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As a dedicated beauty fiend, I'm of the opinion that you should be able to buy beauty products everywhere. Sure, there are Sephora and Ulta and Bluemercury, not to mention department-store counters and the wide world of the Internet beauty scene, but when will I finally be able to pick up a tube of Kat Von D Studded Kiss Lipstick in Lovecraft on my Starbucks run? How am I supposed to touch up my hair during after-work drinks when the bar doesn't sell my KMS California Hair Play Dry Wax? Why won't the world revolve around me? Well, now my dreams of constant product availability are one step closer to reality (thanks for getting on board, world): Bookseller Barnes & Noble is testing new beauty sections in some of its stores.
The concept, which Barnes & Noble is calling the Glossary, is currently being tested in three on-campus bookstores at colleges around the country, with a fourth on the way next month. As in other brick-and-mortar favorites, the new beauty section allows students to look at and test new products (because, let's be real, you really need to see how that foundation shade blends onto your skin) and is reportedly home to premium brands—like Smashbox, Butter London, Philosophy, and Lipstick Queen—as well as drugstore go-tos, like CoverGirl, Burt's Bees, and Maybelline New York.
The move isn't a complete shakeup; Barnes & Noble has been offering a few drugstore brands in its campus stores for some time. But these new additions are making the concept much more like a traditional beauty store. There's a good reason for that, too—the bookstore was directly inspired by Sephora. "I've always been intrigued by the success of Sephora. We actually had some dialogue with them a number of years ago to see if they wanted to explore coming into our store and creating a store within a store," Joel Friedman, vice president and chief merchandising officer of Barnes & Noble College told Racked. That collaboration may not have happened, but Barnes & Noble believed in the idea and moved forward with creating its own version.
As for whether any of these faux-phoras will be popping up at a bookstore near you, there's no word yet on the concept moving beyond university life, but with traditional bookstores looking for more ways to compete with online retails giants, like Amazon, it wouldn't be a surprise to see more innovative ideas like this cropping up in your local bookshop. For now, I'll just have to keep dreaming about picking up a new tube of waterproof mascara to go with my next beach read.
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