S i n c l a i r s Vanessa Tan stands in front of the huge screen in our conference room, I’m reminded of just how much we have riding on this new skincare line and just how much faith I have that Vanessa is the right person for the job. First of all, she’s come to us from our archrival, Bellamy, a fellow East Coast legacy beauty house. And if poaching star employees from your greatest nemesis isn’t the greatest feeling in the business world, I don’t know what is. And second of all, she’s the creative visionary who put Bellamy firmly at the forefront of this industry with the LANE brand she’s built for them over the past five years. If Glossier and rhode had a love child, LANE would be it. It’s no exaggeration to say that watching the stellar success of this brand from the industry sidelines has made me sick to my stomach. Like Bellamy, Voss has legacy. It has a timeless, old-money quality that will never truly go out of style. I’m proud of the way in which we’ve retained the loyalty of the older generations while building that of the new. But there’s timeless and there’s hot, and our stable of brands is way too heavy on the former for my peace of mind. The beauty industry is so fucking fickle that it makes fashion look like someone’s stagnant great-aunt. The way these skincare and cosmetics brands go in and out of style is terrifying. You can throw billions of dollars of investment at R&D and packaging and big-name advertising, and twelve months later the preteen market decides you’re yesterday’s news, S ephora moves you to a small shelf at the back of the store, and you’re dead in the water. You need new products coming online as others lose their staying power. You want viral videos and stock shortages and lines outside shops and organic celebrity endorsements and blind hysteria. And if you can achieve that, you can control how to crystallize that success. Spin-off. Sale. The choice is yours. Today’s meeting is a key moment for our strictly embargoed new brand and Vanessa’s creative baby, solène. The multiyear R&D process is behind us, and production is underway. Now is when we firm up the budget for and direction of the brand campaign. It’s when Vanessa presents the results of the endless, tireless hours of work our group-wide marketing and advertising teams have put in to Voss’s most senior executives. My older brother, Seb, is the last of the management team to arrive. As Voss Inc.’s chief financial officer, his attendance is mainly to ensure we exercise financial restraint. He’s here mainly to piss on our party. I stand so we can bro-hug—he’s been working out of Fairwater the past few days so I haven’t seen him—and give Vanessa a nod as we take our seats. “It’s all yours.”
She stands at the front of the room, fully at ease. Our single most expensive hire in recent years, she has the kind of résumé that would give any recruiter a boner: Cornell undergrad, then HBS for grad school, and a career list equally weighted in blue chips and unicorns. She negotiated her equity allocation like a fucking shark, and I have every reason to believe it’s been worth our while to roll over. In a black tailored vest over a white tee and sleek black pants, she’s the picture of understated elegance. Her mouth is a perfect matte red, and not a hair is out of place. I like all this even more than I like her aggressive negotiation tactics because it means she has flawless taste. And this new line will live or die on Vanessa Tan’s taste level. The brand name fills the screen. solène. Sunshine yellow on white space, a weighty, rounded sans serif font, all lowercase, naturally. What it lacks in the correct punctuation, it makes up for in impact. “It’s a vibe” may be one of the most irritating phrases Gen Z has concocted, but in this moment it’s accurate—solène most definitely is a vibe. “I won’t spend much time on this part,” Vanessa says. “You all know the conc ept. Fresh, clean, contemporary, but with gravitas. This isn’t some shitty Insta-brand that’s all about the aesthetic. It’s backed by the pharmaceutical rigor of one of the planet’s largest, most established empires. It’s modern and it’s timeless. It taps into the zeitgeist without being gimmicky. This is a brand that acquires its consumers young and grows with them.” The next slide is a brief reminder of the numbers and timeline: three years of R&D completed at a cost of twenty-eight million dollars. A patent secured for a new active complex we’ve formulated. Nine million in packaging investment. And the next st ep: sixty-five million dollars of global advertising spend for a prestige-tier debut. My brother groans, and I chuckle. Perhaps sensing she shouldn’t spend too long reminding us of how much money we’re sinking into this, Vanessa clicks her remote. A video fills the screen: sunlight over the sea in the late afternoon. The footage has a lovely, old-school movie-like quality that suggests it was probably shot on a stills camera. It looks like the French Riviera. The light in that part of the world has a warmth to it you don’t get anywhere else. “This is the vision we’re selling,” she says over the gentle sound of waves ebbing and seagulls calling. “Authenticity. Skin that looks lit from within. Sunlight, not ring lights. That certain je ne sais quoi that French girls have and every last one of us wants to emulate. But also, new rituals that anchor your day and compound on your skin.” She looks straight at me. “We’ve been through all the casting calls and shot a ton of candidates. The brief, if you remember, was to try for an unknown. This is about finding a face that communicates solène’s vibe so perfectly that you don’t need a word of marketing copy, that doesn’t come with residual links to other brands. And I believe we’ve found exactly what we were looking for. There was one woman that stood out for the entire team, and she actually gave me goosebumps. I honestly feel like she’s the Kate Moss to our Calvin Klein— and she’s even half French. We just saw her last week, but we want to move quickly. Take a look at this.” Seb and I exchange a smirk, not only because this part of the job is not exactly a hardship, but because Vanessa is seriously bigging this up. I’m surprised she’s not being more low-key. I lean back in my chair and cross my arms like I’m settling in for a movie.
