An Oral History of

11.09.2026, 19:29 allure.com

It was October 1996. The Yankees were about to win the World Series, Bill Clinton was on his way to a decisive reelection victory, and, more consequently at Allure, Chanel’s Vamp was a newcomer on the nail polish scene. It was also the month that we published the very first Allure Best of Beauty awards.

The notion of testing beauty products in order to select winners in each category—and explain why each one was the best—was a radical idea. Most “women’s magazines” didn’t dare declare one product better than its peers. So Best of Beauty filled an information void at a time when dial-up internet was glacially slow (remember this sound?), and social media was just a twinkle in 12-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. When Allure’s October 1996 issue arrived, women tore out pages and immediately began to shop the inaugural list of 234 winners (including Vamp). Soon, unsuspecting brand executives had zero stock left of some winning products to fill store shelves. Allure’s familiar bright red seal would come along later, though; during year one, editor in chief Linda Wells was just hoping this whole awards idea didn’t leave her without a job.

“Because of the initial misgivings about the project, we tiptoed into Best of Beauty, and deliberately didn’t have a party to celebrate it,” says Wells of that first year. “It became something that people anticipated. It became a seal. It became advertising, licensing. It became a Today show segment, but none of that happened at the beginning.”

What did happen? We spoke to the people who were there—those who dragged 70-pound bags of products home to test, those who agonized over every adjective on the page to describe the winners—to probe what they remember about the first-ever Best of Beauty, and the lasting legacy of a project that started as a whisper and went on to transform the beauty industry.

*Throughout this story, we are using titles held at the time the subject is addressed in their comments.

Allure's founding editor in chief, Linda Wells

Linda Wells, founding editor in chief: When you're a beauty editor, you don't live in the real world. You're separate and insulated from the experience of shopping for beauty products. You're also going to events and learning about products from the people who make them, from the doctors who understand them, so you're getting all this information that a consumer doesn't have. And I remember going into a drugstore—I think I had to buy shampoo—and thinking, This is impossible! I don't even know where to start, and I know all these products. Then I walked into a department store to see what the experience was like, and that was also overwhelming. I realized that there was no way for a consumer to sort through it all. And I remembered that when you buy wine, there was a numerical rating system, created by a guy named Robert Parker, and even if you were totally ignorant of wine, you could look at the number and know you were buying something good.

While we couldn’t come up with a numerical system, I thought that maybe, with all the knowledge that we have of products, we could select the best in each category to help readers find the best ones. This was our territory. No other magazine had this kind of expertise because we were a team of beauty editors. We also had a lot of contributors, like [makeup artist] Kevin Aucoin, who we talked to all the time. So I thought, Okay, we're going to figure this out, and we're going to come up with the products that we can recommend as the best products in their field.

I told S.I. Newhouse [Condé Nast’s then chairman and CEO] my idea and he was like, “You can’t do this, you’re committing career suicide.”

But I really, really believed in it, and I knew I had to figure out how to navigate this so it didn’t alienate every other brand [that didn’t win]. We had already been walking on a tightrope at Allure, in the beginning. When we launched [in 1991], we wanted to get to the truth and be able to say, "This product doesn't work that way, this is an impossible claim." We did that and advertisers objected, almost every major brand canceled their advertising, except for Estée Lauder. But S.I. was never afraid of advertisers pulling their ads. Advertisers cancelled their campaigns over and over again in the early years of Allure, and S.I. supported the magazine and me through it all.

Carol Hamilton, vice president of marketing, L’Oréal Paris: When Allure was born—before the awards—I was vice president of marketing for L’Oréal Paris, and what Linda was doing was so controversial. There was a lot of consternation, at least from L’Oréal, like, “How dare you judge our product!” My CEO basically forbade us from advertising there while he gained confidence [in the magazine]. It was very, very difficult, because I wanted to support her and I couldn’t.

