An insider's view of all the brainstorming, bickering, and bitchery that go into those little sticks of color and pans of powder: Business journalist, former beauty editor, and noted scholar on the development of the U.S. beauty industry Mary Lisa Gavenas takes us behind the scenes during the nine months that culminate in the launch of a season's all-important "color stories." In often funny, sometimes poignant chapters, we discover how one shade becomes the "must have," how companies create desire at the counters, and exactly how easy -- and impossible -- it is to start a million-dollar makeup line. Backstage at the runway shows, we're swept into the catty, chaotic work world of makeup mogul Bobbi Brown and supermodel Gisele Bndchen. At Este Lauder headquarters, we see the achingly chic Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer spin societal trends into a lipstick lineup. We watch magazines cheat to make makeup work for layouts, find out how Cindy Crawford got to be worth every penny of her $10 million contract, and make the pilgrimage to Dallas as 35,000 of the Mary Kay faithful assemble for the fabled annual Seminar. Along the way, we also learn about marketing, media, and the manipulation of aesthetics, about the codification of physical beauty, and how this industry revolutionized the role of women in business. Paco Underhill Author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping Every cosmetic purchase involves a moment of reverie, where the woman is transformed from the person she is, to the person she'd like to be. This book is about the industry behind that moment. Welcome to the beauty business, more corrupted than Anna Nicole Smith, more jaded than Jacqueline Susann, and deliciously portrayed by Mary Lisa Gavenas. Ruth P. Rubinstein, Ph.D. Author of Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture There is more to Color Stories than makeup. There are stories about women's complex interactions with other women and surprising observations about how the top cosmetics companies market their products. Gavenas shows us that what a woman wants from make-up can't always be quantified. She's written a good book. . . . I don't know of another book that ties the world together by showing how a product like lipstick is conceptualized, fabricated, packaged, marketed and, finally, sold in suburban malls. --Penelope Green in The Sunday New York Times A former beauty editor herself . . . , Gavenas is a graceful writer and a reliable witness, portraying each stage of the pipeline in terms that are at once absurd and poignant. --Holly Brubach in The New York Times 'T' Magazine After reading this fast-paced book readers may view cosmetics counters much as fast-food consumers felt about Big Macs after reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation . --Joan Hinkemeyer in The Rocky Mountain News A noted scholar on the development of the U.S. beauty industry, Mary Lisa Gavenas has been a beauty editor at Glamour, Mirabella, and InStyle, a columnist at Elle and an academic author. She has been quoted as an expert source in media ranging from The New York Times and U.S. News & World Report to WNYC and BBC-4. Preseason What's in Store Here in Bellevue, eight miles into Seattle's suburbs, the weather is chilly, drizzly, and gray. At the town's immense indoor mall, the big post-holiday clearances are over. Spring sales haven't started yet. Listless salespeople stand around, staring down almost empty aisles. Except in beauty. Blue skies shine out of every picture in the cosmetics department. Hot, happy colors cover the counters. Every counter has a story and every story speaks of sunny days ahead. Customers are all over the place. And salespeople, "beauty advisors," are run off their feet: squirting perfume, doing makeovers, ringing up sale after sale. Any destination, any route -- into the mall, out to the parking garage, up the escalator -- takes you right through cosmetics. Straight into a world where there's always something you can afford. Where one size fits all. Where nobody is stingy with samples and nobody nags if you hang around. Here are thousands of things you can wear. Plus gimmicks like "Plastic Shine" to make your mouth glossy as a magazine cover. One counter's got compacts decorated with the angel of your birthday month -- who knew there was such a thing? Then there's all that other stuff they come up with, like chakra nail polish and bubble bath that smells like cinnamon buns. A woman would have to go almost every day to keep track. Some do. "Anything new?" asks a woman who was here the day before yesterday. The beauty advisors greet her by name and tell her. "This is new!" a connoisseur announces approvingly as she twirls a sparkly wand that wasn't around last week. Others cruise the counters, on their way to somewhere else, wondering "What's new?," keeping tabs on gift-with-purchase deals, looking over the latest. At Lancôme, three women watch the spring makeup video without understanding a word of its Fre