Free Gift with Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup

Everybody loves beauty products. Even if you think you know nothing about them, or even if you think you hate them, you actually know plenty about them and, in fact, have several of them that you love. You have major opinions that lie barely beneath the surface. Women who modestly/moralistically claim to “never use all that beauty stuff” are big Clinique ladies, usually with a healthy helping of Neutrogena. From the beloved beauty editor of Lucky magazine comes a dishy, charming, and insightful memoir of an unlikely career. Combining the personal stories of a quirky tomboy who found herself in the inner circle of the beauty world with priceless makeup tips (Is there really a perfect red lipstick out there for everyone? Which miracle skin potion actually works?), Jean Godfrey-June takes us behind the scenes to a world of glamour, fashion, and celebrity. Godfrey-June’s funny, smart, outsider perspective on beauty has set her apart since she first started writing her popular “Godfrey’s Guide” column for Elle magazine. In Free Gift with Purchase, she invites us into the absurd excess of the offices, closets, and medicine cabinets of beauty editors. From shelves upon shelves of face lotion, conditioner, lipstick, eye cream, wrinkle reducers, and perfume to thoroughly disturbing “acne breakfasts” and “cellulite lunches”; from the lows (a makeover from hell, getting pedicure tips from porn stars) to the highs (the glamour of the fashion shows in Paris, lounging in bed with Tom Ford, a flight on Donald Trump’s private jet, and landing her dream job at Lucky magazine), we see it all. Like a friend sharing the details of her incredibly cool job, Jean lets us in on the lessons she’s learned along the way, about the eternal search for the right haircut and the perfect lip gloss, of course—but more important, about what her job has meant to her and why she loves what she does, blemishes and all.