NOW that Target has come to Manhattan, savvy beauty shoppers no longer have to brave the weekend crowds at the chain’s Atlantic Terminal outpost in Brooklyn to score exclusive products, like the Boots No. 7 skin-care line. They can just take the No. 6 train to Harlem.
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Deidre Schoo for The New York Times
Sonia Kashuk brushes.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Boots No. 7.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The Pixi line.
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Also not in stock were Jemma Kid items, above.
Target’s fashion collaborations with designers like Mossimo and (formerly) with Isaac Mizrahi have made a bigger impression than its beauty collaborations. But the store’s beauty exclusives do inspire feverish enthusiasm among women who want designer makeup and skin care at prices that don’t hit Sephora highs. Like the chic bargain hunters who shop at Ulta, they want to stay on trend and gorgeous without breaking the bank.
And Target is the only American store that sells products from Boots, the British pharmacy, including its cult favorite, the No. 7 serums that aim to soften unsightly lines. This comes as a big relief to transplants like Pam Spellman of Marietta, Ga., who wrote recently on Facebook: “As an ex-Brit I love that I can now buy my fave No. 7 over here instead of having family members send it to me … Have used it since I was 15 years old and I’m now 66!!”
I, too, fell for Boots, back in the carefree 1990s when I was living in England and could drink pints nightly without gaining an ounce. The face creams and masks fit my graduate-school budget, and the minimalist packaging had a certain charm. Buying Boots never made me feel as if I were slumming.
Boots came to the United States through the Target chain in 2007. And business has been brisk: in July 2009, for example, a $22.99 bottle of No. 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum was sold nationwide every eight seconds, according to the company.
This month, the likelihood of a satisfying haul of Boots No. 7 as well as Target’s solid roster of beauty exclusives is worth a visit to the Harlem store, especially since your college-bound teenager’s dormitory room isn’t going to outfit itself. From Times Square, it took 35 minutes to get to 517 East 117th Street with one train change.
Target now has nine stores in New York City (who knew?), as well as beloved staples like Sonia Kashuk’s inexpensive makeup brushes. Their growing roster of limited-edition products also keep shoppers coming back. From Remington, exclusively for Target, there are flat irons and hair dryers available now in girlish flirty patterns ($19.99). Nicole by OPI has a dozen nail polish hues ($6.99) for Tarzhay (to use the colloquial term), including a dark blue that strikes a modern note when paired with an all-black outfit. Herbal Essences ($2.50), the drugstore staple now promoted by Leighton Meester, enlisted a student from Rhode Island School of Design to gussy-up the bottles of shampoo-conditioner pairs in its Love line for Target.
On my midday trip to Harlem last week, I found those products as well as plenty of trendy bargain-priced cosmetics. I bagged Boots’s High Lights, an illuminating lotion ($12.99 for one ounce) with mica, which supposedly reflects light to disguise fine lines. It was a good way to test the waters before buying a luxury product with mica, like Perricone MD’s No Foundation Foundation, a light-diffusing makeup that is $50 an ounce at Sephora.com.
I also went in search of products to cure a problem that — of late — I have grown accustomed to calling Subway Face. As this summer’s heat and humidity drag on, the symptoms have grown alarmingly widespread on subway platforms: greasy forehead, shiny cheeks and a mask of quiet resolve.
It will not come as a surprise that most blotting papers were sold out last week, not only at the new Harlem Target but also at the older one at Atlantic Terminal. In this heat, trying to mop an oily forehead with blotting papers is a bit like plugging a hole in a dam with a finger. Good luck with that.
One sensible solution is Boots’s instant matte liquid, for $5.99. I applied it to oily trouble spots before my luminous foundation. Voilà, my face no longer looked freakishly slick. Apparently, this anti-shine liquid can be used over makeup, too, making it an ideal on-the-go helper.
I fully expected to find designer makeup collections that are sold at many of Target’s other 1,743 stores, but I was disappointed. In the Harlem store, popular brands like JK Jemma Kidd, Napoleon Perdis’ NP Set and Petra Strand’s Pixi were all conspicuously absent.
Why? According to Katie Heinze, a Target spokeswoman, the company did market research and then tailored the beauty assortment “to best respond to the needs and wants of our guests.” For the same reason, she said by e-mail, the Harlem Target is selling “multicultural collections” like CoverGirl Queen (as in Latifah) and Iman Cosmetics for women of color.
Are there no hip young things in Harlem, be they black, Hispanic or white, who would fall for these designer makeup lines at reasonable prices? I’d argue there are. I’m a Haitian-Canadian, half black and half white, and I find that lip gloss is lip gloss — choosing one is just a matter of finding a hue du jour to go with my medium tone. But for now they’ll have to do what women living in Target-free zones do: buy at Target.com, sight unseen.
Later this month, Target will be stocking four new makeup kits from JK Jemma Kidd, a sister line to the more expensive Jemma Kidd Make Up School. And from what I’ve seen, the kits are all right. One of them is a $35 workhorse called the Backstage Kit, which crams in a startling range of products: four color correctors (yellow tames purplish under-eye circles, for example), a bronzer, blushes, lip glosses and an eye primer, all in a case not too big for a purse, and a must-have for vacation.
“The eye primer is unreal,” Ms. Kidd said in an interview. “It enhances the eye shadow color, so you can get that smoky eye so easy. You need less color with eye primer.”
Next week, the latest offerings from two other exclusive Target lines will hit shelves. One is NP Set, the brainchild of the Australian makeup artist Napoleon Perdis, who is known for his foundations and primers (which are used to prepare skin for makeup). The other is Pixi, which aims to demystify makeup for women ages 30 to 100. Both brands are also available online (at pixibeauty.com and npsetcosmetics.com).
Finish off summer shimmery with either $15 duo pack of Mr. Perdis’s crème highlighters. Use on brow bones to give the illusion of being well rested. NP Set’s $29 anti-aging serum uses rare flowers and a hyssop extract from the Swiss Alps, a stab at keeping the clock turning back naturally. The line’s 98-percent paraben-free lip shines hydrate with shea butter and jojoba seed oil (crucial in this heat) and come in sleek tapered tubes for $15.
Pixi’s $18 pairs of lipstick and lip liner may seem overpriced at first. But any woman who’s been through the trouble of having to match a beloved lip color with a separate liner knows that the convenience of an already matched duo makes the price fair.
A bonus? Knowing that applying dark liner with lighter lipstick is one common faux pas that there’s no need to fret about.
Until last February, CVS stores and cvs.com sold some Boots products, but they no longer have an agreement to do so, according to a CVS spokeswoman.
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