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.

THE IDEA

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.

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 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 everyone their products and get them hauled home. And our managing editor handed out car service vouchers like candies. There was no way you were taking those heavy bags on the subway.

Jennifer Tung, staff writer: I remember having bags and bags of things in my little apartment and individually testing a million things and having to be like, "Does it feel like yogurt?” Or, “What's the consistency of this cream?" At one point I ran out of adjectives. We had pen and paper ballots, so I recall I just worked from a stack of papers to write up the winners.

I don't remember if I wrote the whole Best of Beauty package. It might've been a collaboration with two other writers, but it was all about the language.

Those days were so incredible because you got to be really clever and have a lot of fun. The more you pushed it, the better, I think, is how Linda felt.

We really felt we were the beauty authorities, and I think there was a sense that this was bigger than anything we had done before.

Wells: The issue came out in October because I didn't want to have to compete with September fashion issues. I also didn't want it to be too close to Christmas.

And that was always so funny because then, when every other magazine decided to do their version of Best of Beauty, they did it in October too. I was like, "You realize that this was a totally random reason for us to do it in October?"

THE RESPONSE

Wells: Right from the beginning, it was a sales phenomenon. It was met with real positivity from the companies, but more importantly, the readers loved it.

At the time, the circulation of Allure was around 3 million readers; it was huge, and oh my God, they loved [the awards]. People would buy out the [winning] products and the brands were fully unprepared.

They would be annoyed that we couldn’t tell them ahead of time. They’d ask us to let them know in advance if they were winners so that they could prepare enough stock.

I was like, "So sorry, we can't tell you that." Our advertising team also never knew who was going to win, even who was in the running. They always wanted to know, and I was always like, "Sorry.

No.”

Hamilton: I think Best of Beauty was very powerful because it was one of the first curations of beauty products [presented] in a way that the consumer could relate to. It was from an editorial perspective rather than a brand perspective, and I think that was what made it very exciting.

Wells: There'd be some niche product [that would win], and it would often take the brand fully by surprise. It would make the product a success.

We'd hear that over and over again from these indie brands: "You made our business. We didn't think we were going to survive had it not been for a Best of Beauty award." That wasn't our job, but it was really nice that it wasn't just a matter of supporting the big guys.

It was a matter of genuinely picking the best products.

Hamilton: I think what the awards shifted was the power of recognition. Consumers didn't know whether your product was one, two, three, or 30 on a syndicated data report. Now, all of a sudden, there was something that helped the consumer understand that other consumers had voted for this, and editors had chosen them. That knowledge was not available to people before then.

THE PARTY

Wells: Because of the initial misgivings about the project, we didn't make a lot of noise about the awards. Eventually, as we became more confident, we had an event.

Nancy Berger, publisher: Speaking to Linda, she was very opposed to making it an award ceremony in the sense that we were like, "And the winners are…”. And I agreed, that didn’t feel right.

Wells: I didn't want to be in a room announcing winners and having somebody feel like they were losers. We wanted to accentuate the positive. Plus, if I had to read out all the finalists, I’d be up on the podium for hours.

Berger: The event started in 2001 as a breakfast with all of the brand executives at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City. For the 10th anniversary, in 2006, however, we wanted to have the best party ever to celebrate and a fabulous way to present the awards. Up until that moment, the way you found out you won was when the magazine came out.

We threw the party at the Rainbow Room and set up installations all around the room showcasing the winners by category, so when you walked in, it was like an exhibit. We always had entertainment, and that first year Joss Stone performed. We would give guests an early copy of the October issue.

Hamilton: I won’t call it the Oscars of beauty, because we didn’t get dressed up in gowns, but wow, the excitement when you went to the event!

Berger: I also wanted to create the best [beauty] goody bag that ever existed, so we reached out to all the brands to donate full-size products. That first year of the event, in 2006, it was a big, Allure-branded canvas tote bag.

The bags were so heavy, we had to hire very strong people wearing Allure T-shirts to transport them from the office to the party in taxis. We couldn’t lift them ourselves.

So the next year I thought, How can we solve this problem? The solution was a suitcase on wheels.

Hamilton: The suitcase was the definition of swag. You'd walk out and feel like you just won the beauty lottery. There hadn't been anything like that before and people would clear their calendars because they wanted that suitcase. It also really created a sense of a beauty community at the time that didn’t exist before.

