Beauty? It really can be skin deep
by Emily Davies for Times - www.timesonline.co.uk
Rebecca Morrice Williams is the woman whose make-up line, Becca, aims to provide customers with the cosmetic industry’s holy grail — perfect skin
AS teenage obsessions go, finding the definitive foundation is probably not in the Top Ten. But years before she became a make-up artist, Rebecca Morrice Williams was obsessed with perfection and cosmetics, and how the two might correlate. Now 39, she is probably still more obsessed than most, even though with Becca, her make-up line, she has more provision than most to seek cosmetics (and perfection) however she wants.
Her biggest obsession is with making skin look perfect. “The only thing that matters in make-up,” she says, “is the most basic thing: skin, skin, skin.” She agrees that spending fifteen minutes on foundation is not as much fun as applying lipstick, say, but argues that it is much more crucial. In October 2001, after four years of research, her preoccupation with skin perfection led to the launch of Becca. Like many of the best business brainwaves, hers was that she had spotted a gap where others had not, based on what she couldn’t find available — and she decided to fill it.
NI_MPU('middle');Williams, born and living in Perth, Western Australia, is in London to launch the first Becca shop, on a solidly chi-chi corner of Brompton Cross, next-door-but-one to Chanel and opposite Joseph and Bibendum. It opens on Monday. She chose London because it’s the “most receptive, most interested and most interesting” market. She has brought her daughter Ginger, seven months, whom she spent “pretty much 11 hours” breastfeeding on the hop between Singapore and London.
After landing in London three days before we meet, she dashed straight off to Bologna for two days, trawling a cosmetics trade fair, then flew back to London. Her eyes look a bit wet when she says that she misses Finn, her three-and-a-half-year-old son, at home with her husband in Perth, where Becca HQ is still based (and no, she doesn’t plan on moving it to Sydney).
I peer keenly at her face but she doesn’t look a jot more tired than I do — breastfeeding, Bologna and all. I wonder whether it’s because of Becca’s Shimmering Skin Perfector, a pearlised potion that gives a soft glow to the face — and throat, and arms and legs, if you apply it all over (as Kylie’s make-up artist did in her Slow video). It’s one of Williams’s bestsellers and one of her personal essentials, along with cream blusher and concealer.
She is rhapsodic about the power of rosy cheeks. “Every woman looks better with some pink in her skin,” she says. “I swear it makes you look younger, healthier, happier.” The Becca cream blushers are something to be reckoned with; they have received a coveted Best of Beauty award from Allure magazine; such awards are gold nuggets of endorsement to a brand that relies only on word of mouth.
But Becca’s core philosophy is a three-step system called (yes) “skin perfecting”. It involves a weighty-sounding combination of foundation (which goes by the much nicer name of Luminous Skin Colour), concealer and powder; it is also an archaic-sounding trio, especially in light of the many attempts by cosmetics companies to combine the three into one. Williams insists that it is neither. “Being quick with make-up is not the same as being light,” she explains. “If you spend 15 minutes in the morning using all three, I promise that it will last all day and all night, without a single touch-up. Just use what you need, lightly and cautiously.”
She admits that powder is possibly not the most appealing word in the cosmetic vocabulary, but says that the recent fear of the deadly matt finish it can bestow is subsiding. “There has been a fixation with anything glowy for so long. I understand that desire to shine, and the awfulness of looking as if you are wearing panstick, but it works best if you are matt in some areas (the places that might go shiny naturally),” she says. “I love the look of strong lips or eyes on a girl with no other make-up, but that requires perfection — and let’s face it, there isn’t much of that walking around.”
I tell her that during a lunch with the head of PR at a huge beauty house who was so impressed by my “amazing unmake-up make-up”, as she put it, that, when I revealed it was courtesy of Becca, insisted on a purchasing dash that afternoon and bought much of the range. I expect Williams to be excited, especially when I mention for whom the PR worked, but she is nonplussed. “Ah yes, I’ve heard things like that before. It’s funny; you’d think there would be no room in this world for more cosmetics, but I’ve not found that to be true. There is this constant hunger, and once people try it, they’re sold.”
She points out, though, that there is “no reason whatsoever” to buy a £100 moisturiser or, indeed, any product if you are not also using a sunscreen (of at least factor 15). “I wish I’d known when I was a teenager what I know now about the ageing of skin and how much protective creams can help, “ she says. “But even using it now has made a difference. There are blotches here and there, but I think I’ve halted them.” Every Becca product meant for use all over the face has a high sun-protection factor, and a separate sunscreen (“not greasy, not chalky”) is on the way.
