Kayleen Schaefer

Don’t Take Down the Holiday Lights Around Your Eyes

2012-01-10T23:05:26Z

HOLIDAY parties are over, but brilliantly bejeweled and glittering eye makeup has been lingering on, an easy way to alleviate the January blahs.

“Embellished and dramatic makeup just feels right at this moment,” said Rachel Goodwin, a celebrity makeup artist for Chanel. “It’s like a science fiction movie, a Stanley Kubrick thing.”

Or maybe it’s dreams of snow encouraging us to embrace our inner Ziggy Stardusts and experiment with gluing on crystalline rhinestones, crystals and sequins or thickly swiping glittery eye shadow. Read more.

The Cult Of the Cleanse

2011-12-08T23:32:01Z

Matt Bomer had been working 70-hour weeks for months straight and badly needed a break. But instead of hopping on the next plane to the Seychelles, the 34-year-old star of White Collar on the USA Network gave up solid food for three days and put himself on the LOVEdeep Cleanse from Organic Avenue, a regimen of chlorophyll shots, grapefruit juices, and pressed-vegetable drinks. “I thought it would be a nice indulgence for my body to recuperate and reset,” he says. “I don’t know that it’s for everyone.”

Maybe not, but cleansing, which once attracted only anorexics and wheatgrass zealots, is the new national dietary obsession. According to the research firm Mintel International, the number of food and drink products that claim to detoxify the body has grown nearly fourfold since 2003. Most cleanses are liquid fasts (liquids of choice vary from cashew milk to pressed vegetables to the Master Cleanse’s mix of maple syrup, lemon, and cayenne pepper) and typically run from three to five days. Read more.

A Little Confection Behind the Ear

2011-12-08T23:25:25Z

TWENTY years ago, when a roomful of perfumers smelled the sweet scent Thierry Mugler Angel for the first time, most of them were crinkling their noses in disgust.

“They said: ‘What is this thing? It’s not a perfume. It’s a flavor. It’s awful,’ ” said Pierre Aulas, now the olfactive artistic director of Thierry Mugler, who worked for another company at the time but was in the room. “They were all saying, ‘Oh, I’m sure it will be on the market six months.’ ”

Today, Angel, a heavy dose of patchouli with a candy center that conjures an image of Janis Joplin holding a lollipop, is the fifth best-selling scent in the United States, according to the NPD Group, the market research company. Read more.

Service Dept.: Blowout

2012-01-10T23:02:02Z

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Mitchell Rossi, a stylist at Drybar, a new hair salon near Union Square, said to Laurie Cole one recent evening, as he swivelled her toward the mirror to show her his handiwork, “but you look like an un-Botoxed, natural version of Kyle on ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.’”

Cole, a spinning instructor, wasn’t insulted by the comparison. Her long, dark locks had been styled, with a giant curling iron that Rossi called “the big boy,” into loose curls that resmbled Gisele’s. It was a combination of the “Cosmopolitan” and the “Mai Tai,” two of the six looks offered by the salon.

Drybar offers only one service: having someone else wash and dry your hair. Its slogan is “No cuts. No color. Just blowouts.” Read more.

For Shapely Brows, Put Down the Tweezers

2011-09-25T20:01:32Z

“TAKE your tweezers,” Maribeth Madron, a makeup artist and eyebrow specialist in New York, will say to about a quarter of her clients, “and put them in a glass jar and freeze them.”

To women who obsess over and excessively pluck their brows, tough talk is sometimes necessary. Ms. Madron, 39, who charges $85 for a shaping done with tweezers — perhaps setting a new threshold for the service, as Sally Hershberger did before her with haircuts — acts as a coach through the gantlet of overplucking and waxing. When asked if she ever lets clients tweeze on their own between visits, Ms. Madron said, “If they can be trusted, I tell them ‘O.K., but don’t do the top or anywhere near the line.’ ”

“For most people,” she said, “self-shaping is a bad idea.” Read more.

