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The Shiseido Woman

Monday, February 2, 2009

The Japanese makeup company Shiseido always had an air of glamour and mystery to me, ever since I was a little girl. I encountered it first when I was probably eight or so, with my friend J (there we are, posing like the self-aware little girls that we were). We were constantly playing dress-up and rifling through the cabinets of her mother’s bathroom. Her mother, a photographer, never wore much makeup or dressed in anything besides black jeans and linen shirts, but she somehow had a decent collection of expensive-looking cosmetics that all looked like they came from somewhere exotic; where women applied face creams from hand-blown glass jars. So there was all of that, and she had a Shiseido lipstick. The sleek tube was black lacquer, and it slid open and closed shut as smoothly and as discreetly as Japanese paper doors. Coupled with the red lipstick inside, this was shockingly and defiantly sexy to me. This was womanhood in all its grown-up and worldly glory. I was transfixed.

Years later, I was entering high school and listening to a fair amount of Tori Amos (and, weirdly, Metallica). I sometimes dub late middle school and early high school my “angsty years,” not because I had any major problems or hated my parents or was unhappy (quite the opposite on all counts), but because I was highly emotional and attuned to what was in my own head and the way events affected me. I kept diaries like crazy. Being a teenager made me feel wildly excited and alive – everything was a turn-on. Tori Amos had a song called Muhammad My Friend, and the song opened like this:

Muhammad my friend
It’s time to tell the world
We both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem
And on that fateful day
When she was crucified
She wore Shiseido Red and we drank tea
By her side

Amos had a very close friendship with the late makeup artist Kevin Aucoin, who did some work with Shiseido. Amos is just an amazing wordsmith and story-teller, and was the only-I-understand-myself-soundtrack to my inner thoughts then. I don’t listen to her all that regularly, possibly because I use the music to transport myself back to those ballsy teenage days and you can’t over-use that sort of trick. But so there it was again: Shiseido. Shiseido Red, sex-bomb, defiant alter-Jesus. Glamorous, all-knowing, and important.