by Mia Freedman
There’s one key benefit that comes with all this sucking up. By attending all the advertisers’ functions and presenting at pitch meetings with the magazine’s advertising sales reps, beauty editors quickly develop a high profile among advertisers. And, when publishers are appointing editors, this matters. Publishers prefer their new editors to be familiar to the magazine’s advertisers so as not to spook the horses and risk precious advertising dollars leaking elsewhere.
The third way a beauty editor is a mini-me editor is a journalistic one. Ah yes, journalism. Sadly, this is not the biggest part of a beauty editor’s job but it’s important nonetheless. And deceptively difficult. Beauty pages are always a mix of words and pictures: pictures of products of different hair and make-up looks. Features writers work exclusively with words; fashion editors and graphic artists work exclusively with pictures. Only the editor and the beauty editor must always consider both and use them to tell their story.
I knew none of this when I was offered the role of beauty writer at Cleo. I was just beside myself to have a paying job. Of course, I’d already decided I wanted to be the editor. I’d even given myself a deadline: before I turned twenty-five.
Who knows where I pulled this age from, but since I was nineteen at the time, twenty-five felt sufficiently far away to be possible but near enough to be impressive. The fact Lisa had chosen the beauty door through which to shove me on to my career path was, I believe, entirely coincidental. Did she think I had editor potential? Unlikely. I was young and a total novice.
Anyway, all I knew was that I’d just been appointed Cleo’s beauty writer by my hero and it felt like Christmas on steroids.
It had taken me months to get this gig. At the end of my initial fortnight of work experience, I’d persuaded Lisa to extend it and let me come in one day every week. For free, obviously. I was still living at home and making a token appearance at university while I waited for my proper life to start. I didn’t have many expenses and my casual jobs covered me for incidentals.
Excited halfway out of my pants to be in the Cleo office and in such close proximity to Lisa, I was delighted by every work-experience task thrown my way, no matter how menial. From fetching Lisa’s morning cappuccino to photocopying references, from foreign magazines to making half a dozen trips down to the mailroom each day, from returning clothes from the fashion department to typing bought stories into the computer, opening mail and filing correspondence, I was in heaven.
Gradually, I started turning up on extra days, praying that no one would ask what the hell I was doing or send me home. They didn’t. They were too busy working. For money. Within a month, I was coming in two days a week and then three. Then four. There was always plenty to do and my goal was to make myself as indispensable as possible, to create a Mia-shaped hole that would gape inconveniently when I wasn’t there. Then Lisa would have to give me a full-time job, wouldn’t she?
As part of my work experience, Cleo’s then deputy editor, Deborah Thomas, had thrown me a few bits to write for the beauty pages. Cleo was between beauty editors at the time and Deborah wasn’t happy with the work she’d received from a freelancer who was filling the gap. She had nothing to lose by tossing it my way to see if I could do better. I was young and green but I was also free, eager and sitting right there.
To test me, she’d give me a press release for a beauty product, say a new Revlon mascara, and a rough word count—usually about one hundred to two hundred words. My brief was to write an entertaining, informative paragraph or two to go on the beauty pages.
Knowing nothing technical about beauty, I wrote these bits very much as a regular nineteen-year-old. A consumer. An outsider. I liked make-up as much as the next girl but I’d certainly never been a beauty junkie or a label queen when it came to skincare and cosmetics. My skin was pretty lousy and I used any old thing from the supermarket to try and scrub it into submission. As for make-up, it never occurred to me to consider brands. I was hopeless at putting it on, and as a result didn’t wear too much. The cosmetics I did use usually came from Woolworths and were super cheap. Department-store cosmetics counters intimidated me. They still do.
While my utter lack of professional beauty knowledge was in some ways a liability that would frequently land me in trouble, it was also an asset because I wrote in language the reader could understand. It was trial and error at first. Everything I wrote needed work but still I couldn’t quite believe it when a version of something I’d written appeared in the magazine. Deborah was encouraging without being effusive. I didn’t know beauty-speak so I couldn’t write it. Later, this would stand me in good stead for writing and editing for the reader instead of myself.
This was Lisa’s greatest skill as an editor, her ability to slip into the skin of the Cleo reader. She literally viewed the magazine through their eyes. She didn’t edit Cleo for herself or her friends or her staff or other people in the industry. She always took an external perspective, putting aside all her inside knowledge and personal preferences.
I was hugely lucky that Lisa was my first editor because this skill is not innate. Writing or editing or shooting for your peers is a common trap and it’s always to the detriment of your product. People who work on magazines are not typical of those who read them.
To this day, I automatically slip into the mindset of a reader when I’m assessing something in a magazine. ‘I don’t understand what this story is about,’ I’ll say when looking at a layout. Obviously I do know what the story is about because chances are I commissioned it and chose the pictures with the art department, but I’m not speaking as me, I’m speaking as the reader. It’s probably disconcerting for people who aren’t used to working with me but I can’t help it. And generally, that external perspective is crucial.
Beauty writer was an unusual title. My colleagues at other magazines were called beauty editors. Beauty writer was created especially for me to reflect the fact I was a kid and barely knew one end of a mascara wand from the other.
