This year is Allure’s 30th Anniversary, and we’re celebrating by looking back at iconic moments in beauty from the past three decades. You can read more articles like this one here.
Three decades ago, Linda Wells invented beauty journalism. Not long before that, she was writing captions at Vogue. “It was like Mad Libs,” Wells remembered recently, sitting among the creamscape of her Southampton, New York, home, her hair as blonde as candlelight. “‘Here’s a list of advertisers. And here are their products. Now, write some words to go around those things and link it all together.’ It was more like doing a puzzle.”
Wells was hired from Vogue to work at the New York Times, where, among other duties, she covered the beauty industry — which, at the time, was a chrysalis to fashion’s dazzling butterfly. But gradually, Wells saw jewelry brands releasing fragrances, and she wrote about them. She noticed designers beginning to work cosmetics and hairstyling into their shows, and she interviewed them. At the Times, Wells was one of the first paid arbiters for what would become a global industry worth billions; more astutely, she became skilled in observing how humans interact with their mirror images. Where some saw painted lips, Wells paid attention to what they were saying.
In 1990, Wells was asked to edit Condé Nast’s first beauty publication. She chose the name Allure, for reasons she explains during a series of Zoom meetings that took place on either side of the 2020 holiday season. Her magazine exuberantly embraced the controversial pursuit of looking attractive, with neon headlines exclaiming the health benefits of aromatherapy and butter substitutes. It was heavy with product reviews, celebrity interviews, celebrity parody, journalistic or literary reflections on the culture of beauty and aesthetics, journalistic and literary reflections on the culture of beauty and aesthetics, and print ads. For a beauty magazine, it was absolutely cluttered with text. (I like this description of Wells’s Allure from a 2011 Times interview: “The art direction is as messy and scrappy as a gal’s makeup drawer.”) An April 1997 issue featured a story about claiming beauty services on your taxes — Stevie Nicks had just written off $270,000 in cosmetics, hairstyling, wardrobe, and an apparently lavish home office. October 1997 included John Updike ruminating on psoriasis.