We’ve had ‘fast food’. Get ready for ‘fast beauty’. Beauty Bible was in New York recently, where any I-want-it-now beauty-hound can have her heart’s Clinique desires filled – in a New York minute. For instance: give your order to one of the assistants wearing a Madonna-style microphone, and your products will be in your hands within 60 seconds. (It’s a promise.) Use one of these ‘browsing baskets’, meanwhile (seen here with lovely Lynne Green, who heads Clinique worldwide), and the consultants will just plain leave you alone. (And don’t we all wish for that sometime…?)
Clinique’s old-style ‘abacus’ is still around – but the technology’s been eclipsed with this real computer, which gives you a skincare prescription print-out. But most of all, we like the ‘Foundation bar’: foolproof display of shades, textures, coverage – all there, for simple at-a-glance selection. (Find something similar at Selfridges’ gleamingly gorgeous new Clinique counter, on this side of the pond. No walkie-talkies, though. Guess we’re still just too l-a-i-d b-a-c-k, compared to the average Manhattanite…
