ash meant when she used to say, 'I go to bed looking like Elizabeth Taylor and I wake up looking like Charles de Gaulle.'"
THE GRANDE DAME OF THE NorthPark Neiman's cosmetics department is a short, stoop-shouldered 64-year-old saleswoman named Christina Gilbert who wears quite possibly the largest glasses in Dallas. Their colossal brown frames arch above her false eyelashes, where they brush against her copper-colored bangs, and dip below the bottom of her nose, magnifying her green eyes to such a degree that whenever she peers at customers, she appears to be gazing at them with rapturous interest. Women who can't remember her name invariably ask for "the lady with the glasses," sometimes illustrating who they are talking about by cupping their hands around their face in two gigantic parentheses. She is a curious fixture in a place where the rules of beauty are so uniform, but she understands her customers well; they are competitive, and her glasses obscure what is a very pretty face. Because she is fond of wearing leopard-print headbands, baubles, loud sweaters, and an array of gold pins shaped like bumblebees, it would be easy to assume she is just an eccentric. She is, in fact, a shrewd saleswoman. After 24 years behind the counter—currently she sells the Sisley Paris line—she is one of the top sales associates in the makeup department, which sells untold millions in cosmetics and skin-care products each year.
Keep in mind that it takes a particular talent to summon women into a department store to buy products that are not essential, that are wildly expensive, and that can be purchased over the phone or online—and then to retain these customers, and sometimes their daughters and granddaughters, as loyal clients for decades. Christina shrugs off any suggestion that she must have special intuitive powers. "I listen," she said. "Most women don't get listened to." Indeed, throughout my time at Neiman's, Christina was often huddled in conference with various well-heeled women as they unburdened themselves over the shiny glass cases of moisturizer. Or she was slipping off a giant earring so that she could press her ear a little bit closer to the phone receiver, all the while nodding vigorously in communion with the caller. Like a good hairdresser, she knows. She knows whose husband is cheating, whose teenager is struggling with addiction, whose wife is getting ready to file for divorce. It's all in the name of customer service, though the purchase often seems an afterthought. "Oh, I almost forgot," women will say, returning to the counter after an involved conversation that ended moments before with an embrace. "I wanted to get the Botanical Night Complex."
The mix of commerce and confidences is not unique to Christina; it's part of the fabric of the cosmetics department, where vanity and hope and self-doubt are all interwoven. "Anytime you let someone touch your face, it's very intimate," said saleswoman Carol Anderson. "Women tell us about their face lifts and intimacy with their husbands. We know things their own families don't know."
Christina, to her credit, was too discreet—and too astute—to let me eavesdrop on such conversations. My only glimpse of this kind of exchange came by accident one morning, when I was talking to saleswoman LaDonna Powers; suddenly, a petite blonde who had been scanning the room from afar strode up to us. "LaDonna!" she cried. "Thank God you're here. I had to get your opinion." She squeezed LaDonna's hand as if they were old friends. ("I love LaDonna because she doesn't put any pressure on me," she told me. "She shows me what's new and how to look good.") LaDonna smiled warmly as the woman debriefed her on her life post-divorce and her various cosmetic adventures. "The plastic surgeon you suggested was fabulous," the woman said. "Look! I got my tummy tucked again two weeks ago." Beaming, she tugged on her jeans to show how loose they were at the waist.
"You look great!" LaDonna marveled.
"And guess what else? I'm in love!"
"That's wonderful!" LaDonna said.
"I'm just crazy about him. Really! He's the one." She smiled for a moment at her own good fortune. Then, without missing a beat, she got down to business. "So I need one of these," she said, extracting a tube of lipstick from her purse. "And I need something to make my face look less shiny."
"La Prairie?" LaDonna offered, naming one of the priciest cosmetics lines Neiman's carries.
"Don't you think?" the woman said.
LaDonna gave her a significant look—You want the best, don't you?—and nodded, ushering her to the counter.
