E xciting News! Paula will be giving a free presentation on skin care myths in the cosmetics industry. She is armed with the most current research from her latest editions of The Original Beauty Bible and Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me and will be signing copies for attendees.

• Find out how to look younger without spending a fortune.
• Learn why typical acne products can make breakouts worse.
• Organic and Natural products – the reality vs. the hype.
• Book signing.
• Get FREE samples of skin care products.
• Win a $100 Paula’s Choice gift certificate!

Friday, December 11th, 7:30pm-9:30pm
Barnes & Noble
Brier Creek Commons
8431 Brier Creek Parkway
Raleigh, NC 27617

RSVP Here!

I was unexpectedly saddened when I found out that stage and television actress Bea Arthur passed away. Hers was a rare talent that spanned several decades, though breakthrough success didn’t find her until she was in her late 30s and starred in the popular 1970s sitcom Maude. I remember watching that show with my Mom as a kid, and without knowing the difference between a feminist and a womanizer, I knew she was different. She could incite laughter with nothing more than a sidelong glance or hardened stare, and people gravitated to her. All this at a time when television stars were predominantly young and beautiful (actually, that’s still mostly true today) and Arthur wasn’t classically pretty, at least not by television standards.

I realized through the years of watching Arthur as part of the brilliant ensemble cast on The Golden Girls that someone with her strong personality and, yes, warmth, didn’t need flashy looks in order to be beautiful. Who she was and what came across on screen got right to the heart of what being beautiful is really all about: an attractive personality, wit, a willingness to be a friend, and a willingness to admit when you’re wrong or have wronged others. Being true to yourself, and letting the chips fall where they may.

From the celebrity tributes I read in the days following her death, it became clear these attributes weren’t just Arthur playing a character. They were a big part of who she was, even after the cameras stopped rolling. She said what she meant, and she meant what she said. How many of us go through our daily lives with that sense of blatant honesty? Most of us shy away from that because of how we might appear to others. True, there are times and places when bluntness isn’t called for or needed, but still, what a breath of fresh air it would be to behave like that all the time!

I will continue to enjoy Bea Arthur’s talents as I willingly watch reruns of the shows that made her a household name. And on days when I’m feeling down about the way I look (or, more accurately, the way I’d like to look) I’ll remember the well-known adage that Bea Arthur humanized with often hilarious results: true beauty comes from within.

I have been thinking about the Britain’s Got Talent showcase of Susan Boyle. Her appearance and vocal rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” from Les Miserables was captivating. Then came the endless news stories and the blogs. I’m still struck by the hoopla. From what I read and heard I think people aren’t getting it and are missing the obvious.

First of all, she wasn’t an older woman, she was 46 going on 47, by any standard other then someone in their teens or twenties; she wasn’t old. She was dowdy, but what did that have to do with anything. There are lots of powerful, talented, successful, influential women who aren’t beautiful by traditional standards and who you could absolutely call dowdy, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey, Janet Reno, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Maya Angelou, Kathy Bates, to name a few of the thousands upon thousands of women that are not cover girls.

And on a smaller level there’s people like me. Without my coifed, dyed hair, makeup, heels, and tailored clothing covering my ample hips, I would be Susan Boyle. I have never been traditionally beautiful or even attractive without a lot of work. But even without that, there are millions of average looking women who excel by the grace of their talent, flexibility skill, creativity, strength, brains, fortitude, stamina, and willingness to put themselves out there. In reality there are lots of women who can do that and lots of women who can’t. Not everyone can be a “star” or successful. Not everyone has what it takes to propel themselves to the next level, and the next, and the next.

Being beautiful isn’t a guarantee of anything. If anything it can get the way. Beautiful women can get all the dates they want but you only have to look at Hollywood to see beautiful women who can’t get jobs, have miserable, painful divorces or short-lived relationships, and grow old with the embarrassment that they no longer meet the standard of beauty they had in their youth. Bad face lifts abound to prevent the inevitable change in status.

Women like me and other average looking women don’t have the expectation traditionally beautiful women have. I like that. I don’t need to date Brad Pitt or that stunning looking guy with the muscles who is sitting across the bar from me flirting with the 25 year old blonde. I know happiness and success is never about looks. It takes more and at the end of the day success is only one measurement of life and there are many ways to define that. What happens to Susan Boyle will be interesting, but what it will be about in the long run is how well she can handle the requirements of a new job. Just like all of us that can mean success or failure. Actually, given everyone fails along the way, how we handle failure of any kind defines how successful we really are, beautiful or not.

