Air Kisses Page 8

  ‘She’s a little man-ish, I find,’ he said. ‘Great tits and legs, but her face is a little masculine, don’t you think? I mean, she’s divine, of course, but she’s not pretty, you know?’

  Did he just say ‘great tits and legs’?

  ‘Anyway, it’s an amazing cut – best in here by a Golden Gate Bridge. Yasmin has good hair too, but yours is better.’

  Okay, now I was confused. He knew Yasmin?

  He sipped on his straw, furiously stirring his drink with the muddling stick, and asked, ‘So how’s Gloss going for you?’

  Confusion squared. How did he know all of this stuff? In my state, I was unable to keep up the spritely façade required when you’re pretending you know who someone is, when you really, really don’t.

  ‘I’m…I’m really sorry, Gabe, but we haven’t met before, have we?’

  ‘No, but that’s because I’ve been overseas. But I’ve managed to catch up fairly fast over a few of these heinous cocktails.’

  Seeing the look of utter confusion in my eyes, he stopped.

  ‘Sorry, allow me to do a proper introduction.’ He put his drink down, stiffened his collar, and cleared his throat. ‘I’m the beauty girl at Phillip magazine. Well, grooming editor is my official title, but grooming to me implies small spoilt dogs, so I’d rather just be called beauty editor and be done with it.’

  Two billion light-bulbs switched on simultaneously in my head. One of them flashed, ‘He’s gay.’ Another, ‘He’s in the industry.’ And another simply went with, ‘You are a fool.’

  It all made sense! The sharp banter, the fashion-forward suit, the obsession with my hair… No straight man would ask who cut my hair, or speak openly about a woman’s mammaries in such a vulgar manner.

  God, I needed some sleep; my brain wasn’t even able to distinguish a happy camper in a sea of straighties.

  ‘Hannah, I already know that I like you and we’re going to be fabulous friends, so I feel entirely at ease telling you that you should probably head home once you’ve handed over your card and kissed whoever’s arse it is you’re here to kiss.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Your face: it’s beautiful, but it’s weary. You need a hot bath and a good back rub.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I look like shit, Gabe?’ I asked with a twinkle in my eye.

  ‘Not at all, but come on, darling, we’re beauty fascists! We know we’re supposed to look superb every single day! Don’t waste a crack in the veneer at a dive like this.’

  He was far too ‘on’ for me. All I could do was laugh and reach into my bag for a card.

  ‘Oooh, what an excellent card! Whore-lipstick red, how gloriously appropriate for the beauty girl of Gloss! I love it!’

  I took his – it was thin, shiny, black, and had only the word ‘Phillip’ on one side, and on the other the initials GHF, one phone number and an email address. All lower case, all in silver, and all uber-cool.

  ‘Try not to be blinded by how hip I am, sweetheart. Now, get out of here and go get some beauty sleep. You need it.’

  I laughed. ‘You struggle with honesty and assertiveness, don’t you?’ I said, picking up my bag and doing up my jacket.

  ‘Very much. But one thing I’m good at is modesty. I’m probably the best at modesty. If there were an award for it, it’d be mine.’

  I laughed as we air-kissed on the cheek, and I deftly manoeuvred out of the room to the stairs, a cab, and the bed I’d been fantasising about all day.

  Sperm-brows

  Style and set those wild little face-caterpillars by spraying hairspray onto your brow brush and combing them into shape. Alternatively, if you have dark, full brows, lightly sweep some brown mascara through them. Or just buy a really good brow gel.

  Since starting at Gloss, I’d begun to view women as blobs with hair and make-up rather than the more socially prevalent term ‘human beings’. I didn’t mean to mentally divide women into sophisticated blush blenders and amateur blush blenders, but since it was all I read about, wrote about and thought about, I couldn’t seem to find the off switch. It was one of the beauty editor side-effects.

  Yasmin and I were on our way to a skincare launch in the city’s Botanic Gardens, when a woman walked past us. I gasped.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ asked Yasmin, without taking her eyes off her mobile phone, which she had been neurotically prodding the entire journey.

  ‘Did you not see her eyebrows?’ I asked in disbelief.

