Neutrogena has partnered with Self magazine and Jennifer Garner to unveil what the company calls The Roadmap to Healthy Skin, a viral campaign discussing sun safety and skin cancer awareness.
   The Roadmap appears in the May 2008 issue of Self, stressing the importance of self-examination to prevent skin cancer and promote early detection. Self encourages women to download a mole map, located at www.self.com, to track skin changes that could signal cancer.
   An e-card campaign enables women to send e-cards to friends and family to encourage them to perform self-examinations and to visit the dermatologist for an annual full body check. For every five e-cards sent, Neutrogena will make a donation to help support skin cancer research.
   Self.com also has an exclusive video about sun safety featuring Jennifer Garner, and an interactive map highlighting important facts about sun safety across the US.

Some of the most famous women in the world are lending a hand to celebrate Moms this Mother’s Day and also raise awareness about an important women’s health issue affecting thousands of women each year.
   Oprah Winfrey, Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Faith Hill, Jennifer Garner and Olivia Newton-John have signed on by autographing the Pampered Chef limited-edition Pink Kitchen Gloves (the company notes that these contain natural rubber Latex) and Pink Aprons to raise funds for breast cancer education and early detection as part of the company’s Help Whip Cancer initiative.
   From May 1 to 31, 2008, supporters nationwide can log on to www.pamperedchef.com to bid on items signed by more than a dozen famous women, many who are also Moms, including Jane Seymour, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tori Spelling, Meredith Vieira, Melora Hardin, Nancy O’Dell, Samantha Harris and the ladies of The View including Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Auction proceeds will benefit the American Cancer Society.
   According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer among women in the United States and every woman has a chance of developing breast cancer. Thanks to early detection through regular mammograms and effective treatment, the five-year survival rate has improved to an astounding 98 per cent.
   In its ninth year, the Pampered Chef Help Whip Cancer national campaign will offer a collection of limited-edition pink products including Pink Kitchen Gloves, Mini Scoop and Measure and the Pink Kitchen Brush to raise funds in support of breast cancer education and early detection programmes. For each product purchased, the Pampered Chef will contribute US$1 to support the American Cancer Society.

More details are emerging about the Naomi Watts advertisements for Thierry Mugler Angel, from the New York, rather than French, end of the business:

Naomi Watts was the inspired choice for Thierry Mugler, over and above her beauty and her star image. Displaying a modern touch, the actress projects a personality that blends sensuality, voluptuousness and evanescence to evoke the many facets of Angel. A blond fragility, a natural tenderness, an emotional seductiveness …
   Rather appropriately, it was in Los Angeles, city of the angels, and in the Hollywood Center studios, that the commercial was shot, following a scenario by Thierry Mugler and directed by director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls). A Hollywood fairy-tale surrounded by a profusion of Angel stars.
   To immortalize this mythical moment, Thierry Mugler called on photographer Ali Mahdavi to produce the advertising visuals of his Hollywood dream. A worldwide campaign, glamorous and magical, will begin in October 2008.

Chanel has chosen Jean-Pierre Jeunet to direct the next No. 5 advertising film, starring actress Audrey Tautou starring in the lead role.
   Jeunet had directed Tautou already in the César- and BAFTA-winning Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie in English) and Un long dimanche de fiançailles (The Long Engagement). The Chanel advertisement will be the third collaboration between Jeunet and Tautou.
   Tautou, born in the Auvergne region, is best known for Amélie and the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, with Tom Hanks.
   The advertisement will be shown in 2009.
   Chanel is no stranger to artistic commercials. Its 2007 film for its Rouge Allure lipstick was directed by Bettina Rheims and starred Swiss model Julie Ordon.

It’s not that we haven’t kept up with the row over the Miley Cyrus photographs taken by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, which sexualize the teenage star, but I have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to news coverage.
   There are quarters in fashion publishing which would deem these photographs appropriate and artistic, just as Leibovitz claimed, and we ourselves have featured teens in and even on the cover of Lucire, looking probably older than they really are.
   But if a subject comes to me and tells me that she is embarrassed by a series of photographs, and for a cover decision she may well be in the know, then that’s good enough reason for me to have a meeting or a big office poll about it.
   And that’s just what Cyrus, star of the beloved Hannah Montana series, has said of her half-naked bedroom shot.
   In normal circumstances, this matter would be worked out privately between the Cyrus family and Vanity Fair’s publishers.
   Which makes this all rather odd: has the crisis surrounding these images been manufactured? One commenter on a Murdoch Press website seems to think so and, knowing how cover decisions are made, especially those that are potentially controversial, I am seriously tempted to agree.
   Reports suggest that Cyrus’s father, singer Billy Ray Cyrus, was present through most of the shoot.
   What I do know is that the modelling agencies we would work with are protective of their talent and we agree on many aspects of the shoot prior to starting when it involves a young girl—and that means overt sexualization is out.