Williams’s No 2 obsession is with the true shade of skin tones, and how to echo them cosmetically as precisely as possible. Most cosmetics companies have four or five shades of concealer, but right from the start Becca has had 34 concealer palettes and 30 foundation colours. Williams points out that they range from “very pale, for Cate Blanchett”, to “very dark, for Alek Wek”. And she’s not idly throwing out those names — along with Kate Moss, Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow, these women are Becca fans, snapping it up on shoots and rushing to buy it (shock, horror) when they run out.
Williams says that retailers have always given her a hard time for insisting on such a breadth of colour. “They say it’s not the most commercially viable thing to do,” she says. “So many of them still want to buy only the shades they know will sell well — the palest half of the spectrum — but I tell them it’s either all of them or nothing.”
The products are made in Germany — “they’re brilliant but it’s not always that convenient . . . the language difference, the couriering back and forth of samples; sometimes it takes two years to get a product right” — and the packaging is made in Italy, apart from the metal tops, which are applied in Perth. Williams points out that many cosmetics lines that appear to be varied really differ from one another only in their marketing: “the same products get rehashed and repackaged” again and again.
She fled from the monopoly of being stocked by a chain of cosmetics stores because she found that the staff were so obsessed with commission that they had stopped caring about what they were selling, and would freely mismatch products to skin. She mimics their refrain: “Madam, we don’t actually have the powder in stock to match the concealer you should use, but we do have another in stock that is just as good even though it’s really much too dark.” But now I’m free to do my own thing.”
She is fascinatingly frank about products, especially her own. What’s Brazilian Samba, I ask, reading the back of one little brown palette and flipping the lid. “It’s a new multi-purpose gloss, but it’s not for everybody. You’d have to have quite dark skin to wear it on the lips.” She is also a funny mix of strict and casual. “Make-up rules? I have tons,” she declares. (Among them, the absolute necessity of mascara).
But she “loves fingers” for the best application, using a brush when necessary afterwards. She and her chief executive, Steven Schapera, share a special (Aussie?) flair for languid pithiness, interrupted now and again with a jot of narrow-eyed zeal. They poached Paul, their shop manager, from Space NK a year ago when they realised that a London opening was looking likely (no matter that they didn’t yet have a location). They are full of ideas for the Becca den ’s potential (Blow-dries! Manicures! Car and nanny-booking! All-night make-up and champagne lock-ins!). The concept of customer service is being taken seriously.
The main floor of the store is no bigger than the size of some kitchens in the area, but there are two more floors below and much hidden space with curtains ready to be swooshed across when necessary. The walls and ceiling are the same melted-chocolate brown as the packaging. It doesn’t feel like a shop, more like a club caught during the day, or somebody’s especially groovy mews house. The one thing Williams insists that it will not be is intimidating. “I don’t know how many women want to sit to have their make-up taken off in public on a stool at a counter. I don’t really understand that,” she says.
NI_MPU('middle');The lighting is as dim as a nightclub’s but, happily for the maintenance of actualité, next to each mirror there are lamps that approximate daylight. In the future looms skincare (“just some essentials”) and maybe some nail polishes, and something to make the skin gleam all over the body — Shimmering Skin Perfector worn à la Kylie — without endangering one’s clothes or sheets (“Isn’t that the most annoying thing! ” says Williams. “You look great, but your bed and dress are wrecked”).
In an industry awash with snake oil, she is a stickler for reality: in the beginning the campaigns were unretouched, though now that they are blown up to be 2 metres high for the shop walls, she concedes that they do need to eliminate “the odd red line in the eyes. But we try to keep it very minimal”.
An early product that gave eyelids a glossy look in the manner of a Mario Testino shoot was recently withdrawn by Williams for being “too sticky”. But, I say, so many make-up artists claim that you can get that look with Vaseline. “Er, have you ever actually tried that?” she asks incredulously. “It slips and it slides, and is absolutely not for real life.”
In its place is Bird of Paradise, a glimmery gloss perfect for lids, cheekbones and lips that definitely doesn’t shift. “I never pay any attention to beauty trends,” says Williams. “I’d rather link it to fashion. I do not go very close at all to what is happening in make-up on the catwalk. Unless, of course, it’s wearable — that’s always the biggest thing.”