Ihave been doing speaking and book-signing appearances at bookstores around the country over the past several months. It has been wonderful meeting women who have known me for a long time as well as women who are just getting to know my work. The feedback and questions I get range from the basic fundamentals of skin care to the challenging scientific queries about formulations. That’s what I love about the up close and personal interactions. That’s the upside, but there is a downside.

What I can live without are the women who want to tell me what they know about skin care and makeup that is as far removed from the facts as you can get.

A perfect example of this happened recently. I won’t tell you the city, but this woman came up to me and said that she just used olive oil because Cleopatra used it and ancient information is the best source of tried and true skin care. She was so certain she was right. Her emphatic tone made me hesitate responding. It isn’t my goal to get into arguments (I know that’s hard to believe given how opinionated and critical I can be, but all I really want to do is present information based on research and then let women decide for themselves what they want to use).

This time I couldn’t resist. Her comment was so wrong and silly. I just let it fly and said you’ve got to be kidding, you don’t really believe that do you? Cleopatra? Do you really know anything about her? No one has ever seen a picture of her. What did she wash her hair or face with, brush her teeth with (or if she lost a tooth what replaced it?), use for toilet paper, tampons, sunscreen, or acne?

Cleopatra died young so maybe her beauty was fleeting. Maybe she wasn’t beautiful at all and she was just politically advantageous for the men involved? If she was beautiful it certainly wasn’t about olive oil any more then it would be for Beyonce or Angelina Jolie today.

Bottom line: I wouldn’t use “ancient” information that was even a decade or two old more or less a few thousand years old. Research, technology, science, knowledge, capacity, and on and on are light years ahead of where we have come from and still have yet to go. (Had she never heard of the genome project?)

Relying on ancient information, whatever that means would suggest the world is flat, the gods are appeased by human sacrifice, body sweat and mud makes a great skin care product (really, that’s what the Greeks used), and lead in powder was a great makeup base (which caused necrotic skin and that was only from the 1700s).

Facts are so much better then bromides and myth. I hate the term ‘old wives tales’, but when the phrase fits, it fits.

One of the reasons occurred just recently. I had an argument with a woman the other day. She said what I did for a living was superficial, and she didn’t mean that in a good way. If anything, she was being overtly condescending. Well of course to some extent she was right. Skin care and makeup is by definition superficial. But should we feel guilty caring about how we look?

She clearly and boldly thought it was a waste of time, a waste of money, and inane; something that enslaved a woman’s mind and spirit. I agreed that some women can turn makeup and fashion into a religion but in balance, when it’s about looking attractive and groomed, reducing skin problems and flaws, what’s wrong with that? I mean how could you disagree with that?

I swear, she snorted with contempt and said that “beauty emanates from the soul, not the skin”. What we are on the inside is where we should put our attention. She went on to say that “we are lost from our true nature if we don’t seek the divine inside of us”.

Whoa, now that’s about as judgmental as you can get. Talk about evangelizing!

Then it dawned on me that she had a fashionable headband on, fairly nice shoes, a pair of pants that looked good on her, a bit of what looked like lip gloss, she was wearing some crystal-like jewelry (rings, earrings, bracelets, and a necklace), and she had a decent haircut. She was adorned as superficially as I was!

I said to her, “Did you take a shower this morning? Use soap? Wash your hair? Put on a conditioner? Use a blow dryer? Are you wearing clean clothes? Get dressed in the outfit you’re wearing?” The answer to every question was yes. I insisted, without contempt by the way, that she was without question paying a lot of attention to her outside, superficial beauty. Thankfully she ended the conversation there and then.

Beauty was OK to focus on as long as it met the standards of her belief system? Anyone whose style or beauty ideas strayed from hers was overindulgent, wasteful, and irrelevant. It is so easy to feel better than someone else regardless of how you try to whitewash it in pithy spiritual phrases. In the long run, fashion is fun, makeup applied well enhances self esteem, and skin care is important for health and attractiveness. That is a basis in all cultures, regardless of where beauty falls on a person’s spirituality meter.

I am not one to think of fashion magazines as a secular version of a Bible, laden with must-haves for the season. In or out, I mean really, who cares? On the other hand, I’m critical. Not just of cosmetic products, but I always notice how a person is put together. One of my favorite sections of any magazine in the world is one found in Glamour. I don’t read this magazine for their articles on orgasms and the nitty-gritty details of how to get there, but for their often-hilarious their Do’s and Don’t section. You know, the section at the back of the magazine with pictures showing what clothing looks bad on a woman and what looks good.