For once many of the press have taken a moral high ground and that is, at least, pleasing to see, even if I have questions on their consistency. The Fairfax Press noted:

Every artist wants to subvert hypocrisy and artifice. And childhood, after all, is the ultimate artificial construction. It exists only because responsible adults deliberately set out to protect children from predators and situations their young brains are not yet wired to deal with.
   But in an era in which all taboos must be broken, the reigning philosophy is that every truth must be told, every emotion liberated, no matter how destructive, or unreasonable, because there is nothing worse than repression.
   Well—news flash—yes, there are worse things: child neglect, sexual abuse, childhoods cut short, depression, eating disorders, academic failure, violence against women, and all other manifestations of the premature sexualisation and objectification of girls in our culture.

   Interestingly, the op-ed in the Fairfax Press touches on similar subjects to a blog comment that I wrote in discussion with William Shepherd, a marketing expert based in California—one of those smart netizens who reminds me of the days in the 1990s when most people on the ’net were of a certain intellectual level.
   He wrote, on the topic of pornography in Brazil:

However, I find it hard to imagine that Brazil has an issue with porn. They should have a concern with AIDS, the cheap sex and underage labor that Brazil offers to Sex Industry. …
   [W]ill blocking wordpress sites stop white slavery, sexual abuse towards young children, men from going to Brazil to engage in power driven sex events that hurt the fiber of global culture, and humanity? …
   Sex is what it has always been. Yet, the online media has tried to make porn a staple of global culture and economics.

   When I think about these words today, it’s not just the online media, as Vanity Fair and others have shown us.
   I do, after all, see the irony of citing the Murdoch Press when it popularized the page-three girl and sensationalist stories founded in sex.
   At the risk of offending fans of certain TV shows, I responded:

The sex economy, the fixation on sex, are not good things for us to be so focused on, yet I don’t like it being constantly propagated even through prime-time shows such as the old Friends or Desperate Housewives.
   I do not regard myself a prude but you are right: there are more pressing things to be concerned about, and I’m far too busy to find double-entendres in every sitcom appealing.

   While sex is as woven in to Desperate Housewives as it was into Benny Hill, and those watching it at its late hour (past the watershed?) know what to expect, it gets an awful lot of publicity in TV promos with their share of suggestive imagery at other times. OK, it wasn’t the best example of a TV show (which I watched at one point), but the old Friends certainly was. I think it’s difficult to disagree that we have become too obsessed with sex in our society and those early seasons of Friends depended less on characterization and more on innuendo, not often that subtle.
   At the idealistic level there is nothing wrong with this when it comes to showing behaviour between consenting adults—it’s less objectionable than seeing the extreme violence that has now made it on to prime-time television—but we now face the danger of it going further and further into promoting promiscuity among the young. Expand sex’s reach, and you arouse greater curiosity in our youngest citizens at an earlier age. It’s like lowering the drinking age to 18, as had happened in New Zealand: now it’s not 17-year-olds sneaking in three years before they are legal, but 14-year-olds with fake IDs.
   That curiosity around sex has always been there with those who are 11 or 12, as any of you reading this will know, but the signals are telling us that as adults we need to give more guidance, and we need to take a stand against marketing that encourages sex at a time when mentally, young people are not prepared for the consequences.
   And it was interesting to read that I am not alone in my assessment; in fact mine seems ill-educated alongside that of an author who has devoted a book to the subject. Fairfax again:

[Melbourne child psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg] said internet porn, with hardcore sites available to children at a mouseclick, “has completely changed the sexual behaviour of young women, [particularly] the obsession with oral sex.” Young girls, he said, have been encouraged to behave “almost as predators, as if [a boy] is some sort of game animal they want to bag”.
   Again, he blamed parents for creating “a culture of entitlement and indulgence [in which they] are hesitant to set limits around sleep or internet use. Democracy doesn’t work in families. You have to have a benign dictatorship.”
   In a new book, Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau writes that “an incremental but aggressive sexualising of [our] culture … [has created] a status quo in which almost everything seems focused on what’s going on ‘below the waist’.”

   As long as we sit back, tut-tut when the items make the news but fall back on not caring at other times, then we have lost yet another value. Add that to a huge list in the west—and the east—since the end of World War II.
   If certain institutions are being so aggressive as Liebau writes, then adults need to be as aggressive. ‘Benign dictatorship’, in the words of Carr-Gregg, probably describes the families many of us had—and we turned out all right.
   It was a sort-of democracy in my household because my parents involved me in every family-affecting major decision and I earned their trust so I never had a curfew. But that was earned—and I was probably lucky I had a good conscience or spirit guide, or something directing me.
   Not everyone is so fortunate, and in this day and age, it’s not a bad idea to be strongly involved in our children’s lives because that moral compass no longer comes from those cohesive, homogeneous communities of old, nor does it come from the media, at least not regularly or consistently. We, the regular people, are the last and possibly only resort in our respective families.

