Clyde’s House of Beauty
I love beauty products. I
do, I do. I love sizing up each product by looking at the packaging and
smelling their unnecessary scents. I love testing them with my fingertips and
rubbing them into my forearm while pretending I feel and see the miraculous
change in my skin. I usually just feel wetter. But who cares? I adore
slathering them on my skin with big sweeping gestures.
I’m sure some of these
products must be snake oil and fairy dust. But they can be very expensive snake
oil and fairy dust, and sometimes they can even be real snake oil. Dianne
Brill’s skin cream has actual snake venom as an ingredient, and it works
marvelously well. I love it. I also love the great Dianne Brill herself, but that’s for another Subject Eye.
My favorite place to
purchase all things beautifying is Clyde’s Chemist (926 Madison Avenue). I
think I became a member of the Whitney Museum
just so I would have an excuse to travel to the Upper East Side*, cross the
street and visit this skin care Mecca. You don’t need a reason to go to
Clyde’s. The reason will present itself as soon as you walk inside.
Clyde’s does function as an
old fashion type of drug store as well. There is a pharmacy where you can
purchase, I don’t know, cotton balls and the like. I didn’t notice the pharmacy
until very recently. It took me 20 years to notice the pharmacy in the back.
I’ve been too preoccupied with the international cornucopia of emollients and
makeup in the front. If you had the luck to be introduced to the Decleor and Carita
lines in Paris, you will become bosom buddies at Clyde’s in NYC.
The women that work at
Clyde’s are seasoned professionals. Be nice to them and they will respond in
kind. You can really talk to them about any of your skin care trials, tribulations
and kerfuffles. They listen and offer expert solutions in a price range you can
afford.
*Note: I have to give myself
a reason to travel to UES. I wish this wasn’t true. I’m absolutely anonymous
uptown and not in a good way. For me to get attention in a store like Gucci,
I’d have to drag a small stage along and perform a Balinese plate dance. It’s
true that I can actually do some of the moves from a Tari Piring (Balinese plate dance), but they ignore me anyway.
Are they intimidated by my dramatic personal style? Or do they make assumptions
because of my melanin-enhanced skin? Sadly, I know it’s the latter.