  ‘Sperm-brows. Awful.’ Yasmin was always coming up with cool sayings.

  ‘Hmm. Well, I want to help women like that, you know?’ I said, with absolute sincerity.

  Yasmin sniggered. She found my Susceptibility to Gullibility (STG) enormously amusing.

  It was at one of my first beauty launches, not long after the fateful Fire lunch, where Jill’s arseholey and unnecessary discussion of Jesse and Lisa Sutherland had spoilt my appetite, that I had displayed classic symptoms of STG. It was a foundation launch, held in the back area of a brand-new bar, the kind that has a one-word name and elaborate chandeliers and staff who believe they are too good-looking to serve you a drink, let alone clean up the mess you create when you spill it on the white sofas. (Whoever puts white sofas in a room where red drinks are served and the intoxicated roam unfettered deserves to have them ruined.)

  The PR team had been hard at work preparing the room, plastering it with seductive, creative visuals for this exciting new foundation. Before the first canapé had time to wiggle down my gullet, the call-to-action on the posters had me.

  Are you sick of your foundation falling off by lunchtime?

  You bet I am!

  Wouldn’t you like it to last all day?

  Is it even possible?

  Well, we’ve got you covered: our new base stays for twelve hours.

  I have cash: I will buy your magical potion immediately.

  Next came the PowerPoint presentation, complete with beaming quotes from women who had already had the great privilege of trying this foundation, followed by info graphs, charts, statistics, and even footage of leading make-up artists from recent Hollywood movies talking about how radical it was, and how superjazzed they were that a product like this had finally been invented.

  After this circus of persuasion, it was all I could do not to take the PR by the collar, shake her and demand she hand it over.

  I was giddy with anticipation and wondered how soon I might be able to try this exquisite commodity. As it happened, despite the fact that the product wasn’t on sale (or ‘on counter’, as we say in the biz) for another three months, the lucky, lucky people in that room would be allowed to take some home today. And that included me.

  I wasn’t sure how it happened, but, without my permission, my hands joined and separated quickly several times. I actually clapped at the idea of getting this foundation. To take home. To wear. Months and months before anyone else in the country. That last point was by far the most pertinent for me, and was probably one of the primary reasons I loved being a beauty editor so much: I have stuff before anyone else does.

  Yasmin denied she felt this way, but I saw her. I saw her with her limited-edition Chanel palettes and La Prairie illuminators, flashing them around as though they were Olympic medals at a closing ceremony. But me, I was fresh off the beauty boat, and I was light years away from cynical. The moment I walked into a boardroom/café/elaborately decorated garden tent, I unwittingly fell to my knees before the religion of face wash. Or eyeliner or teeth whiteners, depending on what was being offered in between mini fruit-salads and scrambled egg concoctions fit only for people who think capers count as an actual food.

  Of course, during a function I played it ice-cool, so the other beauty editors didn’t start referring to me as The Suck.

  ‘It’s the cheek crème the Olsen twins swear by,’ the PR would gush.

  Shrug.

  ‘It contains a blend of the two rarest – and most expensive – types of zucchini extract known to man.’<
br />
  Roll eyes.

  ‘It’s been clinically proven to take away every single dimple of cellulite.’

  Pfft.

  ‘It will take ten years off your face in one application.’

  Snort.

  Of course, internally I’d be all oohs and aaahs, and praising modern science, but I was a fickle beast. The next week I’d be oohing over another product with similar zeal. However, I figured disloyalty was part of the job. I had to stay impartial. I mean, imagine if I only used the first products that ever impressed me? Completely unprofessional.

  Besides, it invariably gave me currency at dinner parties: women always wanted to know about the latest new beauty products, and I always knew what they were. It was a beautiful dance.

  ‘Hiiii, Hannah!’

  I had just, just stepped into the ye olde-style tea-gardens café and the PR had already zeroed in.

  ‘Oh, hey, Olivia!’ I smiled and air-kissed her, careful not to mess up either of our gloss jobs.

  ‘I love coral on you – you look amazing,’ she gushed.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ I said, commenting on her beautiful, obviously expensive frock, which, with its busy colours and high floral quotient, should have looked atrocious, but actually looked amazing.

