Women Talk

A brief history of Chanel

daniel — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:11:54 +0000

The three new Chanel nail colours for spring

What’s the story?

In beauty terms, it all starts with Chanel No5. It is the best-selling fragrance in the world. The world! That’s a lot of people all going around smelling the same. It started life back in 1921 when Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel was already reigning over the Paris fashion world. Created with Russian perfumer to the Tsars, Ernest Beaux, the name for Chanel’s first fragrance is said to come from her superstitious belief in the virtues of the number five. Apparently she picked the fifth sample presented to her by Beaux and the simple name stuck. It was the first time that a fashion house had created a perfume and it soon became a huge hit. At the same time, Chanel started to expand and go global launching a cosmetics line (in 1924) and a range of skincare products (in 1929).

So Chanel took the world by storm?

In the 50s, Chanel No5 really was the perfume to be, erm, smelt in. In a 1954 interview, Marilyn Monroe famously answered the question “What do you wear to bed?” with the line “Just a few drops of No5″. The popularity of the perfume grew and grew but this wasn’t necessarily a great thing. In the 70s it was decided that No5 had lost its air of exclusivity so it was reinvented and made less widely available. Huge advertising campaigns were adopted using big name directors and big name stars – a Chanel tradition that lives on to this day.

Is it just about perfume then?

Marilyn Monroe getting ready for bed

Not at all. Chanel has a huge range of fancily-priced makeup with seasonal launches and limited edition collections that come thick and fast. In more recent years, there has been the somewhat peculiar phenomenon of the ‘it’ nail colour. Maybe because it’s affordable in a recession, maybe because it’s fun, or maybe because Chanel have a great marketing team and have hooked us all in, but something strange happens when Chanel launch a new shade. People get a bit giddy – waiting lists are formed and cheap copycats are produced. This spring’s hues are a group of three pastelly-fruity shades named April, May, and June (pictured above, £17.50 each, call 020 7493 3836 for stockist info). My pick is the peachy shade June which I feel bridges the seasonal gap quite nicely – just the right side of summery brightness without going too far.

Any reasonably priced alternatives?

• Nails Inc have a very similar shade called Little Miss Sunshine (£12, nailsinc.com) or try Revlon Top Speed Fast Dry Nail Enamel in Peachy (£6.49, boots.com).

Brits awards 2012: winners and nominees on stage – in pictures

daniel — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:11:47 +0000

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Adele and Ed Sheeran both took away two awards, with Coldplay, One Direction, Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Lana Del Rey also among the winners

No, Abbey, your stardom’s not OK! | Victoria Coren

daniel — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:20:02 +0000

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The fame thrust on footballers’ wives is skewing the worth of true celebrity and talent

If you feel incensed when some poor female celebrity is photographed unwittingly on a beach with a ring drawn round her cellulite, or queuing for coffee with a spot visible and her hair undone, then Lord knows what you must make of one being described as “dead in the bath with her blood full of drugs”.

There are no posthumous photographs of Whitney Houston, as far as I know, but they would be all over the internet if there were. The press is certainly inviting us to imagine her water-logged corpse, going down the back stairs of a glitzy hotel in a body bag. This is the extreme end of: “Her dress is accidentally pulled up at the back! Not so glamorous now, are you, madam?”

I find those cruel, ungallant paparazzi snaps of famous women looking spotty, or fat, or haggard, impossible to defend – until I look at OK! magazine.

This week’s issue, for example features a prominent interview with the footballer’s wife Abbey Clancy. In the opening question, Abbey is asked to reveal the most romantic thing that her husband, Peter Crouch, has ever done.

Abbey obliges with the occasion when “he phoned me and said, ‘I’m not coming home tonight but I’ve got a car coming to pick you up.’ I was taken to the Dorchester and we had massages and in our room was a pair of YSL shoes, an Alaia dress and a Prada clutch bag to wear that night!”

This made me feel angry, and ill, and sad. Why does she have to name the designers? This ordinary girl who’s lucked into wealth is taking the noses of other ordinary girls who haven’t been so lucky and grinding them hard into the glass shards of her superior fortune. Does she want readers to reflect miserably that they’ll never transform their own drab lives into such sparkling glory? Or to resolve beadily that they will, thus renewing the whole foul value system? Her “Alaia dress”, waved like a flag in the faces of the hopeful, stands for all the glittering crap that people are still being persuaded to want, to the detriment of our culture, our economy, our planet and our souls.

