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Doreen Bloch [00:00:29]: Hi, I’m Doreen Bloch, Executive Director of the Makeup Museum, and to me, it’s a matter of legacy.
Kelly Kovack [00:00:45]: Every civilization from prehistoric to contemporary times has a beauty culture or dabbled in the application of cosmetics. I’m Kelly Kovac, Founder of BeautyMatter. The value of heritage, history, and legacy is sometimes overlooked or viewed at as a liability. So much of the current hyper-connected beauty landscape is focused on newer, faster, better, that what came before is sometimes tossed aside or dismissed as not relevant. But for others, beauty history is a treasure trove of inspiration just waiting to be discovered. Many of us have passion projects and for Doreen Bloch, the Executive Director of the Makeup Museum, documenting, archiving, sharing, and paying tribute to the thousands of years of beauty history was an idea that she made a reality.
So Doreen, it is first of all so nice to meet you. I don’t think we’ve ever met in person, although I’m very aware of all of the work you’re doing, so we’ll have to fix that sort of on the other side of COVID. But thanks for taking the time to chat, I really appreciate it. I know everyone’s schedules are kind of crazy these days.
Doreen Bloch [00:01:57]: Thank you so much, Kelly. It’s really an honor to be able to chat with you about the backstory of the Makeup Museum.
Kelly Kovack [00:02:05]: Yeah, you know, you’re also the founder and CEO of Poshly. Not that I have to tell you that, but for everyone listening, Doreen is also the founder and CEO of Poshly, which is a beauty data company that you launched almost a date ago. So that in and of itself could probably be its own conversation, but for today, we’re going to focus on your role as the executive director of the makeup museum and sort of the launch of it, which seems to me like it must have been a passion project come to life. So I’m really dying to know the backstory of how the Makeup Museum came to be.
Doreen Bloch [00:02:44]: Yes, it’s been an epic journey so far. Epic also in the sense that unlike a company, where you kind of think about a company journey over maybe ten years, 15 or 20 years, but with a museum, it’s like a hundred years. So we’re really thinking about how do we build the foundation of an organizations that’s going to exceed our lifetimes as founders. So it’s been really epic at the start, but we think of it as such a long journey that we’re going to be walking and transitioning then to future consumers.
Kelly Kovack [00:03:18]: Yeah, how did it all come to be? Was this something that you had envisioned and…you know, it’s kind of on one level, sort of thinking about it, it’s kind of shocking that something doesn’t exist. I know Fragrance House, for example, has the world’s largest collection – which was privately held, the family had the world’s largest collection of perfume bottles. But there isn’t sort of an industry-wide sort of way of archiving all of this.
Doreen Bloch [00:03:48]: Right, and that’s exactly that lightbulb that went off in my mind after having worked in the cosmetics industry for almost a decade and very specifically, to tell you the backstory, I was six months’ post-partum with my sense and driving out of a pediatrician appointment when that’s the lightbulb that went off: Wait a second, why there’s no beauty museum? Why is there not an institution that focuses on the history of cosmetics?
So given that I have worked with so many executives and friends within the space, I started reaching out just to kind of scratch my own curiosity as to whether something like this had ever been done. To your point, I had been – for example, this was in 2017, to the fragrance museum in Paris which was incredible, and yet when I was searching on Google, there wasn’t anything like that done for beauty broadly. So after I spoke with different contacts in the space, the feedback was pretty unanimous: Doreen, you’re an entrepreneur, go do it.
Kelly Kovack [00:04:52]: Don’t you love when people create more work for you?
Doreen Bloch [00:04:56]: Oh yes. That has definitely been the case with Makeup Museum, way more work than I ever expected to do. But I mean, the outcome has just been incredible, more than I ever expected. When we announced that we would be bringing the Makeup Museum to life, this was November of 2019, there was just such global enthusiasm, and at a level that I never could have expected. I mean, multiple editions of Vogue all around the world talking about the excitement of just the prospect of what a museum dedicated to makeup would look like.
There’s a lot of other people to credit in this. My very first call when I was driving out of that pediatrician appointment was to Caitlin Collins who is a long-time friend in the industry. She was the former editor of Makeup.com and she was one of the first people to help me unpack what this could like, such a key contributor to how we were able to build out the makeup museum, how we were able to bring on corporate underwriters to help fund the first exhibition. And then also through the grapevine of the network I connected with Rachel Goodwin, who is one of the most incredible makeup artists in the world. She works with such amazing women: Emma Stone, January Jones, many, many others. And Rachel has just been such a creative force behind the Makeup Museum and helping us unpack, from an artistry perspective, the importance and the legacy of what we’re building. So those are my two co-founders in this venture and just so many other supporters all throughout the journey.
