Letter from the Editor: October 05.

Mouthing Off

I

got my first makeup lesson back in the late 1980s from Bobbi Brown. This was before she was rich and famous, before she had her own line of products, back when people still confused her with the guy who sang My Prerogative.I We sat at a table in her boyfriendis apartment, where she showed me how ?to blow on an eye-shadow brush before skimming it over my lids and how to swirl blush on the apples of my cheeks. I still use those tricks.

Before I left, she pressed a tube of lipstick into my hand as if she were giving ?me an ancient talisman. The plastic case was cracked, the bullet was worn down to a nub, but the fleshy pink shade was as close to perfect as anything Iid ever seen.

I was careful to dip into the lipstick only on special occasions and apply it parsimoniously with a tiny brush. I gave a precious chunk of it to a man who boasted that his company could copy any color in creation. Months later, a box holding three new lipsticks arrived at my office. What a disappointment. The laboratory had added a large dose of frost that gave my beloved color a strange ashen cast.

Iive been searching fairly ...