Berger: The suitcase became iconic for us. I remember calculating it: Some of them contained over $3,500 worth of products and weighed up to 70 pounds.

We had rules around it. You couldn't get it unless you came to the event, and you had to stay towards the end to receive it.

We would also put aside some suitcases to donate to charities doing live and silent auctions, and do reader contests with them too. You know, I still have almost every one of my suitcases.

I wonder if Linda has them too.

Wells: I always have far too many products, and too many suitcases, so I gave them away. The suitcases were so exceptional, and I remember people begging for them, but Nancy restricted them to people who attended the Best of Beauty event, no exceptions.

THE SEAL

Perrotta: We started using a version of the Best of Beauty seal in the early 2000s. Nancy and Linda met and decided we needed to blow this up in a bigger way and that we needed a seal. Good Housekeeping had their seal, and so many other magazines now had beauty awards. Linda asked Deanna [Filippo, the Allure design director] to design one.

Wells: The seal first came along as a design element for the cover. I asked Deanna to design it because I wanted the issue to stand out in the newsstand. We wanted it to look like a sticker, so you could tell it was a special issue. Then it became a thing in and of itself.

Deanna Filippo, design director: When I was an assistant between 1991 and 1995, I used to design the Beauty Reporter section at the beginning of the magazine, and that's where my inspiration for the seal came from initially. We had a recurring thing called “Trick of the Trade,” which was literally 30 words.

The text sat inside a square and in each corner there was a star—I’ve always loved stars and hearts—and down each side it read, “Trick of the Trade.” Knowing that design from the very early years was successful, I probably took all of those elements and then incorporated what was going to become the Best of Beauty seal.

Berger: The seal hasn’t changed much since we designed it. The color, the shape, the easy wording.

Filippo: I wanted a color that wouldn't go unnoticed and a symbol that portrayed Allure’s unique boldness and became a stamp of approval. I chose the most vibrant red in the Pantone range because I wanted it to pop but still look elegant and sophisticated.

The stars [in the design] would say that this was a true, tested product and I think it was a Copperplate Gothic font. The round design was easy to place in any format and stand out on the magazine page or as an actual sticker placed on the award-winning products.

Wells: At some point, some company said, "Could we put the seal in our ad?" And it was like, "Sure. Go ahead." And they were like, "Could we put the seal on our products?" It was like, "Why not?" And then, it was Nancy Berger who said, "Why don't we charge a licensing fee for it?" So that became a revenue stream and also magnified the power of Best of Beauty.

Berger: I talked to a lot of the brands about the value of the awards and how, when Allure announced an award, it had an impact on sales. What I realized was that the companies that benefited the most from winning an award had no channel to communicate the news at the point of purchase.

Sure, you could announce it in a magazine or TV ad, but there was no way to really give a validation that this was an award-winning product. And so that seemed very obvious to me, that there had to be a mechanism to do that, and that mechanism was a seal of approval.

Filippo: I remember doing my research by going into a CVS or Duane Reade or a Zitomer or C.O. Bigelow and thinking, If I was a consumer, with all the bottles placed on the shelf, what would really stand out?

Wells: When the seal started to be used in advertising, that ended up really being a beacon. And it was a great marketing tool for us.

Even though it was being used to market the product, it was also a very good rub-off effect on us. Allure was the ultimate stamp of excellence.

It was the most revered. And I don't want to say that egotistically, it was just that it was the only beauty magazine.

Berger: With the seal, you didn't necessarily have to be an Allure reader to respond to the fact that the product won an award from the “Beauty Expert.” So it expanded our audience to any beauty consumer. And in terms of our importance in the industry, the winning brands gained credibility and sales, the retailers had a trusted merchandising tool, and Allure created a meaningful new business.

The seal also helped consumers make more confident choices, which was really an extension of what Linda and Allure's purpose was [with Best of Beauty] from the beginning. It took the franchise to a whole other level.

A BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT

Wells: The Breakthroughs category was something I was really excited about because I felt like one of the things that the beauty industry often wasn't given credit for was the fact that there were really legitimate breakthroughs in the business.

Perrotta: At first, “Breakthrough”-winning products were just little captions embedded in Best of Beauty. It only became a big story because Linda and I were like, “Holy mackerel, there’s so much to say about these products! Why are we cramming it into three sentences?” That was 2002.

