Adrien Arpel is not “39 and holding.”
She hires models who don’t cover their gray.
She tells women under age 40 that certain of her products are off-limits to them.
In the smoke-and-mirrors world of cosmetics, the only thing Arpel wants to conceal is frown lines. She proudly tells Home Shopping Network viewers that she’s 63, demonstrates her best-selling Signature Club A by Adrienne line on women 36 to 76, and champions the cause of the older customer.
“We all know when you’re young, and your skin doesn’t have any aggravation, everything looks good,” she says during a recent HSN broadcast, dabbing 8 Butters Creamery Makeup on a cute 55-year-old. “Let’s try it on some of us for a change!”
Arpel has sustained her boundless enthusiasm for cosmetic enhancement since she entered the market 46 years ago. Those who’ve followed her career call her an innovator. A trailblazer. An institution.
They might add, an iconoclast:
– “I don’t care that purple eye shadow is chic. I think it looks horrible. You look like a ‘Sesame Street’ character.”
– “The pearly stuff never looks good in the daytime.”
– “If you’re working and you spend your day in the office, God knows you don’t need glitter. Metallic glitter is for nobody over the age of consent.”
– “Bronzer is old-fashioned. You’re the only one who doesn’t know you look ridiculous.”
This is vintage Arpel. On-air and off, the self-made millionaire has a New Jersey native’s gift of gab (and accent). “So I want to discuss once more, how did [Robert] Blake get away with murder?” she asks the man driving her to a recent Friday night appearance.
She has the stamina of a workhorse. “Some people are born with great beauty. I was born with great energy. It’s worked out well for me, probably better for me than if I’d been born with the beauty.”
And she is passionate about her customers. “I love women. I have a gazillion girlfriends. I have girlfriends left over from grammar school. … Who could have more fun than playing with cosmetics all day and talking to your girlfriends, all over the world?”
Her HSN audience apparently enjoys the conversation. The network doesn’t share yearly sales figures for specific lines but will say that Arpel has tallied $600 million in sales since joining the network in 1992. Her products have always been HSN’s best-selling beauty line.
The network believes her plainspokenness turns viewers into buyers.
“She has no problem saying, `This is not your daughter’s makeup,’ and that’s comforting for people to hear,” says Michael Henry, senior vice president of health and beauty. “She’s able to take that one-on-one approach that you often see in the cosmetics department, where a woman is mesmerized by the person behind the counter, and bring it to HSN and its 80 million households, and talk like she’s talking to them specifically about what their beauty concern is.”
In theory . . .
The woman behind the counter. Arpel has a theory about her.
Two days out of high school, Arpel toured department stores, asking the women in cosmetics what she should wear and how she should apply it. “And everyone had a different story.”
She was surprised by the clerks’ lack of training and insulted by some of their remarks. She also noticed that the sales staff had little in common with their customers.
The woman behind the counter “was either a model wannabe — very tall, very thin and very nasty, I guess from not eating enough. Or she had the big red hair, false eyelashes and purple eye shadow. Which is the worst of two evils?”
Although Arpel, a petite 5 feet 4, had no background in sales or cosmetics — she was only 17, after all — she thought she could do better.
She thumbed the phone book for “toiletries” and, using $400 in baby-sitting money, purchased a generic line and stuck her own name on the bottles.
Because beauty salons didn’t go beyond hair and nails at that time, Arpel had the idea of teaching women how to do their own makeup at salons near her hometown of Englewood every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If they wanted to purchase products, she’d take orders and return with them the following week. The shop would receive a cut of her profits.
“I wish I could tell you that I was so brilliant, but it wasn’t that at all,” she says. “Out of need comes business. … I really learned as I went along.”
A quick study
The woman who became “the world’s fastest makeup artist” was a quick study. So many salons wanted the service that Arpel farmed out the jobs to women looking for part-time work. By the time she was 21, she had 78 concessions and had earned her first million.
Arpel, like Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and Estee Lauder, “started out with a tiny amount of capital but very big ambitions and transformed their innovations into empires,” says Teresa Riordan, author of “Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations That Have Made Us Beautiful” (Broadway Books, 2004).
With her success in salons, Arpel developed her own line and, within a decade, her cosmetics were sold at Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Harrod’s.
In the early 1970s, she helped reshape the beauty experience available at department stores by opening private rooms for spa treatments. At Bloomingdale’s, says a former executive, those in-store spas were more lucrative than those run by all the other major lines.
Cash registers cha-chinged even more when Arpel began her beauty seminars in 1984. For $35, guests enjoyed a meal and a fashion show, received tips from Arpel on dressing for specific body types, and got a gift certificate for a mini-facial and makeup application.
What could possibly draw 1,000 women at a time to a department-store seminar?
“Makeup is makeup. Treatment is treatment. It was her personality. She’s got that kind of magic. People just adore her,” says Lester Gribetz, now an executive vice president at Macy’s who worked closely with Arpel at Bloomingdale’s. “We used to plead with Adrien to do more of them.”
Those types of big events “are not an inexpensive way to do business,” Gribetz says, “but with the numbers of people she’d bring in to those, it was very profitable.”
Her books were profitable too. “3-Week Crash Makeover Shapeover Beauty Program” (1977), “How to Look 10 Years Younger” (1980) and “851 Fast Beauty Fixes and Facts” (1985) were all best sellers.
The books earned her bookings with Oprah Winfrey, Mike Douglas and Regis Philbin. “Regis would mention Kaleidoscope [a multicolored powder in a compact] is at Saks, and it would sell out across the country,” Arpel says.
But in the late ’80s, department stores’ buyouts and bankruptcies dulled the allure of bricks-and-mortar retail.
“The fun of it wasn’t there anymore. The creativity went out of it,” she says. “When the fun goes out, you’re not going to do as well financially or any other way.”
Still, HSN’s Henry points out that it took courage to leave the stores. “She was smart enough to realize that her personal charisma drove the business, but she knew that the impact on sales also depended on her being there personally,” he says. “She essentially founded the beauty business at HSN and really in electronic retailing.”
HSN courted Arpel for two years before she signed on; she held out until the network agreed to let her do on-air makeovers. That was a stroke of genius, says Riordan, the “Inventing Beauty” author.
Turning her focus to TV
For a time, Arpel sold her products in stores and on the air, but eventually decided to focus on TV. To differentiate her HSN offerings from the separate Adrien Arpel line that is now sold largely by mail order, she created Signature Club A by Adrienne, using the spelling of her name on her birth certificate.
Signature Club A also is tops on HSE, the network’s European version broadcast from Munich, and Real Collectibles by Adrienne was HSN’s most successful jewelry launch.
Since her first appointments in New Jersey beauty salons, Arpel has always believed in consumer education, and each Signature Club A kit comes with a how-to workbook.
“We’re not Picasso. I try to make things the average woman can use,” she says. “You’re not being taught by some model who has the right chromosomes to be magnificent.”
There may be no one in the beauty biz more comfortable discussing her age.
She doesn’t understand the fuss. “I really don’t get it. Our society does it. Age phobia comes from a lot of women fearing they won’t be socially acceptable.”
And she doesn’t get why Palm Beachers are perhaps most reticent to discuss birthdates.
“Women in this town look great in their 60s, in their 50s, in their 40s. They look particularly good. They’re cared for, and they’ve got it together. But I still see it. I find it so odd.”