Becca, 91a Pelham Street, SW7 (020-7225 2501)
by Emily Davies for Times - www.timesonline.co.uk
Rebecca Morrice Williams is the woman whose make-up line, Becca, aims to provide customers with the cosmetic industry’s holy grail — perfect skin
AS teenage obsessions go, finding the definitive foundation is probably not in the Top Ten. But years before she became a make-up artist, Rebecca Morrice Williams was obsessed with perfection and cosmetics, and how the two might correlate. Now 39, she is probably still more obsessed than most, even though with Becca, her make-up line, she has more provision than most to seek cosmetics (and perfection) however she wants.
Her biggest obsession is with making skin look perfect. “The only thing that matters in make-up,” she says, “is the most basic thing: skin, skin, skin.” She agrees that spending fifteen minutes on foundation is not as much fun as applying lipstick, say, but argues that it is much more crucial. In October 2001, after four years of research, her preoccupation with skin perfection led to the launch of Becca. Like many of the best business brainwaves, hers was that she had spotted a gap where others had not, based on what she couldn’t find available — and she decided to fill it.
NI_MPU('middle');Williams, born and living in Perth, Western Australia, is in London to launch the first Becca shop, on a solidly chi-chi corner of Brompton Cross, next-door-but-one to Chanel and opposite Joseph and Bibendum. It opens on Monday. She chose London because it’s the “most receptive, most interested and most interesting” market. She has brought her daughter Ginger, seven months, whom she spent “pretty much 11 hours” breastfeeding on the hop between Singapore and London.
After landing in London three days before we meet, she dashed straight off to Bologna for two days, trawling a cosmetics trade fair, then flew back to London. Her eyes look a bit wet when she says that she misses Finn, her three-and-a-half-year-old son, at home with her husband in Perth, where Becca HQ is still based (and no, she doesn’t plan on moving it to Sydney).
I peer keenly at her face but she doesn’t look a jot more tired than I do — breastfeeding, Bologna and all. I wonder whether it’s because of Becca’s Shimmering Skin Perfector, a pearlised potion that gives a soft glow to the face — and throat, and arms and legs, if you apply it all over (as Kylie’s make-up artist did in her Slow video). It’s one of Williams’s bestsellers and one of her personal essentials, along with cream blusher and concealer.
She is rhapsodic about the power of rosy cheeks. “Every woman looks better with some pink in her skin,” she says. “I swear it makes you look younger, healthier, happier.” The Becca cream blushers are something to be reckoned with; they have received a coveted Best of Beauty award from Allure magazine; such awards are gold nuggets of endorsement to a brand that relies only on word of mouth.
But Becca’s core philosophy is a three-step system called (yes) “skin perfecting”. It involves a weighty-sounding combination of foundation (which goes by the much nicer name of Luminous Skin Colour), concealer and powder; it is also an archaic-sounding trio, especially in light of the many attempts by cosmetics companies to combine the three into one. Williams insists that it is neither. “Being quick with make-up is not the same as being light,” she explains. “If you spend 15 minutes in the morning using all three, I promise that it will last all day and all night, without a single touch-up. Just use what you need, lightly and cautiously.”
She admits that powder is possibly not the most appealing word in the cosmetic vocabulary, but says that the recent fear of the deadly matt finish it can bestow is subsiding. “There has been a fixation with anything glowy for so long. I understand that desire to shine, and the awfulness of looking as if you are wearing panstick, but it works best if you are matt in some areas (the places that might go shiny naturally),” she says. “I love the look of strong lips or eyes on a girl with no other make-up, but that requires perfection — and let’s face it, there isn’t much of that walking around.”
I tell her that during a lunch with the head of PR at a huge beauty house who was so impressed by my “amazing unmake-up make-up”, as she put it, that, when I revealed it was courtesy of Becca, insisted on a purchasing dash that afternoon and bought much of the range. I expect Williams to be excited, especially when I mention for whom the PR worked, but she is nonplussed. “Ah yes, I’ve heard things like that before. It’s funny; you’d think there would be no room in this world for more cosmetics, but I’ve not found that to be true. There is this constant hunger, and once people try it, they’re sold.”
She points out, though, that there is “no reason whatsoever” to buy a £100 moisturiser or, indeed, any product if you are not also using a sunscreen (of at least factor 15). “I wish I’d known when I was a teenager what I know now about the ageing of skin and how much protective creams can help, “ she says. “But even using it now has made a difference. There are blotches here and there, but I think I’ve halted them.” Every Becca product meant for use all over the face has a high sun-protection factor, and a separate sunscreen (“not greasy, not chalky”) is on the way.