Kelly Kovack [00:06:30]: Yeah, I mean, I can attest to the interest because obviously we felt we had to cover it because it was such a cool story. And the open rates on the articles that we wrote were kind of through the roof. So it was cool to kind of see the interest from the industry for something that is really important for all of us, I think. But you know, the first installation for the museum is Pink Jungle: 1950s Makeup in America. Why did you choose this moment in beauty history as the starting place? I guess intuitively, maybe you would have thought you would start at the beginning. But it’s an interesting – a really interesting choice because it’s very specific.
Doreen Bloch [00:07:11]: Yes. So Kelly, that’s such a great question. We were very methodical about it, actually. As you mentioned, my background is in beauty data, so whenever there is kind of a mammoth question of where should we begin, my instinct is always to turn to the data and to the community. So we reached out to our panel of community members that we were building up and just asked people if there was a museum dedicated to beauty, what would you want to see first? In fact, we even had ideas around doing artist retrospectives, or themes like the history of glitter, right, there’s just so much – there’s literally endless themes that you can explore through the Makeup Museum. The decade approach was the one that resonated most with people for the debut exhibition, and it actually came down to the 1980s or the 1950s.
Kelly Kovack [00:08:07]: Interesting.
Doreen Bloch [00:08:08]: And so then we took it back to our advisory board, including the co-founders, and when we started diving more into the content, we felt that the 1950s was such an important and exciting moment for the beauty industry that almost needed a modern reminder. It felt like the right moment to think back to what things were like 70 years ago in the context of racial injustice, which we never could have imagined how important that topic became, ultimately, in 2020. But we spend a lot of time in the exhibition talking about how women of color were really excluded from the beauty conversation in the 1950s. Yes, of course, there were pockets here and there that were creating products for skin tones that were non-white, but it was very much outside of the mainstream beauty norm. And also because of the level of innovation that was happening in the 1950s. You see, for example, the transition from cake mascara to automatic. That is something, putting essentially what looks like a toothbrush in front of consumers today to show them, “This is what mascara looked like.” It’s quite unfathomable to the modern consumer. So we thought that it was a really great decade to explore and just has such interesting touchpoints and really interesting themes for a modern audience.
Kelly Kovack [00:09:29]: Yeah, and your initial underwriters are also sort of – kind of support that as well, because when I saw Erno Laszlo was one of the brands, I was like, of course. First of all, I think what the team over there has done with reinvigorating that brand is amazing because it is a very special heritage brand and they’ve kind of loved it back into existence. And such cool stories. And really the first doctor brand that was – Dr. Laszlo has innovated things that we now take for granted. Cult products like these quick fixes. So, yeah, it was cool to see the brands you brought together.
Doreen Bloch [00:10:10]: And you alluded to this before, this idea of the corporate archives. There are beauty treasures sitting in corporate archives that brands, in a way, they don’t know what to do with it. It sits there for historical reference for their marketers and product developers to learn from and draw inspiration from, but these items, at least in the states, are never shown to a consumer audience. So to be able to work with Erno Laszlo to bring those items for the first time ever to be shown to the public has just been extraordinary. I mean, to be able to see up close Marilyn Monroe’s bottle of skincare cream that actually says “for stomach” on it because she apparently had an appendix surgery, so he created this tincture and serum directly for her belly, and to be able to see that level of detail is just extraordinary.
Kelly Kovack [00:11:04]: Yeah. Another thing that is, aside from just kind of the huge lift of getting this off of the ground was there was a lot of excitement around the opening that was set for May of last year, but COVID had different plans for you and New York City was shut down. I could only imagine the stress you and your team felt, but it really didn’t feel like you missed a beat. Can you share a little bit about how you were able to keep the launch alive without being able to open the physical space as planned?