UK model of the moment, Agyness Deyn, will release a single, according to British media today.
   It will be her first foray into music, in collaboration with New York-based band Five O’Clock Heroes.
   Deyn contributed some vocals to the song, ‘Who’, and will appear in the video.

There are only 8,000 each for him and for her of the Diesel Fuel for Life Special Edition bottles, launched December 2007—and if you search, you may still be able to find some at ‘exclusive sales outlets’. We had to mention it since we think this is the coolest looking bottle for the first part of ’08.

   Meanwhile, photographer Matthew Plummer went along to the Little Brother show in Wellington, New Zealand and took some catwalk shots—we really loved these since they aren’t your ordinary “photographers’ pit” stuff. Some of Matthew’s work will be in the next print edition of Lucire.
   Speaking of the next print edition, Elyse Glickman has an interview with very hip, celeb-favourite LA label Hale Bob—and it was interesting to note that there has been African inspiration there. It’s evident in one of the collection photographs: embellished, raw and stylish. This pic probably won’t run due to space reasons, so here’s a chance to enjoy it now.

    Finally, in terms of happenings for our team, hop over to the beauty pages: our Mari Johnson has been to the Qua Bottle Lounge in downtown Austin, Texas—read about her experiences here.

Click on centre of image to play

World-renowned burlesque performer Dita von Teese and Cointreau, the famous French orange liqueur, hosted a lavish debut party in New York for their first collaborative effort, the Be Cointreauversial Show at the Angel Orensanz Foundation at 172 Norfolk Street.
   Over 500 guests turned out including Jason Lewis, Russell Simmons and Porschla Coleman, Nacho Figueras, Andrew Buckler, Adam Lippes, Liz Goldwyn, Hope Atherton, Tara Subkoff, Dylan Lauren, Catherine Malandrino, Nicole Miller, Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos, Kelly Killoren, Aimée Mullins, Simon Hammerstein, Jill Zarin, Countess Luann de Lesseps, Jazleen, RuPaul, Zaldy, Kai Kühne, Casey Spooner, Susanne Bartsch, Traver Rains, and Richie Rich.
   Party revellers sipped Cointreaupolitans and Cointreau margaritas before being treated to the highlight of the night, the reveal of the Be Cointreauversial Show. Strutting on stage in her crystal-encrusted costume, designed by Catherine D’Lish (made of 350,000 Swarovski crystals and weighing approximately 75 lb) she posed and pranced before plunging into a Martini glass. She dazzled the crowd with a performance that proved to be a dizzying blend of grace, wit and pure femininity. The show ended in a brilliant blaze of violet light as Dita took a sip of the new cocktail, the Cointreau Teese, and winked at the crowd. Waiters then made their way into the crowd with trays of the new violet coloured cocktail.
   The show was conceived by Dita as an evocation of the Cointreau world. Cointreau and its unique ‘French touch’ has thrived for more than 160 years without changing anything, from the shape of its legendary bottle to its delicate and instantly recognizable orange flavour. It was only natural to join the iconic image of Cointreau to the world of Dita von Teese and her carefully crafted character, a blend of retro and modernity mixed in with the ultimate feminine freedom of thought.
   ‘With this performance, I wanted to express the sensual and delicious first sip of a Cointreau cocktail while sparkling with the essence of the Parisian history of the liqueur,’ said von Teese.

Jennifer Lopez at the 2007 Golden Globes wearing a 30 ct yellow diamond Right Hand Ring by Lorraine Schwartz (courtesy Diamond Information Center/J. Walter Thompson).

Jennifer Lopez will star in a reality TV show for TLC in the US, it was announced today.
   Lopez’s show centres around how the actress–singer–entrepreneur juggles her career with motherhood. She will also executive-produce.
   The show will follow her planning the launch of a new fragrance.
   Lopez and her husband Marc Anthony welcomed their twins, Max and Emme, in February.
   It is not Lopez’s first foray into reality TV: she has already appeared on American Idol and MTV’s Dance Life, which she also produced.

How reliable are these readers’ polls? The British edition of Glamour (May 2008) puts Kate Moss at number one for Britain’s best dressed woman, with Agyness Deyn not even making it into the top 50. It’s a switch from earlier polls, which had been putting Moss lower during the last four months.
   Britney Spears was named worst dressed, with Jodie Marsh and Amy Winehouse making it on to the same list.
   Following Moss were Sienna Miller, Scarlett Johansson, Rachel Bilson, Jennifer Aniston, Alexa Chung, Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley and Victoria Beckham.
   Glamour attributed Moss’s success to her Topshop range and her willingness to be experimental with her clothing.
   A month ago, the UK edition of Tatler, owned by the same group as Glamour, put Deyn at number one, and Moss at number two, though the list looks very different.
   Between the two polls, Moss, Chung and Knightley appear.