  ‘Sooo, how’s everything?’ she asked.

  As I answered that things were good, but busy – the standard response – her thickly glossed smile didn’t waver. But her eyes slid down to my chin.

  To them.

  The twins that had sprung up that morning like tiny volcanoes, waiting to erupt and ruin my complexion for a good five days.

  Olivia obviously realised she’d been caught staring, and so jumped in and awkwardly started her own version of how busy things were. But she couldn’t help it: everyone stares at a beauty editor with a blemish, no matter how small.

  I’d come to realise that as a beauty editor, you are not, by law, allowed to carry a flaw. There was an unspoken expectation that because you had every form of prevention, correction or concealment at your disposal, you had to look perennially flawless.

  In addition, because you had elected to spend your working days advising/lecturing the public on how to avoid acne/cellulite/greasy hair/bad eyebrows/chipped nails/yellowed teeth/fake-tan lines, in theory you couldn’t ever sport any of those things. You had to live and breathe your gig. Your job shouldn’t define you, but in the beauty-editor game it absolutely, utterly, have-you-ever-seen-a-badly-dressed-fashion-editor did.

  This had come as a bit of a shock to me, as pre-Gloss I rarely wore foundation, let alone concealer, which I was now expected to know how to master in the same way a model masters her calories.

  I found that I’d actually come to adore this part of the job – I loved playing dress-up each morning with all of my ‘toys’ – but simultaneously it was very tiring. It bred vanity, induced insecurity, and paved the way for obsessive paranoia and way too much compact-mirror-glancing and surreptitious concealer-dabbing.

  Friends had noticed. Well, some of them. When Gabe and I had gone for schmucktails – as he called them when I had suggested we go to a bar where there were lots of handsome, suit-clad men – he’d commented that I had reapplied my lips no less than four times in the one-hour sitting.

  ‘You’ve become a touch-up tart,’ he said dismissively as he sipped his gin fizz.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You’re one of those painful beauty girls who touches up her make-up a thousand goddamn times whenever she’s further than a metre from the mirror that sits on her desk in place of her computer monitor.’

  ‘Gabe, I am so not a touch-up tart! Um, maybe the fact there are good-looking men everywhere has something to do with it?’

  ‘Forget it, honey. They all think you’re with me. You’re not getting any let’s-catch-up phone numbers tonight.’

  ‘You’re such a bitch.’

  ‘Totally. Do you love it?’ He’d said this in the style Paris Hilton so often did, and it always made me laugh, even when he was being nasty.

  But today I was definitely being a touch-up tart. Just a very stealthy one.

  On days when I had big unhappy pimples, I prayed that the function would be in a dark, moody bar. Of course, thanks to Murphy, that rotten prankster, and his foul laws, they would always be in rooms entirely themed in white, or in a science lab with cruel fluorescent lighting or a courtyard flooded with natural light.

  Today was a prime example. In this sky-lit palace there’d be no missing the twins.

  Yasmin had stopped outside to take a phone call so I walked through to the function solo. A handful of beauty girls, all anti-pants and pro-frock, were scattered throughout. I wasn’t friendly enough with any of them to make conversation. I saw Fiona pouring herself some coffee. I decided to make her like me.

  I walked over to her. She was wearing a black cinched-waist dress, black pumps, and some exhilarating red lipstick. She looked very chic. As always.

  ‘Hi, Fiona!’ I said with gaiety, like we were old friends.

  ‘Oh, hey,’ she said. And went back to her coffee preparation.

  No. Had she really just done that?

  ‘So, uh, how’s your day been so far?’ God. Was I trying to pick her up? I should’ve just asked what a pretty girl like her was doing at a launch like this.

  She shrugged her shoulders, concentrating on her sugar-spooning. She said nothing, but she didn’t need to. Her indifference screamed.

  ‘Oh-kaay,’ I said quietly to myself, wondering what to do next. ‘Well, um, I’d better go take a seat.’ She was diabolical. I needed to abort. Where was Yasmin?!

  I watched as Fiona took a long sip from her cup, completely entranced, before turning away. That was it. I was done with her.