Williams’s No 2 obsession is with the true shade of skin tones, and how to echo them cosmetically as precisely as possible. Most cosmetics companies have four or five shades of concealer, but right from the start Becca has had 34 concealer palettes and 30 foundation colours. Williams points out that they range from “very pale, for Cate Blanchett”, to “very dark, for Alek Wek”. And she’s not idly throwing out those names — along with Kate Moss, Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow, these women are Becca fans, snapping it up on shoots and rushing to buy it (shock, horror) when they run out.
Williams says that retailers have always given her a hard time for insisting on such a breadth of colour. “They say it’s not the most commercially viable thing to do,” she says. “So many of them still want to buy only the shades they know will sell well — the palest half of the spectrum — but I tell them it’s either all of them or nothing.”
The products are made in Germany — “they’re brilliant but it’s not always that convenient . . . the language difference, the couriering back and forth of samples; sometimes it takes two years to get a product right” — and the packaging is made in Italy, apart from the metal tops, which are applied in Perth. Williams points out that many cosmetics lines that appear to be varied really differ from one another only in their marketing: “the same products get rehashed and repackaged” again and again.
She fled from the monopoly of being stocked by a chain of cosmetics stores because she found that the staff were so obsessed with commission that they had stopped caring about what they were selling, and would freely mismatch products to skin. She mimics their refrain: “Madam, we don’t actually have the powder in stock to match the concealer you should use, but we do have another in stock that is just as good even though it’s really much too dark.” But now I’m free to do my own thing.”
She is fascinatingly frank about products, especially her own. What’s Brazilian Samba, I ask, reading the back of one little brown palette and flipping the lid. “It’s a new multi-purpose gloss, but it’s not for everybody. You’d have to have quite dark skin to wear it on the lips.” She is also a funny mix of strict and casual. “Make-up rules? I have tons,” she declares. (Among them, the absolute necessity of mascara).
But she “loves fingers” for the best application, using a brush when necessary afterwards. She and her chief executive, Steven Schapera, share a special (Aussie?) flair for languid pithiness, interrupted now and again with a jot of narrow-eyed zeal. They poached Paul, their shop manager, from Space NK a year ago when they realised that a London opening was looking likely (no matter that they didn’t yet have a location). They are full of ideas for the Becca den ’s potential (Blow-dries! Manicures! Car and nanny-booking! All-night make-up and champagne lock-ins!). The concept of customer service is being taken seriously.
The main floor of the store is no bigger than the size of some kitchens in the area, but there are two more floors below and much hidden space with curtains ready to be swooshed across when necessary. The walls and ceiling are the same melted-chocolate brown as the packaging. It doesn’t feel like a shop, more like a club caught during the day, or somebody’s especially groovy mews house. The one thing Williams insists that it will not be is intimidating. “I don’t know how many women want to sit to have their make-up taken off in public on a stool at a counter. I don’t really understand that,” she says.
NI_MPU('middle');The lighting is as dim as a nightclub’s but, happily for the maintenance of actualité, next to each mirror there are lamps that approximate daylight. In the future looms skincare (“just some essentials”) and maybe some nail polishes, and something to make the skin gleam all over the body — Shimmering Skin Perfector worn à la Kylie — without endangering one’s clothes or sheets (“Isn’t that the most annoying thing! ” says Williams. “You look great, but your bed and dress are wrecked”).
In an industry awash with snake oil, she is a stickler for reality: in the beginning the campaigns were unretouched, though now that they are blown up to be 2 metres high for the shop walls, she concedes that they do need to eliminate “the odd red line in the eyes. But we try to keep it very minimal”.
An early product that gave eyelids a glossy look in the manner of a Mario Testino shoot was recently withdrawn by Williams for being “too sticky”. But, I say, so many make-up artists claim that you can get that look with Vaseline. “Er, have you ever actually tried that?” she asks incredulously. “It slips and it slides, and is absolutely not for real life.”
In its place is Bird of Paradise, a glimmery gloss perfect for lids, cheekbones and lips that definitely doesn’t shift. “I never pay any attention to beauty trends,” says Williams. “I’d rather link it to fashion. I do not go very close at all to what is happening in make-up on the catwalk. Unless, of course, it’s wearable — that’s always the biggest thing.”
Becca, 91a Pelham Street, SW7 (020-7225 2501)
D