Where Fashion Gazes at Itself

2011-09-14T22:20:05Z

WHEN Rich Tong, the fashion director at Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, learned that the model Coco Rocha had started using it, he e-mailed her to say hello.

She later dropped by Tumblr’s Gramercy Park offices in New York, where Mr. Tong introduced her to Jamie Beck, a fashion photographer with her own Tumblr blog, fromme-toyou.tumblr.com. The two set up a photo shoot. Mr. Tong asked Oscar de la Renta, one of the first luxury fashion brands to have a Tumblr, OscarPRGirl.tumblr.com, to provide the gowns.

The resulting photographs, animated images that Ms. Beck calls “cinemagraphs,” featured an elegant Ms. Rocha in her New York apartment flicking her kohl-lined eyes or letting a balcony breeze tousle her hair. They were posted on Ms. Rocha’s blog, oh-so-coco.tumblr.com, reblogged or “liked” about 40,000 times, and viewed countless times by fashion fans around the world. Read more.

Apple’s Unhappy Hour

2011-09-06T16:43:22Z

The latest iPhone prototype to go missing apparently was last seen in a grimy Mexican restaurant and tequila bar in the city’s Mission District that sells pitchers of margaritas for $25 and features mariachi players most nights of the week.

CNET reported that what was possibly a model of Apple’s newest phone, the iPhone 5, was left at Cava 22 by an Apple employee in late July, sending Apple security rushing to recover it. Cava 22 owner Jose Valle recalled a man calling several times during that period inquiring about a lost iPhone.

“This is definitely the kind of bar where someone would get drunk and forget their s*** at,” said Peter Thompson, 25, who works in retail and was drinking Tecate at Cava 22 Wednesday night. “It happens all of the time. That’s what you come to the Mission for.” Read more.

The Old Ball and Chain

2011-08-02T15:38:24Z

When a convicted murderer escaped from an Oklahoma state prison more than 15 years ago, he took the warden’s wife with him.

Bobbi Parker, 49, the wife of then-prison warden Randy Parker, is standing trial for helping one of her husband’s inmates escape. While the prosecution alleges the two were lovers, the defense is arguing Parker was kidnapped by Randolph Dial, portrayed in court as a manipulative sociopath.

The two were found in April 2005 living under the names Richard and Samantha Deahl in a mobile home in Campti, Texas, more than a decade after they went missing from the Oklahoma State Reformatory in 1994. In what prosecutors allege was a love nest, investigators found condoms and love letters between Parker and Dial. Read more.

Splashy Weddings

2011-07-27T16:03:08Z

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — Richard Baker, 57, and Kenneth Greenleaf, 45, were eating a meal at The Western Door steak house when some fellow diners approached. “Can we ask,” they said, “Are you getting married?”

Baker hesitated, worrying that he might offend residents of this blue-collar town. But he soon found out how wrong he was.

“When I said ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘Congratulations. It’s about time,’ ” Baker said. “People here are more worried about filling the gas tank and the refrigerator than if two people of the same sex can get married. We will come back, for sure.”

Baker and Greenleaf and 45 other same-sex couples married yesterday in a group ceremony on Goat Island, which lies between the U.S. and Canadian falls. Sunday was the first day same-sex couples could marry in the state of New York, following passage of legislation a month earlier. Read more.

Glut The Market

2011-07-03T19:38:28Z

Gordon Gekko may have said “Lunch is for wimps,” but he never ate 244 raw oysters in an hour.

Wall Streeters have famous appetites for wealth and influence — and now some are turning mealtime into a power sport, too. The trend is new and only spottily documented, but high-stakes eating contests are catching on among traders and other employees at hedge funds, banks and investment firms in New York City and beyond.

Participants might try, for example, to choke down 100 Dunkin’ Donut Munchkins, 6 feet of Subway sandwiches or 85 Wendy’s chicken nuggets, for sums large enough to pay their rent.

The finance world calls these feats of stomach Food Eating Challenges, and with the slow pace of financial dealings during the summer months — and plenty of interns around to cajole into the action — FECs are as common as cufflinks. Read more.