  ‘Sorry, I’m no one’s friend until I’ve had some coffee.’

  Facing the room, I closed my eyes and smiled with relief. So she wasn’t a total cow. I turned back to her and, feeling extremely congenial all of a sudden, decided I needed a coffee too. Being not-psychotic together could be the glue that would bond us. I tried to do my best ‘Oh, me too’ face.

  ‘Know what you mean. I’ve already had one, but another won’t hurt.’ There was a pregnant pause. She’d missed her cue. Time for me to prompt. ‘So…um…do you think they’ll be launching that new serum today? I saw an amazing write-up of it in WWD Friday last month.’

  ‘Imagine so. Have you tried that three-in-one cleanser of theirs?’ She spoke vaguely; she was still totally engrossed in her coffee, holding it up to her face, taking desperate, scalding little sips every ten seconds or so.

  ‘Mm-hmm, it’s actually really nice. The exfoliating beads are really tiny and soft, you know, so you can use it every day. I never usually believe it when they say that, but—’

  She half laughed. ‘Do you still try everything you’re given? I love it. Adorable.’

  I wasn’t sure whether she was mocking me, so I shrugged and laughed with my mouth closed.

  ‘You’ll get over it,’ she said knowingly. ‘Trust me, I’ve been in the industry for a thousand years, and soon you’ll stick to the brands you know work. No matter which celebrity or bloody dermatologist swears by it.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ But I couldn’t allow myself to agree, no matter how much I wanted her to like me. I knew that for as long as my skin could cop it, I would try every last product that arrived clad in tissue paper in my office.

  Suddenly a dark figure landed beside me, furiously clanging coffee cups and pots with the kind of wild abandon coffee addicts think nothing of. Yasmin had finally come in. ‘Hey, Fi. Hannah, can you pass the skim? And then can we sit down? These shoes are fucking murder.’

  All three of us took care to balance the weight of our handbags with our precariously balanced cups and saucers as we sat down on a large white-leather ottoman. All very, very dangerous for our attire and their furniture.

  As we sat sipping, and Yasmin detailed the drama of her photo shoot last night – �
��The model was so fucking hungover, no amount of coffee or make-up could do anything, so we sent the stupid bitch home and used the work-experience girl, can you believe it?!’ – I watched Fiona out of the corner of my eye, fascinated. Her make-up was absolutely flawless. So was her skin. And her hair; there wasn’t a single hair out of place. And no roots either; just a head of perfect, shiny, Gwyneth Paltrow-like blondeness. Fiona’s hard work was admirable, but there was something a little bit creepy about it, too. Like she was a Real-Life Doll who seduced people’s boyfriends and then killed innocent civilians en route to her murdering said boyfriends after dark.

  Still, it was impressive. I finger-stroked my running-late, semi-blow-dried waves and vowed to put more effort into my appearance. Again. I seemed to make the promise every second day.

  ‘Hannah, where did you work before Gloss?’ Fiona cocked her head to one side and squinted her eyes as though she already didn’t believe my answer.

  ‘Um, Colourblock Advertising.’

  ‘And what made you want to be a beauty editor?’

  Was this a job interview?

  ‘Um, well, I guess, you know, I studied journalism at university, and I kind of always wanted to work in magazines, and, well, actually, I kind of fell into it, to be honest. I don’t know that I did want to become one.’ It was the truth. I’d never wanted to be a beauty editor because I’d never even known they existed.

  Fiona frowned. ‘Really? Isn’t that interesting.’

  ‘I didn’t know what they were either. Sounds like a bloody made-up job if you ask me,’ Yasmin piped up.

  I laughed. ‘I know. Who’d believe we get paid to eat canapés and test lip gloss!’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit more than that,’ Fiona said, her voice tinged with righteousness.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Yasmin with an earnest look, pursing her lips and nodding. ‘We test mascara too.’ Yasmin grinned at me and took another gulp of her coffee.

  Olivia, the PR, had walked onto a small white platform and was nodding manically at a tech guy sitting to the side of the stage with a laptop. He snapped into action and a giant welcome sign lit up the screen behind her. She switched her microphone on to begin, and looked around to see if we’d noticed and would eventually shut up.