Doreen Bloch [00:11:34]: Yeah, so as I mentioned, we had announced the opening in November around Thanksgiving, and we announced that tickets would go on sale March 2020, and we actually did start the ticket sales the first of March and we had just an incredible response for four days, and then everything shut down. And with the team at the time, there is a tremendous amount of complexity. We had already signed sponsorship commitments for a six-month exhibition, already had the landlord and lease set up. And I have to say, shout out to TF Cornerstone because they were fantastic with us to keep this dream alive. If they had been, as a landlord, particular about the lease, we never could have opened. But they really were so generous with us to extend the timing of the lease until we were able to open, until New York City and State gave the okay. It was really painful in those first few weeks, but all of that in stride in the sense that our team is healthy, we were going to be financially okay. And so I think for us, it’s interesting because Rachel, Caitlin and myself are all moms, we’re very cognizant of the fact that there were bigger issues in the world. And so it was very important for us to just put everything in its right priority, that the Makeup Museum again, it’s not about one year or even five years or ten years, it’s about a much longer journey, and so what’s a few months in the grand scheme of things? And so the first thing that we did in those early weeks was say, how can we be a source of joy and inspiration at a time that is so difficult for people and do something that is really honoring our mission around makeup education? And so we started a campaign called Generations of Beauty that was also so lovely and we got such an incredible global response as well, where we encouraged people to speak with their older family members and loved ones or friends, people who had been in their 20s or their teens in the 1950s, so still kind of exploring the Pink Jungle theme, and we got such amazing, ultimately kind of anthropological information and insight back. We got audio and photos and videos of people talking with their older loved ones about makeup in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and it was just so special to hear those stories from people and again to see how different it was back then, and in some ways still the same, but just to hear that women would treasure one lipstick and use the entire tube of lipstick. These types of things were just so insightful.
Kelly Kovack [00:14:17]: Yeah, no, I can – my grandmother not only had one tube of lipstick, but it also doubled as blush because she would put it on her lips, blot it on a tissue, and then rub it on her cheeks, always the same color red as long as I can remember.
Doreen Bloch [00:14:30]: Oh, I love it. And another funny anecdote that I just loved was that – Caitlin’s grandmother actually shared this story, that she saw hairspray for the first time on her wedding day and it was so expensive that her sister said, “Just use a little bit.”
Kelly Kovack [00:14:48]: Aw. So beyond opening the museum, there were other – and I had forgotten about the initiative you actually just spoke of, but beyond that, there were two other big initiatives that I think are independently important in their own right, and I’d love to talk about the undertaking of the digital preservation of Kevin Aucoin’s journals, which I have to say, I think my jaw actually dropped when I saw those images. How did that project come together? They are so special.
Doreen Bloch [00:15:18]: They really are. You’re going to make me cry again. It just is so deeply emotive for I think all of us on the team because it was just such an honor to be able to participate in the preservation of Kevin’s personal journals. So in a sense, generations of beauty helped give us the confidence that there’s more that we need to be doing around the history of beauty beyond staging exhibitions. As with any museum, there is an incredible amount of preservation and restoration work that happens behind the scenes that people who go to the MET, for the example, are not seeing day-to-day, but it’s such an important part of a historical institution. And so I can’t even recall how this came together, but through Rachel and her connections in the makeup artistry space, at some point we all got looped in on an email thread together with Kevin’s amazing family, who of course is incredibly passionate about preserving his legacy and just how much he did for makeup artists to really bring them out from behind the chair, behind the makeup trailer, or from inside the makeup trailer, and really put them as artists in the forefront of makeup and makeup history as a conversation and as a cultural theme. And so I was watching the documentary about Kevin, and in the documentary they referenced personal journals, and they didn’t show too much of it, but kind of knowing that these journals were in existence, it prompted my asking, where were these journals? Do you need any help preserving them? Have they been digitized? Because my main fear, especially I live in California now, I spent many years in New York but I’m now in California, and with wildfires, you know, it’s definitely top of mind for us, making sure that paperwork has a digital backup. And so the family said that they had not digitized it, they weren’t even sure where to begin, so we said, we will help you with this. This was during COVID time obviously, so the logistics of putting this together were quite complex. If it was not during a pandemic, we would have had the journals shipped securely to New York to be photographed page by page, but instead we worked with a photographer in the Baton Rouge area to drive to the family’s home to pick up the journals to bring it to a local studio to photograph page by page. This ended up creating our digital archive that has 1,600 photographs. We are still in the process of making all of the notes and archiving it. There’s of course a lot of personal information, there’s poems, there’s gorgeous artistry that Kevin hand drew, or he would use stickers from his travels, personal photos and Polaroids. It is such an extensive collection, so we’re also working with different family members and loved ones to really construct a narrative of these journals. And there’s actually still two or three journals that are missing, so we hope to be able to track those down some day and be able to add those to the digital archive as well.
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During this process, what was your favorite thing that you uncovered or the biggest surprise? Or can’t you share because we have to wait for, you know, a book or an exhibition?