Skirts and T-shirts that are so short or skimpy skin is popping out all over, and often rolls of skin hanging out.

High heels that are little more then stilts with the wearers barely able to stand up more or less walk.

And then they show the women who look put together. Clothing that matches, blouses and pants that fit, and accessories that don’t look out of place. Stuff like that. I love it.

While the clothing analysis is always great, what I wish they would include are makeup critiques. I would like to see that. I always wonder why women leave the house with their makeup looking as if they applied it without looking in the mirror even once. Don’t women notice that their mascara and liner is smeared all over the place, their eyebrows are etched on like a stripe of grease or a press-on decal resembling anything but brow hair, their foundation is so thick and mottled they look like they spackled on their makeup, or that their lipstick is so greasy it has traveled deep into the lines around their mouth. And then there’s the one we’ve all seen before: the dark lip line around the lips with a lighter color painted inside the line. Does anyone (including men) think that lip look is remotely attractive? Apparently, yes—I still see this today, in cities large and small.

Okay, I know I’m critical and perhaps my thinking a bit schizophrenic: on one hand I know none of this matters in the scheme of things, but I really do notice, and given how much time most of us spend getting dressed day in and day out, shouldn’t we be vested in getting it done right? Actually, I’d settle for presentable if “right” is too hard to achieve on some mornings!

“This moisturizer is perfect for someone with oily or combination skin because it is oil-free.”

I can’t tell you the number of products touting this claim when they indeed do contain oils, or waxes that feel oily, or other ingredients that can clog pores. They may not be oils you recognize, like plant oils or mineral oils, but they are nonetheless in there, with names you may not have heard. Regardless, hearing that a product is oil-free still gives you no information about what it may or may not do to the skin. What is most confusing is that ingredients known for causing breakouts may not leave a greasy feel on the skin. Surprisingly, one of the greasiest ingredients, mineral oil, has been shown in study after study to not cause breakouts, although it can still feel greasy. Go figure. The fewer skin-care products a woman with oily or blemish-prone skin uses, the better off her skin will be.

I had an interesting discussion with a producer of an infomercial last week. Because of confidentiality I can’t tell you which one, but it really doesn’t matter because they are all the same and they all lie through their teeth the same. This producer knew that the script she was going to be videotaping was mostly misleading or untrue. Don’t get me wrong, she was very nice and she appreciated my research and critique of the topic, but of course there was nothing she could do about it. And nothing I could do either.

There are things I put up with in the world of beauty that just drive me crazy, and I mean a lot of things. Of course I put up with it because what else can I do? I can’t struggle with everyone I encounter (well I could, but there just isn’t enough time!).

One of the more irksome moments outside of the industry is the number of women I encounter who love bragging that the skin-care products they use that are all natural. Once they tell me what products they are using I know there is no way in hell what they are putting on their face is all natural or even part natural, except for the 70% to 80% water content the product contains. There just isn’t time to explain why what they believe isn’t true.

Or women who insist that they simply love the $$$$ anti-wrinkle product they are using. I bite my tongue because what I want to say that I can’t say is, you’ve got to be kidding. Can you really be that clueless? And of course the answer is yes, lots of women are that clueless. There is no way that product is worth the price (and it’s often in a jar package which makes it practically useless). No one should love anything that costs that much money when it’s just a moisturizer and often it isn’t even a well-formulated one at that. What does it take for women to realize that expensive doesn’t mean better in the cosmetic industry? There just isn’t time to explain this to the women I meet who don’t know my work.

What most women don’t realize is how everyone in the beauty business knows how the marketing and advertising for cosmetics is all BS. They all talk about it. They all know it. They shrug their shoulders and say, well it’s a living. Or they laugh about it. Either way, they meet women every day that are being suckered into products that can’t possibly perform as the claims on the label assert.

See what I mean about frustrating?

“Our ingredients are high quality; that’s why they are so expensive.”

It would be nice if that were true, but I can’t get any cosmetics company to give me proof of it. I’ve asked for the names of their suppliers to find out what grades of products they are selling and if they have inferior grades that go to some companies but not others. From what I’ve been able to find out on my own after talking to several cosmetic-ingredient manufacturers, the grades of cosmetic ingredients don’t vary that much, and everyone buys cosmetic-grade ingredients, which are all high quality. For example, DuPont is one of the largest suppliers of glycolic acid to the cosmetics industry (they supply over 99% of the industry who use this ingredient), and they supply the same version to everyone.