Wells: With Breakthroughs, I thought, You know what? This could be a really good designation for products that are in a whole different category.

That was, to me, the pinnacle, if you had a breakthrough product. It could be something that was simple, like a mascara wand made from plastic rather than nylon to remove clumps, or more complicated, like Living Proof having MIT scientists figure out a solution to common hair issues. [Editor’s note: Cover Girl Lash Exact Mascara won in 2006 and Living Proof’s No Frizz range won in 2008.]

Perrotta: Around the same time, in 2007, we decided to split Best of Beauty and Readers’ Choice into two issues, because there was so much information now that we had Breakthroughs as well.

Wells: Readers’ Choice had always been part of the Best of Beauty Awards. We sent out questionnaires to readers, and they were open-ended.

Tung: I remember those ballots, I think I wrote one at some point.

Wells: It was interesting to have our choices and the readers’ choices juxtaposed in the first couple of issues, but then I thought, There's enough to have each of those stand on their own. I also thought that our readers are experts in their own right. I mean, they know a lot, and so I felt like it was fair to have their expertise be held up and revered and not just footnoted.

Berger: When you think about the creator economy and tapping into your audience and your customer, we did that very early on.

Perrotta: After Breakthroughs, Readers’ Choice was a breeze; except at one point we realized that some companies—the ones that use direct selling [Editor’s note: multi-level marketing]—were getting the people who worked for them to flood the ballots. We wondered why these brands were sweeping every single category, so we ran through all the data, and it turned out that they were creating new email accounts and voting many times.

So one year we were very late with getting the Readers’ Choice winners done and in the layouts because it took so long to weed through and find out who the real votes were.

Wells: As we went along, we added more product-specific categories. When beauty products became so expensive—enormously expensive skin-care products, designer lipsticks—we decided, "Well, as editors it's easy for us to love a really expensive product because we're not paying for it.” So we added the Splurge category, recognizing that some people could pay for that, but a lot of people can't.

Then we also added the Steals category, because it's always great to be able to go to the drugstore and buy something that's really good.

When we started, there was no such thing as a category of "serums." There were no “essences.” There was a moment where there were anti-aging products, and then that category was renamed and recast. Then you look at the hair-care category and how that has become so enormous, with scalp care and all that.

It’s really interesting, because the beauty business was so much smaller when we started than it is now, and you can track that through Best of Beauty.

THE LEGACY

Perrotta: To this day, I always buy things I see with the Allure seal. It's a really powerful endorsement.

Berger: My first business trip with Allure was to Neutrogena offices in California to present the awards. I got to the conference room, and it was filled with all the scientists who created the products.

That’s who accepted the awards, it wasn’t the marketers. Winning an award, it wasn’t just a marketing vehicle, it was also recognition, internally, that that product, that ingredient, that combination of ingredients, that was the award winner.

And I think that’s a value of an Allure Best of Beauty award that’s a little bit invisible.

Hamilton: I give the awards credit for combining beauty all together. For the first time we started to recognize it as a massive category rather than “makeup,” “skin care,” “hair care,” “hair color.” Before, we were very focused on individual categories, but I think [Best of Beauty] really did make “beauty” an important category with many dimensions to it.

Wells: It’s just so funny because it was all a bit haphazard. It wasn't this giant strategy.

It was sort of naive and just, "Okay, let's do this.” I think that’s the reason it worked. It was truly something intended to help the reader.

That was always our focus at Allure. It was always, “What can we do for the reader?

What can we do to make their life easier and help them understand what's going on?”

Social media has made it easier in some ways because there are all these voices out there reviewing and judging, but they're biased. There are a lot of people being paid to review, and they're not always revealing the fact that they're being paid to review.

There's so much clutter out there, and there's so much unreliable information. And the great thing about Allure is that it maintains its steadfastness and its independence.

That is one thing that remains true in all of Best of Beauty’s 30 years—Allure has always stood by that original principle of, “Let's help the reader.” This is not for the advertiser. This is not for the industry.

This is something absolutely for the reader. I mean, the reality is it does help the industry, but it helps the industry because it helps the consumer.

For more on Allure's Best of Beauty Awards, keep reading:

Allure Best of Beauty: Live Is Back—Here's What You Need to Know

Behind the Scenes at Allure’s Third Annual Best of Beauty Live

Best of Beauty: Behind the Scenes