Doreen Bloch [00:19:35]: No, I would love to share! I mean, to me – and by the way, the Makeup Museum mobile app, we did a big photo dump of images, but we still are doing more. As I mentioned, there are some personal details that need to be kind of redacted for people’s privacy, but we’ll continue to release more images within the mobile app. One of the things that really struck a chord for me personally was just seeing Kevin’s activism. I mean, on the back of his journals, for example, he has stickers about vegan beauty and anti-animal cruelty; this is from the 1980s. I think today, obviously there’s been a huge wave. I don’t have to tell you, Kelly, about clean beauty, green beauty, blue beauty, like all of these things that are now in the beauty consumer’s consciousness, but at the time, it just felt like he was such an early not only adopter, but just passionate activist for these types of things. I mean, he has, for example, a newspaper clipping about animal testing in the beauty industry from the 1980s. So it’s just – that was really astounding to me.
Kelly Kovack [00:20:44]: And are you going to be doing more of this archival work? I would imagine the answer is yes.
Doreen Bloch [00:20:50]: Yes, definitely. So right now, the Pink Jungle exhibition is going to close in February, and because of all of the uncertainty, and you know, New York hasn’t quite recovered really at all, from a tourism perspective, at least. I haven’t been back in a few months, but it’s really hard still right now in New York and across the states. So we hope to see whether we can stage an exhibition at the end of 2021, certainly I expect we’ll be back in 2022 with the new exhibition. And we don’t know what that will be yet, but in the meantime, we’re very busy with doing more archiving and preservation work. I think between working with Erno Laszlo, and we have actually supported them with filling out some gaps in their archives. We now are talking with other brands that we’ll announce in time that we’ll support with our archival work as well.
Kelly Kovack [00:21:41]: That’s very cool. The most recent announcement was the publication of a book called “Beauty Stories From Around the World” in collaboration with L’Oréal that explores overlooked beauty narratives globally, ranging from ancient to modern practices, and the release of the book is obviously very timely. But I think I read that you intend this to be a series and this was just kind of book one.
Doreen Bloch [00:22:06]: Yes. We have so many themes that came up through our research and through our collaboration, again, with a global network. The thing that I am most proud of with Beauty Stories is that the Makeup Museum has become a conduit for so many people to tell their stories, and I think that started with generations of beauty and being able to help tell Kevin’s story through his journals. And now with Beauty Stories, where we have over a hundred images in the book from 30+ countries and the essays that are part of the book, for this first book, and I will definitely be expanding it over time to be serialized, so this is just volume one. We have writers from Tunisia, Lebanon, Brazil, certainly the United States, Japan, I mean the list goes on and on. It has just been incredible to collaborate with people all over the world because something really special happens where you get out of kind of a Euro-centric frame of mind and you just discover so much that you…I’ve been in the beauty industry for ten years. You think you know it all, and you don’t know it all, at all.
Kelly Kovack [00:23:26]: No, you know, it’s true. We’re in the process of working on some market reports, and we’ve done one which was kind of a passion project of mine on Japan, and we always start with the history, the beauty history of an area or a country first, and people always find it really strange, and I’m like no, how can you understand how people think about beauty today if you don’t understand how beauty is engrained culturally through history? It’s always where we start. I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to that. It’s always my favorite part. So I love this book. And I also think the conversations in challenging perceptions of beauty is so important. The images of the book are powerful, and collectively it really makes an impact. What are your hopes for the book in terms of what people do with it, other than it looking great on a bookshelf?
Doreen Bloch [00:24:19]: It does look great on a bookshelf. It’s beautiful. My hope is that it just continues to open people’s minds to the possibilities and the beauty that can be created when we work together across different cultures, different narratives. For example, we have an essay by Kahlil Gorda that covers kohl eyeliner. And obviously eyeliner is one of those things that in a way, we think of to be quite pedestrian today, like everyone wears eyeliner. But then when you look back historically, it has such a religious and spiritual source to it, and so to have someone who is from the Arab world be able to tell that story and to be able to talk about men’s use of eyeliner at the Mosque and how – this is just one of my favorite insights from the book. We couldn’t find any English language sources of this, but apparently in some parts of Africa where the stibnite mineral and stone is just unable to be mined, instead they use the bowels of a certain type of fish to create eyeliner, to create kohl. So, I mean, there’s these type of ingredient stories, tradition stories, that I think are so critical to have in our collective narrative and I’m just so excited for people to see that and for that to stimulate more stories and more exchange.
