Sali Hughes - Pretty Iconic - A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World

But like any true music lover, I always want to hear something new that excites me just as much. And so it is with beauty. Good job, because I’m sent around 2000 new beauty products a year, from designer fragrances and state of the art skincare, to supermarket shampoos and lipsticks costing less than a two pinter of milk – all of them promising something new and extraordinary. It’s an extremely fortunate and wonderful position to be in (teenage me is never far from memory, and believe me, she’s having kittens), but not one without some stress. Storage and eating surfaces aside, I worry constantly that I’ll miss something wonderful. A product so brilliant, so revolutionary and life-changing, that it will deserve to become a beauty icon, used by millions, remembered always, popped in someone’s future treasured toolbox.

But what makes an icon? Quality alone is neither enough nor strictly the point. The beauty products in this book aren’t always, in my view, the best – at least not for me personally. Very many of my all time favourites are not here (and as ever, everything in this book has been chosen by me and me alone, with absolutely no commercial consideration). I happen to prefer By Terry Touche Veloutée and Clinique Airbrush Concealer to the mighty YSL Touche Éclat pen, but in terms of influence, memorability and its creation of an entire beauty category, the latter wins by a country mile. Likewise, you may not love Chanel No 5. But the fact is, you will probably still have an opinion on what is, without question, the towering icon of perfumery. You might not find Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair ideal for your skin but in all likelihood, the serum you do love would not exist without it. These three items, in their own ways, changed how countless beauty products were designed and used thereafter. They are reference points, or the stars of a beauty ‘moment’, or so familiar and relied upon that they’re practically part of the family.

While to many, beauty products are silly, an irrelevance, the currency of the vain and the shallow, they are, to me, the furniture of our lives. Just as we chart life’s journey through music, food and places, I also attribute the same importance and sentimentality to the beauty products I saw, touched, and smelled all around me. The flipping of a lid on a bottle of Johnson’s baby lotion triggers a Proustian rush. I’m immediately back in my grandmother’s living room, my clean pyjamas warming on the fireguard, the soothing hum of Antiques Roadshow and the rattle of a twin tub washer in the background. I don’t just remember my first kiss, I remember the Miss Selfridge Copperknockers lipstick smeared messily over my cheeks afterwards. My first ever gig was notable not only because I saw The Smiths on their last tour, but because I’d stolen my mum’s Rimmel lipliner and Givenchy Ysatis perfume for this life-changing occasion. A memorable beauty product can transport me to my nan’s backstreet curl and set parlour, my teenage cabin bed, a school disco or my wedding day. When I look back at pivotal moments in my life, I can almost always remember the cosmetics and toiletries that accompanied me, and how I came to be wearing them. These are the lotions, potions, creams, colours and powders that defined how we presented ourselves to the outside world. They were companions at major life events. The perfumes that gave us backbone for important job interviews, the make-up chosen to come on our first dates with a partner, the toiletries taken on family holidays, the little luxury bought with a first pay packet.

It’s easy to forget that these cosy, familiar make-up, skincare and toiletries of our youth were often born from world-changing innovation and where particularly interesting, I’ve tried to provide some context. Likewise, if I feel a product is oft-misunderstood or unfairly maligned, I’ve suggested best practice techniques and tips, on how better to utilise them. In Future Icons are some products that, to me, represent either an unforgettable moment – welcome or otherwise – or a great advance in beauty. Whether history will agree with me remains to be seen.

Most importantly, I should say that my interpretation of the word ‘icon’ is wholly subjective and seen very much through the lens of a 41-year-old British woman and is therefore a shamelessly Western view of products. I absolutely acknowledge that Japanese beauty rituals and technology, for just one example, have always been extremely influential and that in recent years, Korean products have changed our beauty culture, but they don’t have the same personal meaning to me (no doubt they will to our children). Radox, Poison and Sun-In – these are the products that made my life. There will, I hope, be some products you remember from your own upbringing. The shampoo that sat at the corner of your childhood bath, the pot of face cream your mother kept on the bedside table, perhaps. There will no doubt be others that are entirely new to you and equally, some omissions that figure hugely in your past or present but not in my own – I would really love to hear what they are.

In perfume-nerd circles, saying Chanel No 5 is your favourite perfume is as obvious and dreary as declaring Citizen Kane your favourite film, Shakespeare and the Mona Lisa your favourite playwright and painting. But sometimes, things are seen as the best because they simply are. There’s no use fighting a towering icon just to be contrary and interesting. And even if you don’t like No 5 (and very many genuinely don’t – smell is a wholly subjective business), you should still respect this remarkable 94-year-old French perfume and what is arguably the most iconic and recognisable beauty product of all time.

No 5 was created by the extraordinarily clever and talented Russian-French perfumer Ernest Beaux, but, for me, his creation is Coco Chanel from crystal stopper to basenote. The couturier had been obsessed with cleanliness from a young age, but was frustrated with the ephemeral characteristics of fresh-smelling citrus colognes. She wanted something stronger, longer lasting, more characterful, and so Beaux mixed traditional floral extracts with aldehydes – isolated chemicals that artificially gave a clean smell, but stuck around on the skin until bedtime. These synthetics were deemed inferior and tacky in 1921, but Coco gave not a damn. Beaux made up ten versions of the scent, numbered 1–5 and 20–24. Superstitious Coco chose five, her lucky number. She packaged it in a typically unfussy flacon, inspired by men’s toiletries and adorned with nothing more than a square label and simple type – a pretty subversive move in itself, when luxury perfumes came in big, blowsy balloon-atomisers. The No 5 bottle – since then, the subject of works by artists and photographers such as Andy Warhol, Louis-Nicolas Darbon and Ed Feingersh in his portraits of Marilyn Monroe – is as recognisable a French icon as the Eiffel Tower.

The scent itself – powdery, fizzy, sexy, grown-up, chic and refined – is magnificent, whether or not your particular bag (though impressively, it remains the world’s bestselling scent). But for me it goes way beyond smell. It’s true to say that outside those with my immediate family, the most enduring relationship of my life has been with No 5. I discovered it at 12 years old and wore it with vintage Levi’s and Smiths T-shirts at school discos; I spritzed it over my uniform when I ran away from home three years later. It moved to London with me when I had nothing but a PE bag worth of belongings, it lost my virginity with me, it came on my driving test, it laced my smiley T-shirts and accompanied me to acid house raves (thankfully, not on the same day). Naturally, it was a guest at my wedding. Some years later, broken, confused and tearful, I considered no other fragrance for my father’s funeral. On such a hideous and unwanted day, I needed an old friend to stop me from falling.