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Adrien Arpel is not "39 and holding."
She hires models who don't cover their gray.
She tells women under the age of 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 bestselling Signature Club A by Adrienne line on women ages 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, a part-time Palm Beach resident, 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 the St. Petersburg campus of HSN for 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 bestselling 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."
A millionaire by 21
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 eyeshadow. 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."
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 VP 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 bestsellers.
The books earned her bookings with Oprah Winfrey, Mike Douglas and Regis Philbin. "Regis would mention Kaleidoscope (a multi- colored powder in a compact) is at Saks, and it would sell out across the country," Arpel says.
She also honed her TV chops with appearances on local morning programs. Good Morning Houston, Good Morning Cleveland . . . Arpel tirelessly said "good morning" to them all.
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.
"Hazel Bishop, who had the number-one selling brand of lipstick in the 1950s, understood this way back then. Bishop did TV demonstrations. But she was doing this on black-and-white TV, so nuances of different lipstick shades were hard for viewers to appreciate. Bishop was ahead of her time. Arpel had the right idea at the right time."
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. "I've loved jewelry since I was a little girl and couldn't afford it," Arpel says. "That business has been as successful as cosmetics, and it's out of love."
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."
No 'age phobia'
Arpel's intelligence - her interest in and knowledge of a wide range of topics - is unique in the cosmetics industry, Gribetz says. "She's able to talk on every subject in the world. She's politically savvy. She's so aware of what's happening around her."
And she's curious about all of it. "I love cats. I love dogs. I love art," she says. "There's nothing I don't love. I'm a happy guy."
She's also surprising in her lack of jet-set airs.
Yes, she has a plush waterfront home in Palm Beach, but her favorite vacation destination is Walt Disney World, where she hits all the attractions with her two grandkids.
Yes, those are Chagalls on her living-room walls, but she'd just as soon gush about her beloved Bronx, the Russian Blue cat at her feet.
Yes, she wore a gray Giorgio Armani jacket for a recent HSN appearance, but this is what she'll say about it: "I'm not the most practical. I'm wearing leather to put makeup on!"
She says comfort comes first when she shops for clothes. "You're never good at anything if you're not comfortable."
And 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."
Arpel theorizes that ageism might be linked to a single woman's perceived worth on the marriage market. She hears about the challenges of the dating scene from her only child, 41-year-old Lauren, but Arpel herself wed within six months of meeting her husband, Ronald Newman.
They'll celebrate their 45th anniversary later this year.
Secrets of success
"How are you, you handsome man?" says Arpel as she blows loud smacky kisses to her show's video engineer. "Anyone that makes me look good, I'm madly in love with."
It's a few minutes before airtime on a Friday night, and Arpel is greeting the small HSN crew and showing off a new black tote. "I schlepped this bag all over Europe, and it's still in good shape!"
She takes her spot beside her HSN counterpart, Bobbi Ray Carter, a sliver of woman who could pass for Arpel's younger sister. If the two raced to see who could talk faster, it would be a photo finish.
At 9 p.m., the pair launches into their first fevered pitch, for Eye Specific Non-Toxic Silicone Plus, a wand with a "white highlighter" pen on one end and a wrinkle filler on the other.
"What are dark circles? I gotta answer that for you," says Arpel before she crosses the tiny studio to a 50-year-old model and starts demonstrating Eye Specific. "I don't want to show you model eyes," Arpel says. "I want to show you older women. It's called real women!"
She steps back so the camera can create the show's requisite side- by-side before and after shots. Her voice rises with excitement, "Look at that! She is wearing no other makeup at all!"
By the time Arpel rejoins Carter, a backstage coordinator has already swapped out the makeup display in front of them.
Next up, Signature Club A's Vitamin C capsules. Arpel squirts the contents of one onto her own skin, specifically a vertical fold between her nose and the outer corner of mouth. "If you are not over 40 years old, this is not for you. I'm 63. If anything's working for me, it's gotta work for you."
For two hours, Arpel tirelessly shills like a sideshow barker.
"These aren't called night creams or eye creams. Why? Because they're elixirs!"
"We're at war with these wrinkles. You gotta look good!"
"Let's lighten Bunkie up for evening. Can you believe that's the very same woman? Voila!"
It's easy to believe that Arpel - still earnest, still indefatigable - is the same woman who started a cosmetics empire at 17.
But it's clear the secret to her success comes down to something more than a teenager's tireless energy and youthful belief in her mission.
Arpel - beaming - turns to a visitor in the HSN studio, and, with a reflexive sweep of her arm, gestures to indicate the potions, the models, the camera and crew, the viewers at home, the women past and present she has helped . . . the whole span of her life's work: "It's really fun, this business!"
Adrien Arpel will next appear on HSN from May 12 to 16 and May 18.
Adrien Arpel's ageless advice
Adrien Arpel has devoted her life to helping women make the most of their looks, and the foundation of her own beauty-and-fitness routine is good old-fashioned common sense.
'I think I'm long past (trying to be) Hollywood quality. Because you see, you never get there.'
- In the morning she walks, jogs or bikes near her Palm Beach home (or in Central Park, when she's back in New York). 'That's the start of my day,' she says. 'If I don't exercise, I don't feel well.'
- She is fanatical about saving her skin from the sun. To preserve her self-proclaimed 'Casper the Friendly Ghost-toned' complexion, she wears sunglasses, a baseball cap and SPF shirts with the collar turned up. 'Everybody always asks if I'm cold when it's 95 degrees outside.'
- She limits portion sizes. 'I'm always on a diet. I could be obese easily.' At a recent working dinner in Tampa, she ate about half of her antipasto entree and took only a couple of bites of chocolate torte. (If you happen to dine with her, be prepared to sample from her plate. She'll insist!)
- She does her makeup, every day, but sticks with a neutral palette of pinks, beiges and soft browns. 'I just want to look like myself but better. Realism is a wonderful thing.'
Formulas for the over-40 crowd
With seven Baby Boomers turning 50 every minute between now and 2014, targeting older women is smart business.
Last year, Americans spent $44.6 billion on anti-aging products and services, and by 2009 the total anti-aging market is expected to reach $72 billion, according to the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
Signature Club A by Adrienne's top-selling products include:
Advanced Formula 5 Essentials Creme with Vinoplex Grape Polyphenols. Formulated with Vinoplex grape polyphenol antioxidants, AHAs and retinol to hydrate, microexfoliate, brighten and firm. More than 3 million 4.5-ounce units sold at $24.95 each.
Advanced Formula Double Strength Vitamin C High Potent-C Anti- Wrinkle Age Defying Capsules. For women over 40, each capsule delivers a single-use topical application of stabilized Vitamin C to your skin. More than 52 million capsules sold at $26.50 per 30- capsule container.
Non-Toxic Silicone Plus. Each bottle contains a day formulation on one side and night on the other to temporarily pack deep wrinkles and fill fine lines. In the last year, HSN has sold 600,000 at $26.95 apiece.
