SPRING BEAUTY REPORT : The Grandes Dames of Beauty
“THE COSMETICS field in the past 10 years has made a big, big jump,” says Aida Thibiant, sitting behind her French provincial desk in the office of her Beverly Hills salon. Suddenly, with just the slightest fluster of horror, she realizes what she has just said. “I shouldn’t say cosmetics ,” she catches herself, as her salon manager, sitting nearby, anxiously corrects her by repeating, “Skin care! Skin care!”
“Skin care, I should say,” Thibiant quickly amends herself, then laughs, an infectious laugh reminiscent of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s.
The distinction, trivial though it might seem, is important. These days, the beauty industry is speaking with an almost puritanical fervor of “skin care.” As the baby-boom generation turns 40, cleansers and moisturizers, facials and masques are viewed as perhaps even more important than camouflaging products like foundation and rouge, lipstick and eye liner.
The change in orientation, amounting to a metaphoric face lift of the industry itself, has spread from exclusive salons to department-store counters to local beauty parlors. Here in Southern California, much of the credit for this emphasis on skin care must go to the three Beverly Hills doyennes of dermis--Aida Grey, Aida Thibiant and Georgette Klinger. Though there are one or two other beauty practitioners who boast clienteles just as exclusive, none have promoted themselves and their products as effectively and indefatigably--or as long--as these three high priestesses of facial care.
All are sisters under the skin, though they are determined competitors who acknowledge one another’s existence only with a certain haughty disdain. None of them looks her age: Their own complexions are their own best advertisement, white and smooth and virtually without wrinkles, shining like well-waxed fruit. Dedicated to the pursuit of the elusive ideal of beauty, they democratically insist, in their very aristocratic European accents, that beauty is within every woman’s reach.
Aida Grey, at 79 the senior member of the troika, rules from her Aida Grey Salon on Wilshire Boulevard, a marble-and-cut-glass confection that could have been lifted from an elegant Ernst Lubitsch movie. Up on North Canon Drive, Aida Thibiant, 62, the relative newcomer (although she’s been here almost 20 years), operates her own Institut de Beaute, its understated tones of pink and gray suggestive of a luxe, high-tech laboratory. Georgette Klinger, 74, swoops in twice a year from her base in Manhattan to check up on the Rodeo Drive salon that she opened in 1978. Her daughter, Kathryn, oversees its two floors, their pink and silver moderne lines reminiscent of a tony ‘30s ocean liner.
In effect, each presides over a competing temple, complete with loyal believers who pledge allegiance to their respective product lines. For though all do common battle against the same prosaic wrinkles and whiteheads and dry, flaky skin, they are hardly allies. Rather, as each preaches the benefits of her particular “philosophy” of skin care, she views the surrounding competition with an Olympian dismissal. “I don’t think we would have anything in common about our thinking,” Georgette Klinger declaims. “I’m sure what they are doing is OK. But we are different.”
The basic tenets of the three are nonetheless strikingly similar. “Once, many years ago, I had a flash of insight about the nature of beauty,” Aida Grey, a self-styled “beauty scientist,” relates in the opening pages of her 1979 bible, “The Aida Grey Beauty Book,” as if relating a conversion experience. “It is simply this: Beauty is the natural state of the whole woman, fully realized. Beauty comes from within.” Reducing such idealism to an aphorism, Klinger pronounces firmly: “There are no ugly women--only lazy ones.”
But while beauty may be universal, its realization demands constant cultivation. As if to preempt any suggestion that their pampered clients are self-indulgent sybarites, all three espouse a disciplined commitment to self-improvement. “I drink between 15 and 20 glasses of distilled water a day, which flushes the system,” Grey says, setting herself up as an exemplar. “Distilled water washes away excess calcium and all sorts of minerals. You are what you eat. Junk food is the worst.”
The Southern California sun is equally verboten . “I don’t go in the sun. I don’t like it,” Thibiant says. She believes moderation is the key. “I wouldn’t stop outdoor life. But when you go swimming or playing outside, it’s much better than when you lie down and have 100% ultraviolet light on your face. Baking in the sun, ugh.” Simply avoiding near occasions of sin like McDonald’s and Malibu Beach isn’t enough, however; the postulant to the religion of beauty must also perform her daily offices without fail. “Everyone should keep her skin spotlessly clean,” Klinger commands.
