Department store beauty floors can be intimidating, what with the heady aromas, special gift offers, quite-literally-in-your-face salesfolk, crowded cornucopias of products and mirrors at every terrifying angle. It’s enough to make you sprint straight for the escalators.
Barneys’ Madison Avenue flagship has dialed down that overwhelming intensity in their revamped beauty department (also renovated at their West Coast flagship), and the effect is about as magical as a wrinkle-eraser. The beauty floor is still tucked beneath the main entrance, down one flight of wide, metal and fiberglass stairs. But in its new incarnation, the design and displays are spare — by comparison, anyway, because we’re still talking about thousands of lipsticks, compacts, candles and scents — and deceptively intimate.
Though the terrazzo marble floor encompasses 9,000 square feet, Abba Gray stone columns designate specific product and label groupings. Candles and home scents are cordoned off on the south side of the department, where a fleet of knowledgeable, cheerful saleswomen can help you decide whether you prefer Diptyque’s Ambre or Feu de Bois. (Feu de Bois, for de record.)
The majority of the rest of the floor is devoted to cosmetics, from the traditional marquee luxury brands (YSL, La Mer) to lesser-known artisanal groups (MAKE, Poppy King), and lines launched exclusively with Barneys
(Surratt, Greg Lauren, By Terry).
Once you’ve weaved through the display areas, designed by the Steven Harris firm to emulate glamorously outsize medicine cabinets, you’ll arrive back at the foot of the stairs, to the right of which is the B3 Barneys Blow Bar by Valery Joseph. The company has clearly seized upon New York’s obsession with quick-coif outposts, such as Blow, Blo Blow Dry Bar and Drybar (though a straighten-out at Barneys runs on the high end, at $80).
If you want a facial, a wax or a little lymphatic drainage, those services are available from Mila Moursi estheticians (on both coasts). Massages are also on offer, though if your beauty retail experience is as stress-free as Barneys seems to have designed, you won’t need one.