Kelly Kovack [00:25:50]: No, I agree because I think as an industry, we’re so obsessed with looking forward and what’s next and predicting trends that you know, the fashion industry is always inspired by the past. I think on the wellness side, with traditional, this look to sort of traditional remedies, it happens, but I think collectively, we don’t, as an industry, look back for inspiration as much as say the fashion industry does.
Doreen Bloch [00:26:18]: And I think a great example of that is coming from the Pink Jungle exhibition too, where we had so many industry visitors. We even had some brands that came and did group tours for a socially distanced off-site. And one of the key takeaways from the live walkthrough of the museum is the packaging, and just seeing, for example, “Bird in Hand” by Salvador Dali with Elgin that’s displayed at the museum, the creativity of these compacts that were created that were sustainable, I mean, people would have them for a lifetime. I think that that has been very inspiring for people. So I do think that increasingly, especially now with the Makeup Museum as an institution really evangelizing looking backwards and looking forwards, in some ways, but looking backwards to really understand the history and how we grow from that has been very inspiring for the industry itself.
Kelly Kovack [00:27:13]: If you had to have people take one thing away from the work at the Makeup Museum, what would you want that to be?
Doreen Bloch [00:27:20]: Legacy. To me, it’s all about when you’re developing a new product, what will the legacy of that product be? When you’re developing a new advertising campaign, what will people in 20, 30 years think about that when it’s on display at a museum perhaps? And so I think that when we think about beauty through the lens of the legacies that have been and kind of our reactions to that, and then the legacy that we leave either through the products that we develop or how we use makeup on ourselves, that is such a big part of beauty that doesn’t get talked about as often.
Kelly Kovack [00:27:58]: It’s interesting that you say that because what popped into my mind is having been doing kind of branding in the beauty space for a couple of decades, there was this shift over – we’ll say the last ten years, but it wasn’t quite that much. Brands, when you would get a creative brief from them, they all wanted to create the next iconic brand and you’d get references. I mean, there’s always kind of the Apple reference or Chanel, but iconic brands. And I feel that we kind of fast-tracked in the D-to-C moment of these brands that weren’t really focused on building legacy as much as kind of speed-to-market and disruption. And disruption happens for a moment – it’s a moment in time that either becomes kind of the new normal or it was just disruptive, period. I really think that one of the byproducts of kind of the past year is people are slowing down, and I also think that people have a new respect for the value in traditional branding because traditional branding, in many ways, had an easier time navigating the past year because they knew who they were, they knew who they stood for. So it’s very interesting that you used the word “legacy,” because I feel like, I don’t know, in the past five years, I can’t say that there’s kind of a legacy brand, or a legacy brand in the making that kind of pops into my mind.
Doreen Bloch [00:29:29]: Yeah, I think that’s really astute. Yeah, I mean, there’s a certain care with so many decisions that have to go into creating a brand or creating a product that if it’s not done really with that love and longevity in mind and also, at the end of the day, thinking about what the consumer or the user really needs and values, something will get lost along the way and then you miss that opportunity to create a really iconic brand. So I think it’s almost, perhaps – it might seem counterintuitive, but I think when there’s a really strong focus on legacy and history and what the meaning of this product is, it can actually really generate something that has that longevity than if it doesn’t have that immediate buzz, perhaps, of slapping a different photo on the packaging.
Kelly Kovack [00:30:20]: Yeah. It’s also interesting kind of thinking of the Makeup Museum through sort of the lens of decades, what sort of the last decade would even be.
Doreen Bloch [00:30:32]: Well, and it’s funny because 2010, it doesn’t feel like that long ago, and yet when you look back at some of the trends, I mean, Kardashians, of course. I hope it’s not every podcast that the Kardashians get mentioned, but they probably do. They had a very huge impact on beauty culture, and so I think that will be absolutely fascinating to explore in time. I’m very curious what the ‘20s will be, we’ve had obviously quite a wild ride to start. There’s going to be a lot of stories to tell about yeah, how people turned toward wellness and skincare, certainly. But then also, you know, the eyes. It’s all about the eyes right now.
Kelly Kovack [00:31:09]: Yeah, but you know, I also think when we think of like the last ten years, or the last decade, yes, Kardashians, influencers, social media have all changed our very existence and how we run beauty businesses, but one of the things that I love, and in my opinion, it doesn’t really get as much attention from the beauty industry at large are all of these beauty subcultures that live online. And yeah, some of them are really, really weird, but they’re so beautiful at the same time, it’s just a different kind of beauty. And these people are just as passionate as sort of traditional influencers, but they now can find each other online. And Dazed Beauty does such an amazing job of sort of capturing these groups. I think that is, in some ways, just as important as kind of that Kardashian influencer moment.
