This weekend, in the bold throes of a great consignment-find high, I floated into a nearby retailer and made a beeline for the makeup counter. I had two items on my list: The foundation compact that Ines de la Fressange told me to buy (hey, when French women talk about skincare, I listen), and a beautifully adorned tube of moderately sheer red lipstick. Chanel had an outpost at the front of the store, and I plopped myself onto an acrylic stool and smoothly convinced the gracious young woman working the station to give me not one, not two, but three full rounds of foundation color. I then begged her indulgence while I carried her mirror out of the store and into the sunlight to scrutinize each round of color. As I sat through my rounds of face painting, I had loads of time to analyze her set-up. She had an artist’s roll of beautiful brushes laid out beside me that would probably put Picasso to shame. The beauty of Chanel is how much attention the company puts into the details—even the tools are works of art. But beautiful as they were, those brushes desperately needed a good scrubbing, and looked like they would take hours to clean. Fortuitously, I had recently stumbled across a solution to this problem, a problem I didn’t even know existed, much less one I would have previously been able to solve for this extremely fortunate stranger.
That solution I proffered? Saving Face, a company that does the work of cleaning your make-up brushes for you. (You have to love NYC; there is a service for everything.) Launched by former model and beauty blogger Nichole Dossous, Saving Face is born from the Twitter cries of women who want to pamper their cosmetic tools but can’t carve out the time to do so. The brush cleaner soap Nichole uses boasts no dyes, perfumes, parabens or talc; she also maintains that it was used in ancient times to help soothe eczema and psoriasis. That means that customers don’t have to worry about any harsh detergents against their skin, or worse, interfering with that rather expensive, newly acquired Chanel compact.
(Don’t live in the NYC area? Scoop up some brand new brushes here, and be sure to keep an eye out for Saving Face’s soon-to-be launched mail-in program.)