Giving me a junior title was a smart move by Lisa because the other beauty editors were almost all a decade or two older than me and infinitely more experienced. To have given me the same title would have been insulting to them and made Cleo look foolish.
Calling me beauty writer also gave me room to grow, and something to aspire to. In time, I could be promoted to beauty editor. When Lisa believed I was ready. When I deserved it.
Frankly, I couldn’t have cared if I was called beauty dunce—which would have been entirely fair and accurate. I had a job at Cleo. I had a desk and a computer on it. A phone with my own extension. A business card. My name was in the front of the magazine. Lisa Wilkinson was my boss and I actually got to talk to her every day. And that was even before the perks began.
Deborah Thomas was my direct boss, the person in charge of teaching me about beauty and making sure I didn’t stuff up and embarrass the magazine in person or print. She, too, had been a Cleo beauty editor and this made her an ideal teacher. She was very patient.
She needed to be. My first public outing as beauty writer was a private meet-and-greet with the PR person for Clinique, an important Cleo advertiser and part of the even more important Estée Lauder group. Naturally, I didn’t know this. Just as many magazines are owned and published by the same company, so it is with many cosmetics brands. Who knew?
Hell, I was nineteen, I knew nothing. Certainly not that Estée Lauder owned Clinique and Prescriptives. Today, the company also owns M.A.C, Bobbi Brown, Origins and Aveda, among many other brands. Similarly, L’Oréal owns Garnier, Biotherm, Maybelline and Lancôme, to name just a few. Not that the average consumer would realise this. You’re not meant to. The idea is that every brand has a distinct and separate identity, helping the mother company cast as wide a net as possible over consumer demographics to maximise sales and profits.
As a beauty editor, however, it’s crucial to know who owns who because having a big company as a parent allows smaller brands to punch above their editoria
l weight. This means more editorial love—and mentions—in the pages of your magazine. No one dares piss off L’Oréal or Estée Lauder.
‘Is there a family tree that explains it all?’ I asked Deborah hopefully in the cab on the way to Clinique as she quickly mentioned the Estée Lauder connection.
She gave a small laugh. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Ha, ha.’
Except I wasn’t joking.
We met with Jenny, Clinique’s head of public relations, whom Deborah had known for years. After introductions were made, we sat down for tea and biscuits while Jenny talked us through Clinique’s next big launch. I tried to keep my mouth shut so my ignorance wouldn’t fall out.
Regrettably, I failed. I’ve never been very good at shutting up. Sometimes it’s as if I have Tourette syndrome. During the meeting I was dimly aware that I might have been saying some dumb things but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was I shouldn’t be saying—which made it difficult to stop talking.
In the cab on the way back to the office, Deborah pointed out where I’d gone wrong. ‘Look, Mia, it was totally inappropriate for you to say, “Wow! My mum uses Clinique!”’
Oh. Sorry.
‘It was irrelevant to what we were discussing and it made you look young and silly.’
Oh. Sorry. Cringe.
As she continued with the mortifying feedback, I kept glancing furtively at the bag of products Jenny had thrust into my hands as we left. ‘Um, what do I do with these?’ I now asked.
‘Write about them, have them photographed for your pages and then you can keep them.’
Seriously? Keep them? For myself? To use? Dear Lord, was there a better job on earth? For the next two years, there was not.
Noting my wide eyes and slack jaw, Deborah cautioned me. ‘Mia, you always need to remember this about working in a magazine: all the products and the invitations and the presents the PRs send you? They’re not sending them to you; they’re sending them to your job. Don’t ever confuse the two.’
These were the wisest words I heard about the industry and I’ve repeated them to every beauty editor I ever hired. As easy as it is to mistake the PRs’ endless solicitations for genuine kindness and become entranced with your own power and influence, you have to stay a little cynical. As long as you can help them by writing nice things about their products, they love you. But as soon as you can’t? Bye-bye. There would be one or two exceptions to this rule, but generally it rings true.
There would be several points in my future career when I’d watch the contact from PRs evaporate instantly. Until I was appointed to another position of power where I could help them out, and the pretend love would come back overnight. You can’t take it personally.
Thanks to Deborah’s sage advice, I never let those gifts and perks turn my head. Yes, they were nice—who’s going to bin a free Chanel perfume or a CD player sent by a cosmetics company along with some new lip glosses? But I never deluded myself into thinking those perks had anything to do with me.
When you work in editorial, you are a job, not a person. And to PRs, your worth is measured in the exposure you can deliver.
As a journalist, I’d like to think I was a quick learner. It certainly helped that each time I submitted my copy, Deborah made me pull up a chair next to her desk so I could watch while she rewrote it and explained her changes word by word. This was invaluable and slightly humiliating at the same time. She always made what I’d written sound better. It was months before I found my voice and my words made it onto the page without extensive surgery.
