Bobbi Brown Says These Makeup Trends Look Terrible in Real Life
The Jones Road founder breaks down the makeup techniques she thinks we’re getting wrong and what she’s learned about beauty and aging.
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When Melissa Magsaysay asked Bobbi Brown to name one beauty trend she wishes would disappear right now, Brown didn’t hesitate. “Contour.”
She has been giving some version of that answer since the early ‘90s, when the look of the moment was heavy coverage and a face sculpted into something it wasn’t. Brown built Bobbi Brown Cosmetics on the opposite idea, sold it to Estée Lauder, and then launched Jones Road in her 60s on the same philosophy.
On the latest episode of the LA Times Studios podcast Live + Well, Magsaysay sat down with Brown, whose memoir Still Bobbi came out last fall, to ask what the beauty industry finally understands more than 30 years later that it didn’t back then. Brown pointed straight at the business model.
“I think back then certainly makeup brands were trying to sell a lot of products, and I think they were dealing with women’s insecurities,” she said. “Right? Your skin’s the wrong color, your nose is too big. And I realized early on that that didn’t make any sense.”
Her bottom line hasn’t moved. “You can’t change your face,” Brown said. “Like, I can’t contour my face into your face and vice versa.”
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When asked what TikTok has taught people about makeup that is completely wrong, Brown laughed. “A lot.”
Her biggest issue is placement. The viral technique sweeps concealer in a lifted triangle well below the eye, angled up toward the temple, with the promise that it gives the face a lift. Brown isn’t buying it. “Putting concealer on just really low and not going all the way up to the lashes,” she said. “You put concealer where you’re dark.” Concealer, she explained, “lightens dark circles, and it needs to go all the way up to the eyes.”
Magsaysay noted that dragging product that far down tends to flatten the face and take away its natural dimension, and Brown agreed. For her, the whole point of concealer is simpler than any lifting hack. “The secret of looking good is looking wide awake,” she said. “And the right concealer and neutralizer is all the difference.”
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Jones Road just released new concealers and neutralizers, and Brown admits the brand’s own label undersells them a bit. “We’re saying it’s medium coverage. For me, it’s full coverage,” she said. “It covers the dark circles, but it feels like you have nothing on.”
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The other social media technique Brown can’t get behind is the full-face transformation built on thick, sculpted layers of product.
“When I scroll, and I see this total transformation with, like, painted coverage, it looks amazing on social media, but in real life, it would look like cake batter on someone’s face,” she said.
Magsaysay pointed out that those looks do deliver impressive payoff in a before-and-after clip. Brown’s response: “Payoff does not make a flattering texture on people’s skin.”
That gap between the screen and the mirror is bigger now than ever, Magsaysay said, with FaceTune and filters conditioning people to see a face that isn’t quite theirs. Brown traced the problem back further. “What happens when our culture has encouraged people to change their faces?” she asked.
She has personal experience with that pressure. As a kid, Brown didn’t like her nose, and it was her own mother who suggested a nose job. “I just looked at her like something was wrong with her, and I’m like, ‘But Mom, this is my nose.’” She never had it done. “My mission is to tell people, like, appreciate what you have,” she said. “‘Cause it’s a waste of energy not to.”
Her view on tweakments is more nuanced than you’d think. Magsaysay asked what women are doing to their faces that Brown wishes they would stop. “It won’t be popular...but injectables,” she said. She was clear, though, that she isn’t judging anyone’s choices. “My thing is not to tell people not to do it. If you’ve done it and you’re happy, that’s great,” Brown said.
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Brown is a fan of Sofwave, an ultrasound treatment that is FDA-cleared for lifting the brow, under the chin, and the neck. Does it hurt? “It hurts, but... it doesn’t hurt enough to not to do it,” she said. Ulthera, another ultrasound device, was a different story. It “hurts ridiculously so much that I would never even consider doing that again.”
What draws her to these options is that they work with the face she has. She said she’s excited about newer treatments “because it’s not altering and changing your face.”
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Shade matching was a problem Brown ran into early. As a young makeup artist, she’d buy the most expensive foundation she could find, apply it to models, and then see the film the next day. “Oh my God, it’s a different color than their body,” she remembered thinking. Working out undertones, including how many people skew yellow, became the foundation of her first brand.
Her test for finding a match is refreshingly low-tech. “When you try it on the side of your face, not on your hand, side of your face, if it disappears, it’s the right color,” she said. Magsaysay brought up the old line that you marry your foundation and date your lipstick. Brown thinks that’s outdated. “You shouldn’t just have one,” she said, since “as seasons change, so does your skin.” Her alternative: “You can have a foundation wardrobe.”
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She has also held the line on inclusive shades for decades, even when the numbers didn’t back her up. “I never, ever let anyone discontinue any of the products that didn’t sell for women of darker colors,” she said.
At Jones Road, her team worked out ordering quantities with suppliers so the deepest and palest shades stay available without waste. “We don’t sell a lot of them, but I’ll never get rid of them,” Brown said.
And asked which beauty rule women over 40 hear that she completely disagrees with, Brown’s answer was short: “That you need to wear makeup.” She’d also like to clean up the vocabulary around getting older. “There are two words that need to be retired, in our language, and one of them is ‘retire,’ she said. The phrase “of a certain age” doesn’t sit well with her either. “Yes, I’m of a certain age, but I hate when people say that. And I hate when people say, ‘You look really good for your age.’”
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If anything, she sees upside. “The good news about getting older is you just get smarter, because you don’t care as much about the things you used to care about, and that’s really, really freeing.”
In launching Jones Road, she said, “ I was able to bring everything I knew and everything I knew not to do.”
After leaving her first company, she earned a health coaching certification from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and started cleaning up her own diet and home. That’s where the idea of a clean makeup line came from, even though, in her words, “I didn’t know what it meant.” She handed chemists a list of roughly 3,200 ingredients to leave out and waited to see whether the formulas would hold up. “I love a challenge,” she said.
Listen to the full episode of the Live + Well podcast with Bobbi Brown on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