Later in the interview, Abbey is asked to divulge her favourite smells.

“My favourite smell on a man,” she immediately drivels, “is Lynx and Marc Jacobs.”

What I smelt, at that point, was a rat. I scanned to the end of the piece; sure enough, Abbey is “launching the new Lynx Attract range”. But though she will spill all about her marriage in return for a wedge of cash from a deodorant company, she couldn’t bear to name this high street brand alone. She had to throw in a designer scent on top. I’d have admired her more if she’d said: “My favourite smell is Lynx and the warm stench of money.”

And when I read this sort of thing, I want other magazines to catch Abbey Clancy looking bloated and ugly without make-up, and I want newspapers to reprint those stories about Peter Crouch and the hooker. Just to give teenage girls a chance, a tiny chance, of thinking: “Hang on… Maybe this isn’t the life I should aim for. Maybe I’d be a bit lonely, married to a man I don’t trust and painting my face all day. Maybe, as I sat draped in the accessories he’d picked out in creepy detail, I’d feel a bit hollow and empty. Maybe I’ll just stay on at school and do my A-levels.”

Abbey Clancy, and her like, queer the pitch for all those famous people who just want to act or sing or otherwise entertain without their private lives and puffy Sunday morning faces being plastered across the press. When the tabloids are destroyed, we won’t be left with a calm, quiet world where artists can put the “work” out there and otherwise keep quiet, because OK!-style magazines will swell out to fill the gap, with shrieking false gods and grim, infectious values: a world portrayed precisely as the shallower celebrities want it, with no balancing rudeness or whistleblowing to sculpt out some middle way, some hint of truth.

And I wonder if the consolation, for those innocent entertainers who get caught in the crossfire of our thesis-antithesis fame culture, is to look at Whitney Houston.

Houston, like Amy Winehouse, is one of those divas whose pain was so great, their fairy tale so poisoned, that there would never have been any hiding it anyway. This often seems the case with the biggest and starriest stars. No amount of press decorum could have concealed the darkness in Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson, and they didn’t really want it to. It was a tortured desire to make their suffering visible, I think, which made stardom a sort of vocation. They let millions in. They neutralised jealousy and inspired love.

The singer Adele has that sort of tendency; she’s happier, I hope, but unafraid to pour her heartbreak into lyrics when she isn’t. That’s what was so risible about Karl Lagerfeld calling her fat. I mean, so what? She’s already put an infinitely greater vulnerability out there of her own accord; that prat’s irrelevant bitching can’t touch her.

So, I wonder whether other famous women (or men) couldn’t look at it as a sort of scale. The cheapest kind of Clancy-celeb projects a thin, stupid veneer of meaningless perfection and nobody loves them. The greatest, most memorable kind of star shows every trace of damage and legends are built. In the middle, perhaps, the odd chink revealed inadvertently is just part of the job.

www.victoriacoren.com

Victoria Coren

A short history of tanning | Sophie Wilkinson

daniel — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:13:55 +0000

Sophie Wilkinson

Coco Chanel, who may have inadvertently ‘invented’ sunbathing. Photograph: Alex Stewart Sasha/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

In the millennia preceding the industrial revolution, pallor was popular within the upper classes, hinting at a noble life of leisure spent indoors. Dark skin was associated with serfdom and toiling in fields all day. Using poisonous whiteners to create pale skin has been popular throughout history – particularly during the ancient Greek, Roman and Elizabethan eras.

The trend for whiteness halted after the industrial revolution. Its corollary urbanisation of Britain meant that by the 19th century, the working classes had moved into the shadows. They lived in cramped dwellings and worked in mines and factories. Any leisure time available was taken indoors, to avoid the smog and soot of the streets. Children developed rickets and other bone deformities and, by 1890, Theobald Palm recognised that sunlight was crucial for bone development. A year later, John Harvey Kellogg – who had still to invent the corn flake – invented the “incandescent light bath”, which was used by King Edward VII, installing units in Buckingham Palace to help cure his gout.

In 1903, Niels Finsen was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine after using “phototherapy” to remove skin ulcers caused by lupus vulgaris. Tanning was only made chic 20 years later, when Coco Chanel caught too much sun on a Mediterranean cruise. The photographs of her disembarking in Cannes set a new precedent of beauty; her friend Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucigne later said: “I think she may have invented sunbathing. At that time, she invented everything.”