This should be good. She cues a new video. Dreamy, aspirational music fills the room, and the word solène appears once again in yellow on white before fading like a firework display. In its place, a close-up of a face fills the screen, and I swear, I turn to ice where I sit. Elyse. I’ve seen her at work, I’ve seen her with a full face of makeup on, and I’ve seen that makeup streaked down her face after I’ve brought her to orgasm, but I have never seen her like this. I dig my fingernails into my bic eps as, on screen, she looks toward the camera and smiles straight at me. Without a scrap of makeup on, she looks luminous. Luminous, and enchanting, and fucking magnetic. The footage is amateur, but it’s in slow motion, and it works. It fucking works. She’s somewhere in Manhattan, in low sunlight, and it might not be St. Tropez, but it lights her up, and in one, horrible instant I know that Vanessa is worth every single penny we’re paying her. Watching Elyse smile and toss her hair and gaze off into the distance, watching her so close up and makeup free, feels like I’m stripping her naked. In this moment, with my brother sitting a yard away from me, my connection with her feels every bit as intense as when I was snorting her cunt the other night like a fucking truffle hound. There’s an extraordinary vulnerability to her, a fragility it’s impossible to look away from, and I latched onto it as soon as I saw her. I was magnetized by it. I just didn’t realize, because I’m what Wolff would call a complete and utter muppet, that everyone would feel it. That everyone would be entranced. That her look, her aura, is what Vanessa would surely call iconic. Vanessa begins to speak over the music. “This is Elyse Ward. She’s a relatively unknown model r epped by Vantage NYC. This footage came from her agency, but I thought it captured her allure well. She’s twenty-six, but her look is very timeless. She’ll appeal to the younger generation, I think—she has the clean-girl thing going on—but she also has this very elevated vibe that will resonate with all ages. I like that she’s a brunette. Those are her own eyelashes—no extensions. Great, full brows. She checks every single box. And just look at her mouth. I mean, way to cue a zillion new lip filler requests. She’ll be incredible for the lip gloss collection. Move aside, Hailey Bieber.” I am indeed looking at Elyse’s mouth. I cannot not look at Elyse’s mouth. Her infernal agent now has her sucking on a Popsicle in profile, and it’s like watching porn. I’m back in that room in Alchemy as she gazed up at me through her eyelashes and worked my dick better than any Popsicle. Under the table, said appendage stirs in appreciation as her full upper lip snags against the snack. I recall achieving the same effect by pressing my index finger against it. The worst thing is, this isn’t even meant to be porno. I’m pretty sure it’s just meant to be hot girl with great skin eats Popsicle while looking natural and aspirational. Unfortunately, everything this woman does looks pornographic to me. I am in capable of surveying her objectively, weighed down as I am with the most salacious memories a man could ever dream of. And the truth is, I feel as much of a voyeur sitting here as I did the first time I trussed her up in that pillory and looked my fill. She has that effect on me.
The home movie comes to an end, thank Christ, and Vanessa clicks her controller, seemingly unaware that I’m on the brink of a major heart attack or panic attack or some kind of attack. “These are the shots we took at the test shoot,” she continues, and Elyse’s face fills the screen once again, looking straight at the camera. Her hair is scraped back in this one, and the part of me that runs a multibilliondollar beauty empire can see that her skin is fucking flawless. It’s dewy and slathered in product, and I wonder why she ever bothers with makeup. “Her skin-mapping results were fantastic, and you can see how great she looks with just a little product.” Vanessa clicks on through the close-ups, and then we’re onto some more fluid shots of Elyse in a white tee against a plain white backdrop. There’s nothing editorial about these images, but her natural beauty shines through. “She’s stunning,” my idiot brother says, and I want to clock him. “Did you say she hasn’t done any big campaigns before?” my chief marketing officer, Audra, asks from my other side. “That’s right,” Vanessa says. “She’s only five-four, so I guess that’s limited her options. She’s mainly done catalogue stuff, some smaller beauty brands, and jewelry. But I’ve gotta say, I believe this is an instance where the portfolio isn’t a reflection of the person. She’s a hidden gem, and she honestly en capsulates everything I want us to communicate for this brand.” She clicks onto another slide, which I assume is Elyse’s official headshot from Vantage. She’s in a plain black shirt, hair tied back, and looks young and ethereal and perfect. “Thoughts?” Her voice carries all the certainty that this is a mere formality, that she’s hit this particular ball out of the park. She absolutely has. And I absolutely cannot sign off on this campaign. I’ve known it from the moment she put Elyse’s face up there on that screen. I lean forward and place my hands on the table. “She’s very pretty,” I say, making what feels like a herculean effort to ke