Writing beauty copy is part science, part politics and part bullshit with a sprinkling of journalism on top. There is a language of beauty writing steeped heavily in cheesy cliché that’s best avoided if you want to succeed. Nowhere but in magazines is hair called ‘locks’ or ‘tresses’ or a ‘mane’. Only in mag-speak are legs called ‘pins’ or lips referred to as ‘your pout’. I’ve always hated that language. As a reader then a writer then an editor. But it’s easy to slip into, especially at first when I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
My first published feature with my name on it was a story about nails, titled imaginatively: The Nail File. This caused much hilarity among my friends and family because I was a chronic nail biter to the point where my cuticles would sometimes bleed. Not a good look for a beauty journalist. Must try harder…
My first public function as a beauty writer was daunting. Deborah wasn’t there to hold my hand. I was nervous to the point of mild nausea.
It was the launch of a new perfume and a cocktail party for about forty journalists was held at a fancy five-star hotel in the city. I arrived shortly after the start time, took a quick look around at the dozen or so assembled women and—recognising no one—headed straight for the plush bathrooms. I put the toilet lid down and sat quietly in a cubicle for the next forty minutes, too shy to venture out and introduce myself to anyone, too fearful of saying something stupid to make conversation. Out of my depth in every way.
When all was quiet and I was sure the formalities had started, I emerged from the loo and slunk into a chair in the back row ready for the presentation. As soon as it was over, I bolted, collecting my gift bag—containing a full-size bottle of the perfume and a press release—on the way out.
Even though it was an awkward experience, I was still awed by my job, wide-eyed about everything. Especially my beauty cabinet at home, which had spilled over into drawers and cupboards within weeks.
However, like working in a chocolate factory, the perks soon lost their perkiness. There were only so many posh restaurants you could be wined and dined at. Only so many lipsticks and mascaras and nail polishes and perfumes you could wear. Or give to friends. Or stash in cupboards for future use. Only so many glasses of champagne you could sip while discussing the relative merits of free radicals as a skincare ingredient. It was a dream job in so many ways. But I had a different dream. And it had nothing to do with mascara.
MISPLACING MY SELF-ESTEEM
Voicemail to Charlie from me:
‘Hi. Don’t worry about picking me up after work today. I’m going to a L’Oréal launch and then I thought I might have dinner with Karen. I’ll be home early, I promise! Bye!’
Less than two years after becoming a beauty writer, things were going swimmingly at work. I was being given lots of stories to write and shoot, which meant lots of by-lines and a growing profile in the industry.
After a year of full-time uni before I’d started at Cleo, I’d limped along part time for another nine months before abandoning it, confident in my belief that future jobs would come from the one I had, not a degree. My parents thought I’d deferred, but I had no intention of going back to uni. My career was too intoxicating.
I was becoming more self-assured in my writing, more comfortable at functions and more capable dealing with PRs and advertisers. Lisa had promoted me to beauty editor, which meant no real change in my job description or salary but it was public acknowledgement that I was on my way up the ladder.
On the home front though? Miserable. A mess. In a pattern that would repeat itself several times over the next few years, my work life was on an upwards trajectory while my personal life was heading rapidly in the other direction.
I was living with a guy called Charlie. It was the first time I’d lived with a boyfriend, and it was a disaster.
We’d met at 2 am in a nightclub, which, I find, is always a terrific way to start. I’d been at Cleo for a few months and I was having a ball, going out constantly for work and play. Life was fun. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend.
Charlie was in a struggling band that had recently moved to Sydney from Brisbane to do some gigs and hopefully get signed to a record label. He played bass. I’d seen him around a few times and we’d had a few amusing chats. He was a good flirt. I picked up straight away that he fancied me but I didn’t pay much attention because I wasn’t attracted to him.
His personality was a big one, though, and he did a stellar
job of dismantling my defences. Pretty soon, we were seeing each other although I was determined to keep it casual.
I truly meant this. No bluff. No attempt at reverse psychology. It was obvious that Charlie wouldn’t be an ideal boyfriend and, anyway, I was Just Not That Into Him. Nonetheless, he was entertaining to be around and the idea of dating someone without wanting a solid commitment seemed novel. Modern! Empowered! Just like a guy! Woo!
I braced myself for the conversation—the one where he’d tell me he wanted a proper relationship. I practised my speech where I’d let him down gently.
As it turned out, I never delivered that speech because we never had the conversation. He seemed as keen as me to keep it casual. No strings.
And that’s when my empowerment began to falter. It was one thing to have decided I didn’t want commitment but it was slightly less empowering when I realised he didn’t either. What was the point of telling someone not to pursue you when they weren’t actually pursuing you, dammit?
This is when a confusing change in the balance of power began to occur. It was subtle but potent. The less he chased me for a relationship, the more I wanted one. I have no idea why or how this happened or when exactly my brain clicked from independent to needy. Was my pride hurt? Was it ego? Was it that pesky brain chemistry that made me confuse sex with love?
The idea of one person pulling away and the other person scampering after them was hardly original but I’d never experienced it. This push–pull dynamic would precipitate an insidious downward spiral of my self-esteem until I finally felt so worthless, I barely had the strength to walk away.
The snapshots I have in my mind from the two years I spent with Charlie still baffle me. I was smart, educated and confident. I had a job I loved, a nice apartment I rented on my own, a car and financial independence. I was surrounded by supportive family and friends. I knew a thing or two about a thing or two.