Beauty Expert Paula Begoun
Q & A With Beauty Expert Paula Begoun
Beauty expert, author and publisher Paula Begoun has performed extensive research on the cosmetics industry; she has just about seen it all — from wrinkle-vanishing claims that don't pan out, to "miracle" pills that fail to deliver what they promise.
Paula has appeared on a number of syndicated television programs and has written two ground-breaking books on the cosmetics industry: Don't Go to the Cosmetic Counter Without Me (in its sixth printing from Beginning Press) and The Beauty Bible (Beginning Press), which is in its second edition. She is also the author of Blue Eye Shadow Should Be Illegal (Beginning Press), and who could disagree with that?
We asked Paula to share some of her findings on a variety of beauty beliefs.
Q: What made you decide to pursue the truth about beauty products?
A: It's an interesting premise to take on the cosmetics industry. It's the notion of giving critical feedback and providing information that the cosmetic companies and the fashion magazines don't have any reason to tell you. I think that there is very little [critical feedback] — whether it's in the dermatology part of it [the industry] or the plastic surgery part of it or the cosmetic part of it — there is very little analytical or critical aspect to it . Dermatologists aren't critical of themselves, and plastic surgeons aren't critical of themselves, and Lord knows the fashion magazines and the cosmetics industry can't be critical of the cosmetics world. So you are inundated by all of this "latest and the greatest" and "oh, look at this and look at that," and then if you stand back and take a look, you end up not seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak.
Q: What is in your background that makes you qualified to write on the subject of cosmetics?
A: Education-wise, I had a science background in college, but I was a makeup artist and an aesthetician for several years and owned my own cosmetic stores. In the late '70s and '80s, my take on the industry was, "If astringents could close pores, we'd have negative pores," and "If wrinkle creams got rid of wrinkles, then we wouldn't have wrinkles," and they [the cosmetic companies] wouldn't have to keep launching them because the last one would have worked.
Then I started doing beauty reports for KIRO-TV and became a reporter and got out of the business of beauty. What I learned as a reporter led me to write a book in 1984 called
Blue Eye Shadow Should Be Illegal (Beginning Press). With the demand from readers and the number of books I sold, I kept writing about the cosmetics industry. I have spent the past 20 years researching the cosmetics industry. Interviewing cosmetic chemists, dermatologists, oncologists and reading journals and studies. So basically I do what a reporter does: find out if this ingredient is good, what is the research that says it is? Are they making it up? Is there research on it? I even take chemistry classes to keep myself up to date. But mostly I accumulate the information from many sources and put it together to form an opinion.
