Bobbi Brown, Creative Colossus
The audacious outsider who took on the beauty titans.
Autodidact: Bobbi Brown is a best-selling author of nine books on beauty and wellness.
I’m sure she wouldn’t remember, but we met briefly one day in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, where I lived at the time. The blocks between 34th and 42nd streets on Ninth Avenue were quite different in the mid-Eighties. Legacy delis, diners, Puerto Rican bodegas, ethnic butcher shops and bakeries lined the avenue, with a few red sauce mob hangouts interspersed. Supreme Macaroni, our favorite, sold dried pasta in bins out front and served old-school Italian fare in the comforting red-checkered tablecloth dining room in the rear of the store. Up the street were a couple crammed West African bodegas with barrels of colorful, aromatic spices, exotic fruits, and grains spilling out onto the sidewalk. A few doors down, at a spartan bakery, run by a gruff Italian granny, 60 cents bought a freshly-baked, still-warm loaf of chewy, delicious old world bread that required no accompaniment to savor. Some days, a few years earlier, a loaf would serve as breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
On this day, my girlfriend Catherin and I were approaching the grimy blocks at the ass-end of the Port Authority, that dreary and dystopian bus terminal that sprawls over two blocks from Eighth to Ninth Avenues.
Seemingly out of nowhere appeared a wisp of a girl, future cosmetic dynamo Bobbi Brown, just off the bus from New Jersey. She and Catherin, also a makeup artist, recognized each other from their shared experience on set. Catherin introduced me, and the three of us chatted for a while. Through a brief, random encounter, Bobbi had made an indelible impression. Within five years, her name would emerge all over New York and soon became legend in the fashion world.
Her lightbulb moment was to identify the opening for natural lipstick shades, breaking with the garish bright tones of the excessive ’80s. She conspired with a Kiehl’s chemist and painstakingly arrived at ten unique muted colors that defied convention. The line debuted in 1991 as Bobbi Brown Essentials at Bergdorf Goodman and immediately caused a sensation, selling 100 lipsticks in the first day. She expanded into natural foundations and, by 1995, her little enterprise was acquired by giant Estée Lauder. By 2012, Brown’s cosmetics line represented ten percent of Estée Lauder’s sales (source, Wikipedia). By 2014 there were over thirty Bobbi Brown stores.
From there, she amassed achievements like poker chips, including a $1 million endowment to her alma mater, Boston’s Emerson College (where I serve as an adjunct professor. Coincidence?) As a student, Brown helped forge theatrical makeup as a course of study. Since then, her contributions have allowed the college to build a makeup studio and an eponymously-named gymnasium.
In a 2011 profile, the Boston Globe’s Christopher Muther details her inspiring story up to that point. I’ve long admired Bobbi’s creative genius and business acumen and have casually followed her career trajectory, a resume that now includes hotelier. I’m grateful to have crossed paths with her that morning in long-forsaken Hell’s Kitchen. The world is a better place thanks to her.
—J Heroun
Additional sources: T, The New York Times Style Magazine; JustBobbi.com