ep my voice level at a time when I feel low-key hysterical, “but I think we can do better.” My brother blows out an amused breath. Everyone else at the table turns and stares. And Vanessa puts down the remote so she can stand and plant her hands on the table. “I beg your pardon?” she says in the kind of tone she might use if I suggested we should move to an all-male workforce. I shrug, feigning a nonchalance I don’t feel. “You heard me. She’s meh. A little too commercial.” I know that word will land with Vanessa, and I mean it to. I mean it to detonate. We all want commercial as an end point, but we need a model to have a vaguely editorial look, not a commercial one. Not too edgy, but not too bland. They need to look as if they’re capable of giving us arty Vogue shots rather than modeling bras for fucking Sears. Elyse is not too commercial. She is lovelier than I could ever articulate, and she is so fucking perfect for this campaign that I could we ep. Hers is a face in a million. The problem is that Vanessa knows that, and that the whole world will know that if this thing airs, and then Elyse will be public property. Every brand under the sun will clamor for her next gig, her career will go stratospheric... and I will have no leverage left, financial
or otherwise. She won’t be mine to coax, to mold, to pay. I’ve just found her, and I pulled off the mother of all proposals to secure her, and she and I are perfect together behind closed doors. We’re electric. And fucking Vanessa waltzes in here and, out of all the thousands of goddamn models in New York, tries to persuade me to share Elyse with the world? I don’t fucking think so. I found her first. “I strongly disagree,” Vanessa says. “The consumer research we’ve done backs me up. Every demographic responded to her—every single age group overall chose hers as their favorite face for the brand over ten other faces.” I’m starting to sweat. Of course they did. Of course they were dazzled by her. “She has a nice, girl-next-door vibe,” I say. “That’s it. She’s honestly generic. She’s not memorable.” Lies, all lies. She is impossible to forget. She is inimitable. Vanessa actually gasps, as if what I’ve said is sacrilege, and quite rightly. “With respect, Sinclair, no one could call that face generic. She’s accessible, yes, but that’s different.” She straightens up and folds her arms. “I disagree,” I lie. “I think she has a very special look,” Seb says, and I throw him a look of disgust that I don’t need to fake. Just because he succumbed to Mom’s pressure and married a well-bred socialite with a stick up her ass, doesn’t mean he needs to drool all over what’s mine. “Like you’d know,” I say. “Stick to the numbers, why don’t you?” “I agree with Vanessa and Seb,” Audra chimes in. “She’s a beautiful young woman with an iconic look. Why you’re quite so opposed to her, I don’t understand.” “It’s a gut thing,” I insist as my stomach drops. Of course someone had to go and drop the iconic bomb. “She’s fine, but she’s not the best we can do. I’d like you to go back to the drawing board.” “Sinclair.” Vanessa’s voice is quiet and deadly. I suspect she’s seriously considering giving me a spontaneous tracheotomy with the heel of her very high pump. “This meeting is a courtesy. This is my project, and it’s precisely why you hired me. I make the call on who we cast, not you.” I’m backed into a corner. I cannot let this happen. I cannot let Elyse slip through my fingers. My only option is to double down here. Sure, I feel vaguely shitty that I’m d epriving her of this opportunity, but I’ll make it up to her. I’ll pay her so much money to ke ep sucking my dick that she won’t miss this win at all. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but that’s not how it works around here. As CEO of the company, I get ultimate sign-off. And I say I’m not authorizing you to spend sixty-five million on a campaign around that girl. Find me someone else. Do you understand?” She’s visibly trembling with rage. “You promised me full autonomy. Solène is my brand to run. Why the fuck would you bother to poach me when you’re going to overrule me? I swear to you, I know better than you when it comes to positioning this brand. I’ve served you up a once-in-ageneration face, and you’re determined to screw it up—and you haven’t given me a single valid reason as to why. Generic—bullshit. She’s incredible, and you know it.”
I stand and slam my hands so hard on the table that Audra jumps. Apparently, Vanessa doesn’t know whom she’s dealing with. If a member of the Voss family wants something killed, it gets killed. If we want something buried, it gets buried. This is the way it’s been for generations, and that means Ms. Tan is way out of her league here. “That’s enough. I don’t need to justify myself to you or anyone else. You don’t like the hierarchy, then tough shit. Deal with it or walk. This girl won’t cut it. I want five more faces within a week. We’re done here.” With that, I stalk out of the meeting room, banging the door so hard behind me that it rattles in its frame. Vanessa isn’t the only one shaking with the intensity of their emotions. Extreme stress calls for extreme measures. I’m going to go back to my office, lock the door behind me, drink as many fingers of scotch as it fucking takes, and bang one out to that image of Elyse sucking on that goddamn Popsicle.