Every now and then a woman comes across our radar with a point of view that is so refreshingly up front and honest that it’s practically impossible not to sit up and listen. Right now, that woman is Andrea Robinson, a beauty executive with several decades worth of high profile, high powered career behind her and the author of, “Toss the Gloss: Beauty Tips, Tricks and Truths for Women 50+”, a book dedicated to debunking the myths of her industry and helping women feel and look the best their natural selves can be.
From her beginnings as a graduate making coffee at Conde Nast, she spent over a decade as a Beauty Editor, first at Mademoiselle, then Vogue before becoming President of Ralph Lauren fragrances and Tom Ford Beauty alongside several other starring roles. Her newfound mission is to show women her age a way through the minefield that is the beauty industry to a regime that proves as rewarding as it is uplifting – in every sense of the word.
Her book is a very good start. Launched at a party thrown by Ralph Lauren at his Madison Avenue store, its advice focuses on shifting our ambitions from chasing youth to celebrating whom we are with mantras that include, “Love your lines, you’ve earned them.” Robinson wants to restructure our entire approach to beauty. She wants us to throw out all the useless products that clutter up our make up bags, and focus only on the ones that really work: “think of Primer as Spanx for the face!” she shouts out, before proclaiming that, “there are more anti-aging products out there than George Clooney has ex-girlfriends. The problem? Few of them actually deliver.”
And the best part? That beyond this rather liberating point of view, she gives a whole host of real, takeaway tips from diagrams to product recommendations that genuinely could help revamp our regimes. As full of humor as it is candor, this book is part feisty call to action, part celebration of real women with real lives and faces, part rebellion against the one-size-fits-all ideal of perfection, and its approach and opinions make not only for a brilliant read for also for a brilliant fresh start. Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson.
Toss the Gloss is out now and available at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Toss-Gloss-Beauty-Tricks-Truths/dp/1580054900