This scene plays out, with variations, seven days a week. Women are pampered, affirmed, empowered, and made to feel beautiful, all while vast amounts of merchandise are moved off the shelves. No one is spared; not the Middle Eastern royals who buy here, nor Angie Harmon, nor the Bush twins. It would be easy to be cynical about the whole thing, but in the end, everyone wins: The customer feels elated when she walks out the door with a bit of the Neiman's mystique, and the saleswoman has made another 9 percent commission. (A top salesperson in a good year can make a six-figure salary.) Christina does not fawn over her customers or offer up false flattery to make her sales; she simply gives them her undivided attention and good judgment. Her clients want to be nurtured, and so she nurtures them. She sends them bouquets and chocolate-covered apples on their birthday and flowers when there has been a death in the family. Throughout the year, she calls periodically to check in and pens cheery notes on homemade cards festooned with feathers and sequins. And still, business is never too far away: "Would you like to charge this to your Neiman's account?" is her constant refrain, the chorus to almost every love song she sings to a client.
Whether or not the beauty products Christina sells actually do what they say they do—the literature on one $350 elixir claims that it "revitalizes, repairs, restructures, rehydrates, and renews" the skin as it "plumps the dermal layer"—is beside the point. The beauty business has always, in the famous words of Revlon founder Charles Revson, provided women with "hope in a jar." One of Neiman's best-sellers is La Prairie's Creme Cellulaire Radiance, a facial moisturizer that purports to improve the skin's elasticity; it is displayed atop an illuminated platform, as if it were a talisman, and runs $500 for a 1.7-ounce bottle. Rather than discouraging customers, its price has become its selling point. "We can't keep it in stock," Christina said. "It sells itself." The reasons for its popularity are simple enough. "Women want to stop time," she observed on my last visit. "Beauty is what makes us powerful, and so we try to buy our immortality." She was in a philosophical mood. Then, out of reflex, she switched into sales mode. Her voice softened and she leaned a bit closer, her gaze washing over my face as she drew me in. With great earnestness, she began to make the pitch: "And you know, good skin care can make all the difference . . ."
I'D LIKE TO SAY THAT I was immune to the notion that I could somehow buy beauty at the cosmetics counter, but I was no different from any woman who walks into Neiman's. I did successfully withstand the urge to purchase a $250 jar of moisturizer that carried the intriguing claim that it was "made entirely by hand in a monastery." I also passed up the chance to buy various masks and creams laden with exotic ingredients such as "pure diamond powder," "crushed Polynesian pearls," "wild yams," "sea wrack," and "powerful caviar extracts." And I refrained from pulling out my credit card after the maestro performance of a natty fragrance salesman who, with great dexterity and care, massaged my hand, misted me with a heady blend of "citrus-sandalwood notes," and then blew softly on my wrist until I was certain he would pass out from a lack of oxygen. But it didn't take long to break down my resistance. Once I got a makeover, I promptly spent more money on makeup in a few minutes—$136, to be exact—than I did all last year.
It was an unusually slow afternoon, and so the Neiman's makeup artists had passed the time by working on me as we talked. They dusted and drew and smoothed and polished and contoured and shadowed, stopping now and then to take a step back and assess their work. A woman with smoky eyes gave me smoky eyes; a woman with peachy lipstick and lip liner applied peachy lipstick and lip liner. At some point, my hair acquired significant amounts of hairspray, which gave it a sturdy sheen, and I was spritzed in lemony clouds of Acqua di Parma. Bronzer lent my pallid skin a healthy glow. Under the diffuse lights of the cosmetics counter, I looked good. Not wildly different, just better. Enhanced.
The most stunning woman among the makeup artists, a dead ringer for Sophia Loren, told me as I began making my round of good-byes that she wanted to put makeup on me the following day. I thanked her but said I would have to decline. I was returning home to Austin. "Really?" she said, surprised. She did a quick appraisal of my face—the full-coverage foundation, the perfectly drawn flourishes of black eyeliner, the peachy lipstick so glossy that it was practically reflective—and then offered her assessment: "I thought you lived in Dallas."
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