The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
“Generally speaking, I never talk anecdotally,” Paula Begoun tells me. “People always say ‘Well, what do you think about this?’ I don’t believe anything. I care about what the research says.”
It’s this search for honestly within the beauty industry that has been the driving force behind Paula (the mastermind behind the Paula’s Choice brand)’s entire career. “Truth in Beauty,” is her personal and professional motto, an ethos that rings as true today as it did when Paula first developed a vested interested in skincare.
“The [experience with beauty] that I think was the most formative in my career,” Paula explains, “was that I got my period at age 11 and then, the next day, I had acne. I have suffered and struggled with acne my whole life. Those years of going to dermatologists and going to cosmetics counters to try and find products that worked, to only end up with either my skin worse, or not changed at all, was just hell.”
Paula’s mother, seeing how self conscious her daughter had grown, allowed Paula to start wearing makeup in an attempt to cover up her skin concerns. “I got rather got at it,” she tells me. “I was actually a makeup artist for a while.”
Paula did work as a makeup artist on department store beauty counters (one of the many jobs she worked to support herself through university), until she was unceremoniously fired for the trait that is now, arguably, her most defining characteristic- her honesty. “The sales trainer would say “Sell this astringent and say it closes pores,” and I would say “well if it closed pores, who would have pores?” It didn’t endear me to anyone in the industry,” Paula tells me of some of her earliest frustrations with the beauty world. “That’s really when I started obsessively looking at physiology, chemistry, and biology journals just to understand skin, what worked, and what didn’t. That became my passion- to not have any woman go through what I went through, and to make it so the cosmetics industry stop making bad products, stop lying, stop misleading.”
A career change saw Paula put her passion for facts to good use- as an investigative journalist. “I wasn’t an editorialist,” says of what her time in media taught her. “It helped train me on how to look for facts.”
It was in 1984 that Paula wrote her very first book, ‘Blue Eyeshadow Should Be Illegal’. “It was only 50 pages,” Paula laughs. “At the time I thought ‘I’ve said it all, that’s it, I’m done, nothing more to say.’ But the research about skin, and science in general, regardless of the field, is just enormous.
“There’s nothing, I think, in my first several books that I would say still holds up [today]. The research really exploded over the last 10 years, and what we know about natural ingredients, designer ingredients, what they can do for the skin, what are the pathways… skincare became rocket science. It’s brilliant, it’s complicated, it’s confusing, and it’s exciting and wonderful when it’s done well.”
It was that first publication that saw Paula land a coveted spot on the Oprah Winfrey show, a yearly guest position that Paula credits with much of her early success as a beauty writer and researcher. “When I bought my first house, I called it ‘The House That Oprah Built’.” It was Oprah, too, who gave Paula her first professional moniker. “She just casually said ‘It really is like you’re a cop. You’re the Cosmetics Cop.’ I thought ‘That’s great alliteration, wow. I’m gonna use that!’ And I’ve kept it ever since. It resonated with me, and it still is what I do.”
To this very day, Paula is known as the Cosmetics Cop for her unabashed quest for transparency from big beauty brands- a quest that has, naturally, ruffled some industry feathers. “Over the years I’ve got a handful of silly letters that never really went anywhere, some threats. Mostly, they just ignore me.” Paula explains that the process remains the same, decades later- Paula will publish her research on a product and its claims, the brand will retaliate, Paula will ask for any research they have that is contrary to hers and, more often than not, they retreat. When pressed for an example, Paula tells me ” today, the standard for sunscreen is SPF30 or greater. Back in the day, it was SPF15. Chanel had an SPF8 product, and I said it couldn’t protect from the sun.” When Chanel argued that they weren’t claiming their product had any abilities beyond SPF8 protection, Paula changed her tact. Rather than arguing that a product didn’t live up to its claims, Paula countered that the product was ‘an inadequate sunscreen that did not match the global standards’.
“It’s not that there aren’t good products out there. There are good products. It’s just the prevalence of mediocre, or “not worth the money” products.”
Paula’s 1991 publication, ‘Don’t Go To The Cosmetics Counter Without Me,’ (a title that has since spawned 9 editions) became the catalyst for Beautypaedia, the world’s first objective beauty review platform. “One of the books was 1400 pages,” Paula tells me when asked why she made the move to a digital publication. “They [the books] just got bigger, because the industry got bigger, the research got more complicated and the ingredients got more complicated. That eventually turned into, and is still, Beautypaedia.
“The thing about Beautypaedia that I’m proud of is that we’re still the only website that reviews product based on formulary skin type, skin concern, and relevance to the research. Too often, the information [available elsewhere online] is still wrong, the research has been misinterpreted or they’ve pulled out research that has nothing to do with the reality of the product can do.”
1995 saw the launch of Paula’s eponymous skincare line, Paula’s Choice. “I wasn’t so fancy back in the day,” she tells me. “One of the editions of Don’t Go To The Cosmetics Counter that I had just written was 700 pages, and I wrote that all myself. I didn’t have a research team- it was just me. I thought that the last thing I wanted to do was write another book. I thought ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ My friends, family and readers said ‘You always say this product is good, but too expensive, too this, too that. You don’t want to write any more books, you know science, you work with some of the best cosmetic chemists- make your own line.’ And that’s when I started formulating Paula’s Choice.”
One of the truly unique things about Paula’s Choice, as a company, was Paula’s decision to launch the brand exclusively online. “At the time, you might as well have said they [the products] were on Mars.” The decision, however, wasn’t one made to deliver the brand press or notoriety- it was a need for consistency and truth across brand communications. “When I started, I wasn’t trying to be master or mistress of the universe. I just wanted to sell my products, and when you distribute to thousands of stores how can you know what that salesperson, who might have been selling shoes the week before, knows about skincare? What the internet does, and does to this day, is allows me to marry my products, the research, the content and the articles about why we do what we do. It was the best of both worlds. I could have my products and I could have the information, and I could change quickly. That I turned out to be a big company still shocks me. It was never the intent. I’m still surprised.”
What has kept Paula motivated from the launch of her first 10 products right through to today, hundreds of products later, is the knowledge that she can (and so often does) positively change the way other companies formulate, market and make promises surrounding their products. “I’m a drop in the ocean, but the passion to do it, for me, is the ocean.”
To listen to the full interview with Paula, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify.
