FACE FORWARD

(From the editorial, From the Editor, of the current September edition of the Sense&Stle, "Beauty and the Best," still available in Philippine bookstores, newsstands, hotel kiosks, and more)


I didn’t realize until we started preparing this issue devoted to the pursuit and the upkeep, the benefits and the burdens of beauty that this multi-billion-peso industry is run by people who are as serious about their business as, say, a bank or investments executive. The only difference is that in the way these beauty executives run their business the bottom line hardly ever appears to be about money but rather about putting the best “face” forward for both brand and its customer.

BLURB
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature. But beautiful old people are works of art. —Marjorie Barstow Breenbie

To these brand custodians, a night cream or drying lotion, more than a product to sell or a formula to address particular concerns, is time in a bottle or a porcelain jar. In it is contained a history of excellence, a promise that materializes now, and better, brighter, more beautiful days ahead, depending on the efficacy and effectiveness of the product. That’s the past, present, and future all sold as one over the counter every time a new line of anti-aging creams or a new packaging for a lipstick or a new formulation for your favorite facial wash is launched.
No wonder, the industry is run by the most engaging personalities, mostly women like Tina Tinio (“In Tina’s Shu,” page 112), whose phenomenal success, a PR feat, in making Japan’s Shu Uemura a household name among fashionistas in Manila has brought her on top of six countries in the “Shuniverse.” Mutya Crisostomo (“High on Her Heels,” page 124), the classic example of beauty with brains, has taken this former actress and beauty queen barely a year to be a young woman on top of Unilever’s skincare products like Pond’s and Dove. After her life-changing brush with breast cancer, Marionnaud’s Toni Abad (“Vanity’s Fare,” page 122) has made it her commitment to devote herself to what is truly important and that includes seeing other women with cancer through this ordeal.
So many other women make up this special “Beauty and the Best” edition who, like this magazine, are tasked with the mission of keeping the women and the world looking and feeling good. Among them are Manila’s devoted guardians of the world’s most trusted brands in makeup, skincare, and fragrances (“Brand Management,” page 130), such as Lancome’s Zerline Chan, Guerlain’s Trisha Chua, Coty Fragrances’ Vicky Marchadesch, Shisheido’s Raisa Mislang, and Creed’s and Paul & Joe’s Esmeralda Abe.
That’s a whole lot of beauty in this country. If only we can have these women pour all their ideas, energies, savvy, and taste into the Metro Manila Development Authority’s “Metro Gwapo” campaign, whose blue-and-pink sense of aesthetics I find quite disturbing, we can maybe begin to dream of a city as dreamlike as Paris! After all, beautiful people deserve to live in beautiful places, too.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com