But for Britons, this look was aspirational rather than achievable – holidays were rare, and went no further than the nearest seaside or holiday camp. The depression, the second world war and its subsequent austerity measures meant that the closest women got to tanning was dousing their legs in Bovril to create the illusion of stockings.

Actor Jessica Alba. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

By the 1960s, colour film and commercial air travel were now available and people soon had enough money to enjoy both. The glamour of sunbathing drew Britons to the Mediterranean, particularly Spain. When economic strife returned to Britain in the 1970s, methods of sunless tanning – such as Coppertone self-tan – grew in popularity, and by 1978, the sunbed was reintroduced as a quick way of bronzing. The cosmetics boom of the 1980s and the accessibility of Mediterranean package holidays too carried the glamour of tanning through to the 1990s. By 2000, a survey showed that 50% of Britons said that returning with a tan was the single most important reason for actually going on holiday.

Women with toffee-coloured skin (Jessica Alba, Beyonce, Halle Berry, Kim Kardashian) are at the forefront of definitions of 21st century beauty. An argument runs that white women try to achieve similar complexions, ignoring that these celebrities’ skin tones are the result of being mixed race or non-caucasian. However, those obsessed with tanning also have Katie Price, Victoria Beckham and even the whole cast of Geordie Shore as tanning role models. The desire to tan runs deeper than race.

Fears surrounding the risks of tanning were confirmed in 2009, when it was found that rates of malignant melanoma in the UK have more than quadrupled in the past 30 years and that it is the most common form of cancer among those aged 15-34. The World Health Organisation has found that people who have been using tanning devices before age 30 are 75% more likely to develop melanoma.

The Sunbed (Regulation) Act, introduced in 2010 with much help from Girls Aloud singer and ex-tanner Nicola Roberts, made it illegal for tanning salons to allow under-18s to use sunbeds. However, there is no regulation on how often an adult can use a sunbed.

• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

No, Abbey, your stardom’s not OK! | Victoria Coren

daniel — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:13:37 +0000

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The fame thrust on footballers’ wives is skewing the worth of true celebrity and talent

I find those cruel, ungallant paparazzi snaps of famous women looking spotty, or fat, or haggard, impossible to defend – until I look at OK! magazine.

Later in the interview, Abbey is asked to divulge her favourite smells.

“My favourite smell on a man,” she immediately drivels, “is Lynx and Marc Jacobs.”

And I wonder if the consolation, for those innocent entertainers who get caught in the crossfire of our thesis-antithesis fame culture, is to look at Whitney Houston.

www.victoriacoren.com

Victoria Coren

The beauty spot: fig fragrance

daniel — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 06:34:23 +0000

Eva Wiseman

Getting fresh: fake it with fig. Photograph: Alamy

What fig fragrances do is make things smell like the outdoors is meant to. The outdoors is meant to smell of wet wood and things cooked on fires. Instead it smells of Red Bull and dirty hair. So you fake it with fig. It’s like sweetness soured, or organic pudding. When you burn it in a candle (Wild fig and cassis candle £38, jomalone.com – also, see their cologne below) it makes the room smell like a boutique hotel (best smell ever) and when you rub it in as a body cream (Diptyque Philosykos body lotion £28, johnlewis.com) you feel like you’ve been for a bracing walk.

Alternatively…

Space NK Mediterranean Fig Candle £30, spacenk.co.uk Korres Fig Body Milk £9.50, feelunique.com Jo Malone Wild Fig and Cassis Cologne £72, jomalone.com Tommy Guns Fig, Plum and Marshmallow Conditioner £5.50, asos.com Laura Mercier Fresh Fig Hand Cream £13, selfridges.com

No, Abbey, your stardom’s not OK! | Victoria Coren

daniel — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 06:34:01 +0000

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

The fame thrust on footballers’ wives is skewing the worth of true celebrity and talent

I find those cruel, ungallant paparazzi snaps of famous women looking spotty, or fat, or haggard, impossible to defend – until I look at OK! magazine.

Later in the interview, Abbey is asked to divulge her favourite smells.

“My favourite smell on a man,” she immediately drivels, “is Lynx and Marc Jacobs.”

