Style: An Everywoman as Beauty Queen

2009/08/15

An unlikely candidate shakes up the beauty world, writes RUTH LA FERLA

IN her bright orange tube top, denim mini and towering stilettos, Lucretia Williams was doing her best to affect a steely urban chic. But Williams’ composure crumbled when she encountered her idol.

Williams, 21, an Anthropology student at New York’s Hunter College was being ushered to a dais in midtown Manhattan to meet Lauren Luke, a self-styled make-up maven, Internet sensation and fledgling cosmetics entrepreneur.

Luke was to give Williams a computer, first prize in a make-up contest she was presiding over with Sephora, the cosmetics chain.

“I was so excited I wanted to cry,” Williams later recalled.

Meeting Luke, she said, “was like meeting Angelina Jolie”.

Emily Uurba likes Lauren’s approach

Williams is one of millions of fans mesmerised by this Digital Age media star. Not all viewers tuning in to YouTube to watch Luke cheerily layer rainbow-tinted shadow on her eyes or paint a pneumatic pout on her lips view her as an alter-Angelina.

But in their eyes she is an icon — a self-made celebrity they have embraced as their own.

A 27-year-old single mother from South Shields near Newcastle in England, Luke is approachable. She is the kind of open-faced, plain-spoken Englishwoman you might expect to encounter at the butcher shop or corner pub.

With her plump proportions and pretty if nondescript features, she seems an unlikely candidate to shake up the beauty world. And yet it appears she is doing just that.

A former taxi dispatcher, Luke began selling cosmetics for a modest profit on eBay.

“Instead of showing pictures of the actual products I was selling, I would use them on meself,” she said in her deliberate Newcastle twang.

“Then I would take a photo so people could see what they looked like outside of the pot.”

Soon she began posting videos on YouTube that she had taped from her bedroom — without editing out the laundry or dogs lounging in the background.

Now, 20 months into what began as a do-it-yourself experiment, Luke’s videos have logged more than 50 million views and her YouTube channel has 250,000 subscribers in 70 countries — affirming her status, and that of YouTube’s, as a force to be reckoned with.

“Her appeal is that she is the Everywoman,” said Ed Burstell, a former vice-president at Bergdorf Goodman and the buying director for Liberty of London.

Fatine Ezzaoui (left) hopes to meet Lauren Luke

“She connects on an emotional level and her quirky honesty is infectious.”

Her passion and a tendency to share her emotions — “I’ve just had a good cry,” she might tell viewers — have drawn a following large enough to pose a challenge to the multibillion-dollar cosmetics industry, which has long sold products modelled by the world’s most celebrated beauties, their flawless features showcased in costly ad campaigns.

Online tutorials like Luke’s are “not a threat,” argued Linda Wells, the editor of Allure. But they do add another dimension to the way cosmetics are sold, she said. They have also helped encourage a change “in our thinking about what we do as a magazine”.

“We see ourselves as a brand with a print life, a television connection and an online life,” Wells said.

That reassessment is in part a response to steep declines in advertising — ads in the September Allure dropped by close to 28 per cent from last year’s levels.

With so much competition, “it would be naive just to be producing a print magazine,” Wells said.

Luke herself is an advocate for change.

“What the TV and magazines tell you, it’s not normal. For years I’ve been doing what they tell (me) and wondering why I came away feeling inadequate.

“I’m an average-looking girl who can’t wear 10 layers of fake lashes to get that mascara effect.”

Her disenchantment, she added, “made me dig my (heels) in (deeper). We’ve all had enough of lies.”

Until recently Luke had little to sell but her candour. In an industry fixated on “poreless” skin and a goddess-like bone structure, her very ordinariness may be a boon.

“I’m not your typical gorgeous, skinny girl,” she said.

“But people know with me that what they see is what they get.”

Even now, following the debut of By Lauren Luke, her make-up line, and a new book deal, Luke herself remains the real commodity.

Her success has drawn attention to a raft of, well, Luke-alikes. There are dozens on YouTube alone, according to Sadia Harper, a marketing programme specialist for how-to and style videos on YouTube, and they have been enlisted by brands like MAC and Bobbi Brown.

Their growing presence on video sites like eHow, Vimeo, and of course YouTube, which has 100 million unique visits each month in the United States alone, has turned those sites and their homespun stars — people like Amy Powel (www.youtube.com/user/amy04) and Sarah Victor (www.youtube.com/user/sarahvictor?blend>1&ob>4 ) on YouTube — into influential pitch artists. (Luke, for one, says she is not paid to endorse the brands she mentions).

“The emergence of beauty how-to videos on YouTube is a very good indicator of the overall volume of interest that women show towards beauty video content online,” said Marisa Thalberg, the vice-president of global online marketing for the Estée Lauder Companies.

The company has identified beauty as one of the top five categories of video content women search for on the Web.

Such instructional videos stand to gain in popularity, said Burstell of Liberty. “They provide a safe space to practice, fail and laugh at yourself.”

YouTube is increasingly built on instructional content.

“From the end of 2007 to the end of 2008, our view counts for how-to content nearly doubled, and it’s been rising ever since,” Harper said. She added that 10-minute how-to clips on creating smoky eyes are among YouTube’s top attractions.

Tutorials like Luke’s inspire viewer confidence. Their self-styled experts tend to dole out praise and criticism in equal measure, noted Karen Grant, an analyst with the NPD Group, “so viewers feel they are getting an objective point of view.”

Gina Fret is one of those viewers.

“I feel like she isn’t trying to sell anything,” said Fret, 34, who travelled to the new Times Square Sephora from Brooklyn last week to catch a glimpse of Luke. “It’s just her giving advice from what she knows and tried.”

Such enthusiasm has prompted some in the industry to try to cash in on Luke’s success. Sephora, for instance, will market the By Lauren Luke line through an exclusive retail partnership.

The chain has been offering its own online tutorials for more than a year, but its polished experts are no match for Luke and her gritty charms.

“Lauren is bringing something of a new audience to us,” said Alison Slater, Sephora’s vice-president of marketing, “and we’re bringing a new audience to her.”

Luke will continue to demonstrate the line on Panacea81, her YouTube channel.

While the makeup itself is a significant draw, “the bigger connection is with this idea that real people are celebrities, too,” Slater said.

Their lure has not been lost on beauty magazines and cosmetics companies. Seventeen, Glamour and Elle now offer tutorials on YouTube.

L’Oréal’s step-by-step makeup tutorials appear through a link on Luke’s site. And Estée Lauder is stepping up its efforts to develop video content for MAC, Clinique and Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, Thalberg said.

Luke herself remains relentless in her quest for self-improvement.

“I’ve recently started to teach meself how to do foundation properly,” she said.

“I kept on applying and applying until I got it flawless.”

Her fans will doubtless follow. — NYT

Lauren Luke, makeup idol