But while their precepts seem to be simplicity itself, their approach to the skin is less straightforward, as if it is a mystery that can be decoded only with their expert assistance. “Each skin type requires a different regimen of care and makeup, and it is not always obvious what group you belong to,” Grey says. Further complicating the matter, Thibiant proposes, “The same person’s skin can change from one month to another, so you have to be able to adjust the treatments.” Sighs Klinger: “Normal skin, oily skin, sensitive skin: There is no such skin. It is all combinations. That’s why we have 30 cleansers and 20 moisturizers for different types of skin.”
Still, their respective treatments call for similar routines, all involving cleansing, toning and moisturizing, supplemented by regular facials and masques. They maintain, however, that all creams are not created equal, and each claims her respective products boast the latest scientific breakthroughs.
A Czechoslovakian immigrant who first became interested in skin care while seeking a cure for her own teen-age acne, Klinger opened her first shop on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue in 1941. “The few salons in existence then were always the same story--the same massage, the same cleanser, the same thing for everyone,” she recounted during the course of a phone interview from Scottsdale, Ariz., where she is readying a new salon, the eighth in a chain that ranges from Chicago to Palm Beach. Adopting the European approach, she claims to have pioneered a more individual touch. It wasn’t until 1970 that she expanded to Los Angeles, where, to her horror, she discovered, “They still don’t believe the sun can damage the skin. That’s the No. 1 problem.”
Aida Grey has been treating Californians since 1946. The daughter of a French dermatologist, she had a childhood brush of her own with acne--in the world of the beauty mavens, overcoming acne is almost de rigeur , a sort of mottled red badge of courage. Although she already had salons of her own in New York and Philadelphia, she says she was ready to retire, having turned down promoters eager to turn her into a nationally marketed figure, when she and her husband first visited Los Angeles. “But I fell in love with Beverly Hills,” she relates, sounding a bit like Hermione Gingold remembering it well. She soon had her own salon in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel--and, by the mid-1960s, she had also opened her flagship salon across the street from the hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.
“Makeup was applied too heavily, with a cementlike, painted pancake look,” Grey has written of her first encounters with the then-prevailing Hollywood high-style. “Too much. I concentrated instead on a classic, natural look to bring out the special beauty of the individual.” One of her first celebrity clients was the young Marilyn Monroe. “She was not a great beauty,” Grey admits. “But she had an awful lot of charm.” She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt (“When she would start to speak, she would be the most beautiful woman I’d known”). But as if sensing that the rich and famous don’t account for all the business done at her 95 franchises, Grey reassures, “I have a strong urge to create and work with people in every sense--whether it’s a teen-ager who needs help or a woman of 96.”
A younger generation of Hollywood stars such as Candice Bergen and Ali MacGraw is equally responsible for putting Aida Thibiant on the skin-care map. “Whenever they would give interviews, they used to talk about me, and that’s how I got known,” she allows. A native of France, Thibiant says, “I was going to be an engineer, since I was more mathematical minded. But I had an acne problem. I had my skin treated by many dermatologists. When I finally saw some improvement, that’s how I got interested in the business.”
On a visit to a sister in Los Angeles in 1970, she and her husband, Michel, who now oversees her cosmetics factory in the San Fernando Valley, decided to relocate from Paris. She opened her own salon in Beverly Hills in 1973, moving to her current location in 1978.
Beauty, as these three promote it, may be available to all--including men, who now make up about 30% of their clientele--but it doesn’t come cheap. A facial at Aida Thibiant’s ranges from $55 to $80. While a similar facial at Georgette Klinger’s can be had for $65, a “Deluxe Full Day of Beauty” tops out at $260. Despite minor variations, their facials, whatever their ultimate results, are designed to be reassuring: In quiet, dimly lit rooms, “facialists” clean their clients’ skin, prod and poke their pores and finish with soothing creams.
But that’s just the beginning, since, once hooked, the grateful client is urged to avail herself of the many products offered for home care. Thibiant’s newest product, Beauty Lift,for instance, costs $70 for a package of eight small vials intended to last eight days. It adds up--Klinger reported 1989 revenues of more than $15 million.
But, says Grey, the modern approach to skin-care actually represents a simplified regime, far removed from the overly made-up days of yore. “We are so far advanced,” she enthuses. “We used to use nothing but mineral oil and animal fat. Today we do not use that. Today, you need only 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night to have perfect skin.”
And, since the cultivation and maintenance of beauty remains as much a religion as a science, possibly a prayer or two.
