This past February, the Telegraph published an article detailing a new biography of the Queen authored by Sally Bedell Smith, who took great pains to provide a glimpse of Her Majesty's everyday life. Among those rare glimpses? One inside of her purse. Bedell Smith shares that the Queen is never without a small mirror and a tube of lipstick.
I quote the article:
“‘At the end of a luncheon or a dinner, even a banquet set with silver gilt and antique porcelain, she has the somewhat outré habit of opening her bag, pulling out a compact, and reapplying her lipstick,’ she writes.
‘When First Lady Laura Bush made a similar cosmetic fix during a Washington ladies’ luncheon, she cheerily commented, ‘The Queen told me it was all right to do it.’”
Whoops. For years I’ve been criticizing my mom’s own outré habit of reapplying lipstick at the dinner table (or anywhere in public). She hates me complaining about her lipstick applications almost as much as she hates being mentioned in this blog. Now I learn that I’ve been wrong all this time. This piece of information made me wonder just how long the Queen has been putting on lipstick in public. Do you have to be a certain age to do it, or could, say, a 30 year-old woman also get away with it? While I can’t answer that question, I do know that she’s been wearing lipstick since she was a teenager. In his biography of her, Robert Lacey writes about Elizabeth’s joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) to aid the war effort during World War II. She attended training in the form of a Vehicle Maintenance Course with other young English women in 1945, but she never actively served since the war ended later that year. A fellow corporal, Eileen Heron, wrote about her first encounter with the princess in her diary:
“Quite striking…Short, pretty, brown, crisp, curly hair. Lovely grey-blue eyes, and an extremely charming smile, and she uses lipstick!”
From photographs of her as a teenager, it seems like Elizabeth was one of those natural beauties who didn’t need much makeup to look good. This seems to fall in line with Elizabeth Arden’s philosophy that “beauty should not be a veneer of makeup, but an intelligent cooperation between science and nature in order to develop a woman’s finest natural assets.” The company's history is one of female empowerment. Elizabeth Arden immigrated from Canada to the United States before opening her first Red Door spa in New York in 1910. She used her cosmetics to champion such causes as women's suffrage (suffragists marched wearing her red lipstick), and she designed cosmetics especially for women serving in the military during World War II. Who knows—maybe that's when the company first garnered Queen Elizabeth's admiration.
I liked the idea of Elizabeth Arden, but I still wasn't sure what I was in for when I plunged into the first-floor sea of makeup counters at the Macy’s on State Street in downtown Chicago. I'm not really that into makeup and I know very little about it, although I guess I do make an attempt to slap on five or so products before I leave the house each day. My experience at Macy's was therefore a little bit intimidating. After turning down almost a dozen vendors and sales clerks who tried to hand me coupons and perfume samples, I finally found myself face to face with a smiling Clinique sales lady. “Would you care to try our new fragrance?” she asked. I shook my head, and her smile faded. “Which one are you looking for?” she then asked more bluntly, her jet-black mascara clumped onto her eyelashes, her zebra-print skirt clinging to her thighs.
“Elizabeth Arden?”
She didn’t answer so much as point languidly to one of the identical counters just across from her own. I thanked her and hurried over to where two female sales clerks stood bored-looking next to a lipstick display. My presence signaled them to go through a kind of routine that I sensed they’d been practicing for awhile. I waved off their offers to sample perfume and moisturizers and instead tried to home in on the lipstick. I just wanted to look at the lipsticks. Within two minutes one of them had me up in a chair with my eyes wide open while she applied mascara to my eyelashes.
“There they are. There. I knew she had eyelashes,” chimed in the perfume lady from off to the side.
“Of course I have eyelashes,” I said defensively.
“But no one can see them if you don’t wear mascara.”
“I was wearing mascara. When I came in I already had some on.”
“She did have on a little,” the other woman admitted. “It just looked kind of…uneven. Like she got some of her lashes but not all of them.”
I pointed out that when I’d put on my mascara at 6:30 that morning it was while standing next to a two year-old in dinosaur pjs (his, not mine) who wanted me to make him breakfast.
As the two sales clerks kept thinking of more makeup they could put on me, I kept trying to talk them down. I've fallen for this a couple of times before and have always been amazed by how quickly these people can get carried away. When my friend Jeannette and I visited a Nordstrom makeup counter a couple of years ago, we left looking like transvestites. We were too embarrassed to even stop at a Starbucks before wiping half of it off.
Elizabeth Arden is different, though. These sales clerks seemed to read my cues pretty well. When the lady finished putting mascara, eye shadow, and lipstick on my face, she reached for a small hand mirror so I could see the finished product. I looked...surprisingly...really nice...and not at all like a transvestite. I looked better, and I also still looked like me.
I went back to work thrilled. I've finally had a positive makeup counter experience! I didn't think that was possible. The Queen really does know her cosmetics.
Where to buy: Macy's, of course. You can also order cosmetics from Elizabeth Arden's website.
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