Sun in a Bottle - Thank You Gucci Westman
Everything you need to know about Westman Atelier's new Sundrops via some gratuitous and not-strictly-relevant-but-possibly-a-nice-hook anecdotes about going backstage, this being fashion week
It’s London Fashion Week. Because I went to a fashion dinner a week or so ago, I actually thought LFW happened then, and not now. I’m not sure how I came to be this person, the one who is lying on the sofa with a sprained ankle wrapped in ice (well, this I do know, don’t carry a sofa while wearing old Birkenstocks over a mossy, sloping driveway) instead of buzzing about backstage, notebook in hand, writing copious notes and capturing little soundbites and interviews on my recorder/phone.
I used to love being backstage at the shows - it was the closest you’d get as a beauty editor to being an actual, proper, reporter. This was the origin of all the good makeup and hair stories for the season ahead, filling out the rest of “the season” with tips, quotes, trends that we could drip feed month after month, issue after issue, until the next lot of shows came along. It was as close to being a frontline reporter as we came. McQueen show this week, who knows, next week CNN’s expert on the ground in Syria. Now, I’m barely aware it’s happening. Oh well.
What I’m truly grateful for though is having the time - back then - to meet all the amazing professionals, the hair and make up artists, the nail artists, the models, who worked so closely with the designers to make a show happen. It felt like the most enormous privilege to have someone like Pat McGrath, (a makeup artist who I’ve known since I was 19 when she used to do my makeup as a model for magazines that neither of us would work for now, and not just because they’re extinct) take you by the hand and say, “Come with me darling, I want you to meet this new model, she’s going to be big…!” (Kendall Jenner). To watch Marian Newman create intricate designs for an Alexander McQueen show. To see hairstylists Eugene Souleiman painstakingly clamp hair clips between hair straighteners to get the requisite indentation in the hair, or Sam McKnight skilfully wrestle with plastic bags to bring to life the boundless creativity of Vivienne Westwood, who had a point she wanted to make about the planet and plastic. Fashion weeks, and we did them in all the four fashion capitals of the world, were fun.
Gradually, going backstage became chaotic and controlled at the same time. An influx of content creators who could deliver instant gratification via their social media channels meant that backstage was so busy that interviews, or time with the experts became too micro-managed by PRs trying to protect their teams and enable them to get the job done while also delivering what the sponsor brands needed in terms of ROI engagement. It lost its organic charm, and the chats you’d have with the likes of makeup artist Tom Pecheux became five minute long “group interviews”. I hate those - I don’t feel special enough and why would I want all my questions and answers to be shared with other journalists’ publications? Sometimes I’d naughtily slip away and then poke around when no one was looking, trying to get little gems for whoever I was reporting for - the books the models were reading, or the candid shots of the artists backstage. And then in the end, I think I just gave up, no one seemed to want backstage stories any more. And here I am, on the sofa with a sprained ankle.
However, all those relationships live on. This week, I was invited to a beautiful dinner at Julie’s in Holland Park, to celebrate the launch of Westman Atelier’s Sun Tone Bronzing Drops. The first time I met the eponymous founder, Gucci Westman was backstage at an Oscar de la Renta show in New York. I remember it because Orlando Pita was doing the hair, and I’d annoyed him by asking a question which he thought was obvious. (In my defence, 99% of the time you’re asking questions that are “obvious” because you want the interviewee to tell you how it’s done, so that the reader gets it from the actual subject, and not from you, but sometimes it does mean you look like an idiot, an occupational hazard. Let me give you an example, “So how do you brush the hair?” See? Makes you look like an idiot. But what if the answer includes, “I spray the brush first with a mist of Elnett, so that as I’m brushing I am smoothing all the tiny, fluffy hairs into place”. You see? ).
After taking a look at the hair backstage, I went over to makeup, where Gucci Westman was welcoming, while also laser-focused on the task in hand. Her makeup was beautiful, natural, yet elevated - she managed to bring out the best in girls who were already very beautiful, with just a touch here, and a dab there. She made it look effortless. De la Renta’s gowns were always so classic, acres of silk, exquisitely tailored, that this wasn’t the time for an extreme makeup look, and Westman stuck to the brief. It was refreshing.
Here we are some 20 years later and her own make up line, Westman Atelier hasn’t deviated from this approach. It’s become a cliche to talk about “enhancing our natural beauty”, but it’s rare to come across a brand where that’s heartfelt past a certain age. It’s very easy to enhance your natural beauty when you’re in your 20s. You can just smile, and the room comes alive. Not so easy to do this when you’re in your 50s. When I interviewed Westman for Vogue recently, she attributed her own profoundly positive stance on getting older in part to having grown up in an ashram, where the emphasis was more on health than on looks. This, plus the years prior to launching her own brand in which she gained confidence-building experience as the creative ambassador for Revlon, meant she no longer feared appearing on social media, bare-faced.
At her dinner this week, she was barely wearing any makeup, and wore jeans and a Chloe beaded jumper. The complete antithesis of the over-blow-dried, over-done, over-dressed look that is meant to make us look younger but somehow has the opposite effect. (Her beauty secrets? From the Vogue piece: “she swears by facials with Pietro Simone and Anastasia Achilleos, red light treatments at Greenwich Point Dermatology in the US, and has a tiny amount of Botox between her eyebrows but otherwise avoids it”).
Later, I took a selfie of me wearing her Sun Drops.
They are designed to be worn all over for “a wash of warmth” or you can pop them wherever you feel the sun would naturally hit. I whacked them on - bish, bash, bosh - all over my face. A little goes a very long way. I’d been gifted a few other Westman Atelier essentials, so in-for-a-penny, as the saying goes, I added a little lip gloss, the mascara, and a very pretty highlighter balm, which I popped under my eyebrows to open up the eye area, as they say, something I notice I’m becoming increasingly inclined to do as the skin on my eyelids seems to grow while my eyes seem to shrink, I’m not quite sure what is going on there.
So what do we think?
Moisturise first, it makes the Sun Drops easier to apply. My skin was definitely a little dry when I applied these.
If your skin tone is uneven, you might want to cover a little first. The Sun Drops are designed to work just as well over foundation as without it. But if you’re used to even coverage, this is not a product designed to deliver that, it’s more about a smattering of sunshine across your face.
It’s a liquid, so for more control, pop the Sun Drops on the back of your hand first before application. The liquid comes out of the tube a little quickly, and a little goes a long way.
I used a Soleil Parfait 3 in Deep Tan - I think I’ll save this for more of a summer look, I would probably be better off with Soleil Parfait 2 in Medium Tan at this time of the year. You’ll see in the photo that it looks absolutely fine, but when I bumped into a neighbour on a Shropshire walk, she did ask me if I’d been away, which could either be interpreted as looking well or overdoing it on the fake tan, I’m not quite sure which. Let’s err on the side of caution.
I loved these as a quick pick me up, and I think they’ll be great on those days when I don’t want to wear too much makeup. The other products I tried alongside them - the mascara, and the highlighter balm - were gorgeous, with beautiful textures and a lightness of touch about them, and what I loved most of all, was feeling I’d created a whole look, effortlessly.