Wells: Immediately after the first issue came out, I had to go to various executive conference rooms and get yelled at by CEOs and presidents. And you know what? That was my job. I felt like, "You want to yell at me? You have every right. That's the consequence of me taking a stand. Fortunately, that was the agreement that S.I. Newhouse and I made before I started Allure. He was absolutely fearless in his support of journalism, and Allure and I were the beneficiaries of that.

But in terms of Best of Beauty, his initial concern was this: How would one beauty company feel when we named another company's mascara or lipstick or whatever “the best”? And what gave us the authority to be so definitive? We weren't Consumer Reports or Good Housekeeping, with a lab or a test kitchen full of scientists. We were naming our favorites based on our opinion. And, yes, it was an informed opinion. But it was an opinion nonetheless. Hence, it was subjective. So he was concerned that I was putting Allure and myself at risk.

Wells' editor's letter from from the October 1996 issue.

The awards harkened back to something that we did in early issues of the magazine called “Road Test.” We would try a product in different real-life circumstances and then tell readers if it stung, if it smudged, if it wore off before it was supposed to. Essentially, we tested the claims IRL. After about three or four of those, S.I. and I discussed the pros and cons, and I decided to kill the column. The problem with it was we would declare a product a success or failure based on our road test. There were no controls and no scientific rigor. So, it was subjective but presented as objective. We found it fun, but you can imagine if you were at a beauty company and had worked for years on a product, put it through your own tests, only to have some editors play a game with it and call it a flop.

It was a little bit of a show-off, a gimmick, which was, and is, very different from Best of Beauty, in which we pick the products we love and tested thoroughly. There was no declaration of failure, so big difference. That’s why, in my editor's letter [for the first Best of Beauty], I wrote, "This is our opinion. These are the things we like right now and why we like them right now. These are not the best products of all time, forever and ever, case closed.”

Not that we were casual about what we were choosing. We were really rigorous about testing. Everybody had these charts, and compared one thing to the other. And then we'd meet, and talk, and argue. We'd consult with makeup artists, and hairstylists, and dermatologists, and cosmetic chemists. And then we’d pick our finalists. We put all those products through a great deal of scrutiny in order to be sure that what we were choosing lived up to the designation “best of beauty.” The preparation wasn’t that long, it was maybe three months. Part of that was because, back then, there were fewer products, frankly. [Editor’s note: This year Allure tested 5,568 products, over nine months, to determine our 319 winners; 85 more than the first issue.]

Kristin Perrota started at Allure as an assistant, going on to become the magazine's beauty director and executive editor.

Kristin Perrotta, editorial assistant* (who went on to become beauty director and then executive editor): My first day at Allure was in May 1996, right at the tail end of preparing for Best of Beauty. Linda had brought on an editor behind the scenes to help manage the project, a woman named Candy, and then once I joined, I worked with her. By the time I started, the products [to test] were already there. I'd never seen so many products. This was before Sephora had hit the US, but it would've been like a Sephora had exploded in our offices. There were bags and boxes of products, not only in the beauty closet—where you were always in fear of them caving in on you—but also lined up along the hallways throughout the entire office, in the art department and production, copy, research.

At this point, the other assistants were over it. They were like, "Great, you're here. We're going back to editing and writing and making spa appointments." I knew that I was screwed. There was no way that I was going to be able to continue logging and handing out the products on my own. I told my boss that I’d need to work seven days a week to finish, and even that wasn’t enough. So I started having my then-boyfriend Jeff and some friends come in on the weekends and evenings. We’d have pizza parties and they'd help me bag stuff up for people, because back then it wasn’t only everyone in the office testing, we also had all of our contributors—freelance writers, beauty pros, even fancy socialites tested products for us. I also dealt with the reader ballots, because back then, Best of Beauty and Readers’ Choice ran at the same time.

Wells: We worked with Kevyn Aucoin very closely back then. I remember enticing him with pizza and Coca Cola to test products. It was like having a teenager. My assistant would order the food to arrive right before he walked in.

Perrotta: Candy ordered thousands of large paper shopping bangs and those were used to give ever