Turning Pink (cont.)

How a year with Mary Kay turned a shy writer into a gutsy moneymaker. It wasn't the lipstick.

I’M NOT entirely sure. Maybe it started with curiosity. I grew up in Texas, where Six Degrees of Mary Kay could have been an actual game. This is where Mary Kay Inc. began, and where the direct disciples of Mary Kay Ash live and apply blusher freely. If you weren’t a Mary Kay lady yourself, you knew someone who knew someone
who had a cousin in Mary Kay who would be more than happy to offer you a free facial. I had never gone there before.

And I likely never would have gone there, until journalistic curiosity got the better of me. When I discovered a Mary Kay event about 15 minutes from where I live, I thought, Here’s my chance tofind out what this phenomenon is really all about. I decided to attend.

It turned out to be a full-fledged cosmetics revival, where a Mary Kay celebrity, kind of a cross between Blanche Devereaux and Tammy Faye Bakker, crooned about her successes to a rapt audience. When she signed up three decades ago, she said, she was so broke she could barely write the $100 check to purchase the starter kit. She had 30,000 people under her and had earned $9 million since she first joined the company. It was the perfect rags-to-riches tale. Two-hundred women in attendance progressed from mildly interested to bum-rushing the podium to sign up and become just like this Mary Kay lady. I developed a craving for the Kool-Aid, too. It wasn’t so much the $9 million (though that would be nice). It was the subculture: I never knew selling makeup could be so exciting and uplifting to women. I wanted to know more. I wanted to be more. Could I actually become an independent beauty consultant? In mid-pondering, I met Marti Andersen. I liked her immediately. A petite sexagenarian brunette with a certain sparkle in her eye, she used to be the head of marketing at a medical office. She invited me to her weekly Success Meeting here, at Studio Pink.

Where they’re closing in on me. I try to decide on the spot whether to cheer or to flee. It doesn’t help that the woman to my left is proclaiming her hotness.

“Whoo!”

So long, comfort zone. I swallow, breathe, and—my rhythm is off. So is my stepping. And I think I may have stopped clapping as I struggle to get the words out: “I’m Kate. And I’m hot.” My voice is a clumsy, flat baritone. I can sense their sideways glances. “Because last week I joined Mary Kay.”

“Whoo!”

Exhale. It feels like a baptism of sorts. Now I am truly an independent beauty consultant.

Gulp.

Can I really pull this off?

IT’S EASY to find Studio Pink: The parking lot in a strip mall outside of Las Vegas generally contains at least one bubble-gum pink Cadillac. Feathery pink boas form the main décor of this estrogen-filled studio, arranged on tables and lining the walls along with large cutout letters that spell “I Believe.” Mirrors line the shelves, reflecting pink and white Mary Kay products. These are just the side-dishes to the real meat of the room: On a podium, like a kind of shrine, sits a poster-sized, gold-framed photo of the eternally blonde, ever-smiling prophet of profits.

Mary Kathlyn Wagner was born in Hot Wells, Texas, in 1918. Even as a child Mary Kay was a hard worker, caring for her invalid father while her mother managed a local restaurant. She was married by age 17 and then had three children. When her husband returned from World War II and asked for divorce, she obliged. Now a single mother, she hiked up her skirt and got a job as a saleswoman, selling books door-to-door, and, later, cleaning supplies for a company called Stanley Home Products.

Though Mary Kay was a natural, her employers kept promoting the men and passing her by. She never let it affect her work ethic, but it got to her personally. When she retired after 25 years in sales, she decided to write a book instructing women on how to succeed in the male-dominated work world. She wished that she had worked for a company based on the Golden Rule—the notion of God first, family second, career third. Then she decided that she’d rather create this company than write about it. So she spent her life savings of $5,000, and with the help of her son, Richard, started the company that she had imagined.

Mary Kay knew that women were primarily wives and mothers in 1963, positions that didn’t exactly garner the most appreciation. The enduring philosophy of Mary Kay Inc. is that rewards and recognition will motivate sales.

“Praise people to success,” she would say.

But the emphasis of Mary Kay Inc. has always been about the culture as much as the products. Mary Kay was part motivational speaker, part revivalist, part queen. And it worked. She became a modern-day prophet by speaking in Yoda-like aphorisms and giving women a chance to have a hand in their own business.

“Don’t limit yourself,” she said. “Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.”

She also taught life skills. In the cosmetics biz, appearance is everything. Mary Kay extolled the value of being a “lady.” And to her, that meant wearing skirts, pantyhose, and closetoed shoes. She decried alcohol consumption and gum chewing, and encouraged her beauty consultants to only speak positively and to arrive 10 minutes early for all events. And they should always—always—have their faces on.

“Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” she said. And who’s going to buy makeup from a slob?

Although Mary Kay died in 2001, she lives on in studios pink across the country. That’s where slobs like me learn to be Miracle Makers; the caterpillars turn into butterflies; the fringe girls molt into cheerleaders. I just pray that it happens quickly, because in my first few weeks of meetings I’m still feeling awkward. My skin is pale, my T-zone—the area from the forehead to the nose and chin, shaped like a T—erratic. With my unkempt eyebrows and nails I’m not just a fish out of water; I’m a carp in a flock of doves. I’m hardly wearing any makeup aside from lipstick, whereas the Mary Kay ladies have a halo of pretty around them. Their eyes sparkle, complexions dewy and flawless, their gold and diamonds accentuating the theme. Them? Glamorous. Me? Unruly galumph.

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