And I wonder if the consolation, for those innocent entertainers who get caught in the crossfire of our thesis-antithesis fame culture, is to look at Whitney Houston.

www.victoriacoren.com

Victoria Coren

Beauty: men’s moisturisers

daniel — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:00:55 +0000

Sali Hughes

‘Men generally seek weightless, quick-drying moisturisers with no hint of oiliness.’ Photograph: Rui Faria for the Guardian

My first journalism job was as grooming editor of a men’s magazine. Since then, I’ve attended countless men’s skincare launches, and no amount of pseudo-scientific marketing waffle has managed to convince me that the structure of a man’s skin is any different from a woman’s, requiring fundamentally different treatment (cleaning, moisturising and protecting from the sun). What is different is their lifestyle (eg shaving) and what men prefer. The velvety feel of face cream? They don’t want it. Men generally seek weightless, quick-drying moisturisers with no hint of oiliness. Likewise, umpteen luxury pots and bottles. Men favour minimal product in neutral packaging, preferably in a tube or pump.

If you’re looking to buy the man in your life a present, a good moisturiser will benefit him year round. Some of my favourite six here are marketed at men, some are not, but what they all have in common is that the men I know love them. They soothe after shaving and don’t clog pores. They’re user-friendly, easy on the eye and great quality. They will also ensure he never puts his mitts on your face cream again.

Link to this video

Clinique Age Defence Hydrator SPF15, £26. A great, oil-free moisturiser to tackle signs of ageing and prevent further damage.

Origins Save The Males Multi-benefit Moisturiser, £27. I’d happily put this on my own face. Wonderfully sSoothing, fragrant, oil-free lotion for all skins.

REN Multi-tasking After-shave balm, £20. If your skin flares up after shaving – and even if it doesn’t – this feels lovely.

Neutrogena Visibly Clear Oil Free Moisturiser, £4.25. If oiliness and spots are your problem, it’s tough to beat this at any price.

Liz Earle After-Shaving Moisturiser, from £6.25. A simple, light, non-greasy lotion that’s especially good on sensitive skin.

Clarins Super Moisture Balm, £26.50. If you’re on the dry side, this is a comforting, cushioning balm with zero grease.

There is no one reason behind Whitney’s awful self-destruction

daniel — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:00:39 +0000

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Some suggest that homophobic cultural pressure drove Whitney Houston to self-hatred and self-destruction, but it’s probably not that simple

Whitney Houston certainly paid a high price for fame. We all know about the drug abuse that dogged her for years, with the genesis of her addiction often laid at the door of her former husband, Bobby Brown. He says different, as he would, and claims that Houston married him in order to hide her lesbianism. Others concur. An afterlife in the glittering pantheon of tragic gay icons beckons.

It’s horrible to think that homophobic cultural pressure drove Houston to self-hatred and self-destruction. Homophobia is a vile and inexcusable brand of hatred. Still, it’s a huge leap to suggest that, out and proud, Houston would have lived happily ever after. Sadly, countless heterosexuals can attest that being comfortable with your sexuality is no panacea – as can some gay people, too. Even if life can be made fair, it cannot always be made simple.

Deborah Orr

Alex James’s new memoir proves him to be Britain’s premier cheese bore

daniel — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:15:06 +0000

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All Cheeses Great and Small describes the Blur bassist’s purchase of a farm in the Cotswolds. It contains much rennet-based droning

Stop what you’re doing: Alex James is to publish the second volume of his autobiography. All Cheeses Great and Small – yes, I know – is to hit the shelves in March, picking up after A Bit of a Blur, which detailed James’s years as the bass player in Blur. If you’re searching for the Churchillian analogy, as all multivolume autobiographies demand, this instalment is perhaps akin to Winston’s London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, detailing his experiences of the second Boer war, first as war correspondent for the Morning Post, when he was captured by the Boers and made a daring escape, and then as he combined reporting duties with an army commission, managing to be one of the first soldiers to relieve the Siege of Ladysmith, and going on to see the British take Pretoria.

All Cheeses Great and Small describes Alex’s purchase of a farm in the Cotswolds and his emergence as Britain’s premier cheese bore.

Naturally, I need hardly ask if you realised that our hero likes cheese. James’s fondness for cheese is believed to be a matter of which no one in this earthly sphere is unaware. For a time, it was assumed that there were some remote peoples still untouched by his rennet-based droning, but in that recent aerial footage of the uncontacted Amazon society, the tribe was seen to have arranged a collection of bones and earthenware shards into the words: “PLEASE STOP ALEX JAMES GOING ON ABOUT BLOODY CHEESE.”