Doreen Bloch [00:32:06]: Yeah. Are there any examples that you have top of mind?
Kelly Kovack [00:32:10]: Yeah, so, there’s definitely kind of like the E Girls of TikTok. The interesting thing about kind of E Girls is that it’s very performative for them. They kind of do these makeup looks and they do it for the sake of content creation. They don’t necessarily walk around like that, but some of them do. And then there’s sort of like the modern day interpretation of “club kids,” but they don’t go out and drink the way we used to. If you look deep enough, they exist. Or even the impact of drag culture on the beauty industry, which we kind of take for granted, but now has become really mainstream. So I love all of those narratives as well, that kind of…they’re kind of in the background of the beauty industry, but those people use a lot of makeup and skincare and haircare products. It’s just not mainstream. But now there’s a place for them in this world that’s increasingly diverse. So I think that’s kind of cool, too.
Doreen Bloch [00:33:16]: I agree, and I think it’s also, you know, as a beauty nerd, it’s so neat to be able to see the process because now in a way that – I mean, you think about 1950s, right, just to juxtapose, that no one wanted to be known as wearing makeup. It was like obviously you wore it and you had to wear it, but you didn’t talk about your process. And here, you have people who are in front of the camera totally barefaced and then doing that transformation. So I think the ability to see those transformations is really profound. And we take it for granted right now, I think, because there is so much content. But being able to see that transition is quite different from a beauty historical perspective.
Kelly Kovack [00:33:54]: Yeah. So obviously all this work comes at a cost. So how can people get involved to keep the good work you’re doing going?
Doreen Bloch [00:34:03]: First of all, pre-order or purchase the book, “Beauty Stories From Around the World.” We have it for sale right now on our website, so it’s MakeupMuseum.com. And then once we have the new exhibition, whenever we announce that, please come and stop by and get a ticket. And also for any brand listeners who are tuning in, if you have any interest in archival services, we would love to talk with you, we’d love to work with you. It’s very win-win. We’d love to help you get your archives in order so it can be leveraged for product development and brand exercises and so much more. So those are all great ways to get in touch and to help us continue doing the work that we’re doing.
Kelly Kovack [00:34:43]: Well, I am so excited that we were able to do this. We tried to do it sort of – this is our second season. We launched our first podcast season in March, which means it didn’t really get launched properly, we just kind of threw it out into the world, but we’re nurturing it. We’re doing a retroactive nurturing launch. But we’re bullish, so we went ahead with season two. So we’re happy that we were able to make it work this time.
Doreen Bloch [00:35:08]: Thank you so much, Kelly. I can’t wait for the next time we get to chat and hopefully to see one another in person.
Kelly Kovack [00:35:16]: Yeah, absolutely, and please keep us in the loop on everything you’re doing because it’s definitely important work.
Doreen Bloch [00:35:23]: Thank you so much.
Kelly Kovack [00:25:24]: Thanks, Doreen. For Doreen, it’s a matter of legacy. So much of the beauty industry is laser-focused on newness and looking forward to try to predict the next trend. The work of the Makeup Museum creates a space to slow down, look back, and learn. Focused on exploring the history of beauty and its ongoing impact on society, with a dedication of inspiring all people to learn about and have fun with beauty, the Makeup Museum places an important role in the beauty landscape. Most beauty history books gloss over thousands of years of history between ancient Egypt and the Renaissance with limited attention paid to the important beauty rituals of Black people, indigenous people, and people of color. The Makeup Museum is dedicated to documenting the beauty traditions of all cultures while enabling conversations that challenge the perception of beauty. So in the end, it’s a matter of legacy, and that’s what matters. I’m Kelly Kovac.
Doreen Bloch [00:36:36]: Hi, I’m Doreen. To me, what matters is legacy. In the beauty industry we spend so much time thinking about the future, which products we should be launching next, and the latest, hottest trends, but we often don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where we’ve been and the history and the iconic products of the past. But what’s interesting is that when we look back, we often may be inspired for the future, and so that’s why legacy really is important to me.
Kelly Kovack [00:37:08]: It’s A Matter Of is a production of BeautyMatter LLC. You can find more content and insights on
www.BeautyMatter.com and follow us on social media @BeautyMatterOfficial.
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