versace.(Donatella Versace)(Interview)

the beauty queen

t takes a lot of products to look natural," says Donatella Versace, raising a finely plucked eyebrow. This may be a common observation, but when Versace uses the words "a lot of products" and "natural" in one sentence, they take on a surreal new meaning. Just look at her Milan bathroom, full to bursting with exclamation points: gold fixtures, tile mosaics of Magritte paintings, slipper chairs covered in python. The tub is encircled with a United Nations of bath gels, shampoos, and scrubs (from Juvena of Paris to Nivea of Norwalk). Display cases hold anti-aging lotions and perfumes from every flower and fruit, as well as a lowly milk carton of Epsom salts. Versace arranges and alphabetizes them all by type and brand in a system that would humble both the Census Bureau and the stockkeepers at Saks. "I'm crazy," she says, in her Fellini-vixen growl. "I'm ridiculous." Beauty addicts are different from you and me. They buy confi-dently, flamboyantly, and in triplicate, without a care about price or storage space. Each new jar or tube holds so much more than glycerin, pigment, and purified water. It's an invitation to a more attractive, smoother, or at least less flawed self. On her trips to New York City, Versace swarms into Zitomer, one of her favorite shops, with her bodyguards, her assistants, and the assistants to assistants forming a beauty SWAT team. Then she clip-clops into Henri Bendel with an entourage of "very good- looking men and women," says Craig Jessup, a makeup artist there. "It's like a fashion show on the spot." Out come the extra-large shopping bags; in go the M.A.C. eye shadows and lip glosses, off to the trunk of the waiting limousine. "You have your customers with three homes," says a Zitomer saleswoman, expounding on her favorite big spenders. "And you have your beauty junkies." Her colleague Roberto Baez widens his perfectly curled eyelashes. "One customer buys eight new brow pencils every three weeks," he says. "I don't know what she does with the stuff. Eat it?" According to cosmetics-counter lore, Cher is also an insatiable shopper. She once snapped up the entire contents of Bendel's Kevyn Aucoin counter. "And she was wearing absolutely no makeup," Jessup says. The same cannot be said for Michael Jackson, as a salesman at Barneys New York discovered last year when the beleaguered performer alleg-edly called "for all his favorite makeup to give to his friends and family," the salesman reports. The tab, as he remembers it, came to about $30,000. Beauty junkies feel a need to be one step ahead of the trends. "They ask me about things that haven't come out yet," says Carlo Geraci, a personal shopper for cosmetics at Barneys New York. "They get crazy with exclusives. And they want it right away." Jessup believes there's "an endorphin rush in seeing the makeup. It must be the same chemical that's released in chocolate or an orgasm." Versace knows about the endorphin-rush business. She places the orders herself ("I don't trust anyone else with that") and rips open the boxes nearly every day. "I do about three packages a day," she says, sounding like another kind of junkie. "I try the products immediately, ...