As for the book, James writes like the brilliant satirist Craig Brown has got hold of his computer and done his worst. His is that most unfortunate of prose styles: auto-parodic. Let’s lay our first scene in a chapter entitled CHEESE, in which Alex’s land agent poses the fateful question: “‘Do you like cheese?’ I told him I did,” reveals Alex. “I did, in fact probably more than anybody else I’d ever met, like cheese and it hadn’t gone unnoticed … I always liked to keep an eye on the cheese situation at large when I was on the move and for many years saw touring with the band merely as an excuse to travel the world tracking and eating obscure types of cheese. Cheese was on the rider. Cheese was de rigueur. Cheese was what I like a lot. I said to Paddy, ‘Yes, I do like cheese. Why?’”

Mm. It’s possibly my favourite passage in a celebrity autobiography since the bit in volume one of Wayne Rooney’s planned five-volume effort, in which the Manchester United striker spellbinds readers by painting the following word picture of his home. “Our house has six bedrooms and a big kitchen which is very modern and greyish. I’m not good at describing decor.”

For Alex, cobblers trips rather easier off the tongue. Thus we learn that: “Trees belong to the class of things that cost as much as you’re prepared to spend, like pianos.” The Japanese are “a conscientious hardworking people”. “The Industrial Revolution skipped the Cotswolds.” Even more bizarre claims follow. “I got myself a job in the astrophysics department at Oxford University,” Alex declares at one point, where his business was “considering dark matter”. Which I suppose is one way of saying he was once named the department’s artist in residence.

Speaking of incredible claims, emblazoned on the back cover of All Cheeses Great and Small is the following excerpt from the Guardian’s review of the earlier volume, A Bit of a Blur: “James’s inquisitive nature makes him eminently and continuously likable.”

I was going to challenge that. Then again, who could fail to warm to his accounts of the Cotswold locals? “On the whole,” muses Alex, “I was surprised how much I liked most of the people who lived nearby. Not just the nobs and the billionaires. We took on two gypsies from the trailer park as cleaners and they fascinated me. The younger one was very pretty …” The reader is never burdened with their names – the elder cleaner is described elsewhere in the book as “the not-so-pretty gypsy girl”.

Or consider his account of a machinery sale at the next-door farm, which is staffed by “a few muddy people”. “One of them, a big fat one, did an enormous burp in my ear as I walked past. He just carried on staring out from his benign, muddy, burp world.” Fortunately, Alex is able to gloss the encounter. “It wasn’t a threatening burp,” he judges, “in fact the bizarreness of it put me quite at ease: the strain of the vast silence between strangers, from quite different worlds, meeting in a field, relieved by a belch. It was as if he’d burped for both of us.”

But for all these half-dimensional portraits of the rural working classes, the overwhelming picture James presents is of a Cotswold society where every second estate is owned by someone playing in their version of Marie Antoinette’s hameau. “Pig owners are all long-lost friends,” explains Alex of the ease with which he strikes up a conversation with another local (in fact it’s Peter Kindersley, who sold his stake in a publishing business for £105m). “Apparently I’d only just missed the man who used to run Bradford & Bingley. He was now a cheesemaker of some repute.” And I’m sure a nation saddled with a stake in what remains of his bank wishes him every success with his curds and whey.

The shtick reaches its apogee in a six-page hymn to what can only be described as the most twattish shop on the planet. Actually, it can be described in more Chaucerian manner, but we only use that word in reported speech in the Guardian, so twattish must do for now. Located in Alex’s village, Daylesford Organic is the brainchild of Carole Bamford, wife of JCB gazillionaire Sir Anthony, whom Alex claims “didn’t particularly care about making money”. (Most fortunate, as according to Daylesford’s published accounts it loses millions.)

The complex is an insanely priced place of grocery pilgrimage for those whom convention demands we style as the Chipping Norton Set – your Clarksons, your Camerons, your Brookses. Loathed by most locals, according to James, the Daylesford he describes is a purveyor of “tasteful objects”, which “radiates prestige”, sporting “a whole New Age massage, yogaromatherapy wing, apparently staffed by Tibetan Buddhist monks”. The car park is full of black Range Rovers, the car that more than any other indicates that its owner is a member of the arseoisie.

It reads like an open invitation to friendly bombs, but James adores it with a rare passion, which makes his recent willingness to appease the Sun’s advertisers – writing craven screeds for the paper in praise of McDonald’s production methods and the like – seem more cynical than ever.

Still, All Cheeses Great and Small is not without its social theorising. “The bigger your house is, the less you throw away,” explains Alex. “A lot of problems would be solved if everybody lived on farms.”

Especially if they weren’t allowed to write books.

Marina Hyde