On Saturday, a gaggle of 11-year-olds gathered in the Samantha Thavasa store on Madison Avenue for a tea party sponsored by Christian Dior Beauty to raise money for New Yorkers for Children. Host Tinsley Mortimer, Samantha Thavasa designer, socialite, and Dior beauty ambassador (she has her own shade of lip gloss), said every 11-year-old wants to wear makeup. Although Tinsley’s effortless nighttime look takes fourteen products, including two kinds of mascara, and fifteen steps, she wanted the kids to ease into it. “We’re showing them how not to overdo it. At that age you don’t want to put on too much, you want to do a little mascara, [keep it] simple,” she said. “The Tinsley look has a little more going on. There’s no fake lashes on these girls today.” She added she doesn’t usually wear “that much” makeup, but was doing so Saturday because she had just been filming her reality show for the CW. “I like to do a little mascara on a regular basis, even with sweatpants,” she explained.
She can’t get enough mascara. “I get some stuff and my sister and my mom come over to my house and they always take my stuff! I’m like, Where’d it go? And they say, ‘Well Tinsley, you work at Dior.’ And you I’m like, ‘No, you don’t understand! This is like gold! You may not take it!’” she continued. “That and then gloss in every color — well, like a pink, you know — I find those things missing all the time. But I’m also always throwing them in handbags to go out at night and can’t find them again. I go through a lot of tubes, definitely.”
We wondered what happened to Tinsley’s signature blonde waves. “Well I changed my style with everything going through my personal life,” the recent divorcée told us. “I needed a big change. So I cut bangs and when I cut the bangs, doing the curl didn’t really look good with the bangs — it was too many things going on. So I’m growing them out and kind of getting back into doing some curls. It was just too much going on.” Further complicating her getting-ready routine is the addition of a stylist, which she’s never used until recently. “I did work with a guy named PJ, who’s a friend of mine who doesn’t normally do this, but he knows my style really well and knows exactly what I would want and not want,” she said. “But we needed so many outfits that it was just impossible to do it on your own. You couldn’t even — even if I had a lot of money to go to the store and buy outfits — it still was just impossible, our schedule was so grueling. But I’ve never, ever had a stylist.”
