MULTI-COLOURED POWDER PEARLS WHICH LAUNCHED A CRAZE

IF BEAUTY had a grande dame, a glamorous French nana who turned up at parties in a great dress and smoked Sobranie cigarettes through a Bakelite holder, she would be Guerlain’s Meteorites. These are multi-coloured pastel pearls of face powder designed to be swirled together with a brush then buffed into the skin to brighten and illuminate. Launched in 1987, Meteorites may have looked outwardly like an antiques shop find, but was remarkably ahead of its time. For years, it was one of very few consumer powders designed to give the complexion a radiant, rather than matte, finish, and the first to introduce the concept of powder balls (or ‘pearls’), allowing several different colours or shades to be used simultaneously to give a multi-dimensional look. Meteorites was prohibitively expensive for many, but hugely influential on the mass market. The Body Shop, Boots and Avon soon made bronzer, blusher and face powder in pearls, taking them from inaccessible luxury to full-on beauty craze. Meteorites remained aloof and became a beauty icon with a devoted cult following. Nowadays, illuminating powders are ten-a-penny and I won’t pretend that Meteorites is my own weapon of choice — but I’m not sure I’d have so many to choose from were it not for Guerlain’s trailblazing. The pearls come in a pot not a million miles from a Tiffany lamp, which, when opened, releases the delicious powdery fug of crushed Parma Violet sweets. The whole thing is bulky and wholly impractical for any manner of travel, and should be moored to some Art Nouveau dressing table next to a string of beads and a Dirty Martini. But Guerlain has made some concessions to modernity: there are now different colourways for more skin tones, pressed versions, travel containers and various seasonal limited editions — each of them as unfeasibly pretty as the next.