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Because this is a story about Lauren Hutton's eponymous makeup line, we'll begin with the question inevitably asked of cosmetics gurus:
If you were marooned on a desert island, what three makeup items would you most want with you?
"If I were on a desert island, I wouldn't be wearing makeup," responds this maverick model-actress-amateur anthropologist in her distinctively husky voice. "When I travel to Africa and places like that, I don't take makeup with me."
So what would she want on that island?
"Books. Pencil and paper. And someone to love," she says. "A man. A beautiful, exotic man."
Hutton launched her makeup and skin-care collection on the Home Shopping Network four years ago. The market was crowded with cosmetics, so why go up against all that competition?
"Because it's what I know very, very, very well," says Hutton, 61. "I'm the only model I know who's had a continuing working history in fashion for 40 years."
Also, because she wanted to target a niche market: mature women like herself, says Hutton, who is talking by cell phone while being chauffeured between appointments in New York.
Her company grew slowly at first, relying on word-of-mouth advertising. But an infomercial launched last year boosted sales to $20 million - a 400 percent increase from 2004, says Doug Cooper, the company's chief operating officer.
The makeup is sold on Hutton's Web site, laurenhutton.com; on Home Shopping Network's site, hsn.com; and in Soft Surroundings' catalog, 1-800-240-7076.
Next year, she plans to go international.
Hutton hadn't given much thought to makeup before she re-launched her modeling career in 1990 - at 46.
"My first pictures were monster pictures," she says. "The makeup was all made for young girls. It had all this glitter and dense pigment that gathers in the wrinkles, making you look like a hag."
So for the next 10 years, she improvised.
"I'd find makeup with the least amount of glitter. I'd smash it up and add talc to thin it out," she says.
Researching the effects of aging on her face "became my grail," she says.
Not that she dreads growing older. "I wouldn't give up a month, much less a year," she says.
And even though she has lived with severe back pain since crashing her motorcycle during a celebrity ride in Nevada in 2000, she's irrepressibly upbeat.
"One has a choice every day to be optimistic or pessimistic. Any fool knows the world is in enormous trouble, but pessimism destroys joy, fun and sensuality," says Hutton, who grew up in Tampa, where she attended the University of South Florida for a year.
Her long career in fashion started at 20, when Hutton, a leggy blond with a gap between her front teeth, headed for New York. Always an individualist, she resisted pressure from her modeling agency to get her teeth "fixed" - just as she now dismisses the idea of cosmetic surgery.
Wrinkles, she says, "are our medals of the passage of life."
After a brief stint as a Playboy bunny and a year working as a house model for Christian Dior, Hutton was discovered by Diana Vreeland, iconic editor of Vogue, and was featured on 25 of the magazine's covers.
Two years later she made her film debut opposite Alan Alda in "Paper Lion." More than a dozen movies followed, including "The Gambler" with James Caan and "American Gigolo" with Richard Gere.
Her refreshingly natural beauty and gap-toothed smile beaming from magazine covers and movie billboards caught the attention of Revlon's top men.
"I say `men' advisedly," says Hutton. "There were no women in the top jobs at Revlon back then."
The term "supermodel" was coined in 1974, when she was offered the first exclusive, million-dollar contract to promote Revlon's Ultima II line.
"Those were great years," says Hutton. "I'd work for two months, then travel for six months to the Amazon, Africa, the East."
Then she turned 40.
"Revlon fired me," she says. "They told me they'd done focus groups. They said women over 40 won't buy makeup.
"I said, `I know you need a young girl, but shouldn't you keep me? I'm a baby boomer. We're different from our mothers.'
"But they just patted me on the back and said, `Go home.'"
She went - for a while.
"I started looking at magazines. The models were all 24, tops. It hurt my feelings," she says.
Six years later, she caused a sensation in the fashion world when she launched her second modeling career, appearing in print and TV ads for J. Crew, Regatta and Burdines (now Macy's).
But her biggest triumph came when Revlon rehired her to promote Eterna 27, a skin-care line for baby boomers.
Models have flaws like anyone else, says Hutton. They've just learned to use makeup to hide the flaws - and enhance their assets.
But when Hutton returned to modeling, makeup tricks didn't work.
"I realized makeup made me look worse - older, artificial, like a painted doll," she says. "In order to work, I had to invent a new kind of makeup."
She studied photographs of herself taken throughout three decades, noting how her color was fading, her hairline receding and her cheeks drooping.
"Everything had moved around. I had to find new places to put makeup," she says.
She worked with chemists and makeup artists to formulate new products and application techniques. To test products, she wore them herself.
"People started commenting," she says. "They'd say, `She looks great, and she doesn't have a stick of makeup on.'"
But she was wearing makeup - sheerer makeup, applied with a lighter touch to her mature face.
"I told myself, `You should market this stuff.' So that's what I did."
Her cosmetics offer "everything I need but can't get anywhere else," she says.
Her best-known item is her Face Disc, a compact containing 11 items - "everything you need for your face except mascara." At HSN, her brushes are "phenomenally popular," says spokesman Brad Bohnert. Another best-seller is the Passport to Africa kit, with colors inspired by the African landscape.
By the time women turn 50, "We don't have time to open a million jars and compacts," says Hutton.
"We know the value of life and time. We don't want to waste it."
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(c) 2006, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
