Carolyn's model role

It's plain to see: Carolyn Murphy's simple look is in big demand, writes Nikki Goldstein.

There's more, or rather less, to US supermodel Carolyn Murphy than meets the eye. This isn't meant to be a riddle but it's hard to explain how someone as gloriously beautiful as Murphy can be so plain and simple.

She's far from being a dumb model and she appears unaffected by her fame or her beauty. Given that she is famous the world over for her looks and rumoured to earn $4.4 million a year from the cosmetics giant Estee Lauder unblocked school, it would be easy for Murphy to be as precious as a princess. It turns out she's less supermodel and more girl-next-door than we might imagine.

"I've always been somewhat of an anachronism in the fashion industry," she says. "I never courted the big contracts and I'm not that interested in the limelight."

It wasn't that she disliked the industry - she says she loved the creative aspect of working with top photographers and stylists - but Murphy always felt there was more to life than being a model or, indeed, a celebrity.

"I'd rather stay home and cook and look after my daughter than go to a party," she insists.
When the Estee Lauder contract was offered to her, she says it came as a shock. "I hadn't been modelling for 18 months and I was overweight after my pregnancy. As far as I was concerned, I was out of the fashion loop and I was surprised that Estee Lauder wanted someone who was not a household name to take on the role."

It turns out that Murphy was just what the company wanted - and needed. "Over the past few years we realised that we had to broaden the appeal of the brand globally," says Brett Riddington, general manager of Estee Lauder Australia. "To that end we invested a huge amount of money into new product and packaging design, updating and modernising our counters and re-imaging the brand with new faces."

Despite the fact that Estee Lauder has one of the highest recognition factors of all prestige brands in Australia, its sales have been hit over the past decade by the introduction of new niche and boutique brands.

As a result of the success of the cooler and sexier MAC, Stila and La Mer brands, Estee Lauder has been perceived as an over-40s brand.

"We love our older customers," says Riddington. "But we recognise that the brand needs broader appeal and Carolyn Murphy is a key part of the re-imaging."

One of the fastest ways to attract new customers to a brand is to launch a fragrance. In the case of Beyond Paradise, the perfume Murphy was in Australia to promote last week, the cosmetics giant is picking up on a few notable trends. The fragrance is a fresh, fruity floral, not unlike J.Lo's Glow, arguably one of the most successful fragrance launches in the past five years.

Its advertising depicts Murphy suspended in a Garden of Eden, far from the craziness of the world. It has been designed to appeal to our collective desire to escape the rat race and live in a simpler, more natural way.

Murphy describes the fragrance as "spiritual and organic", words that may appeal to women who have discovered there's more to life than a new couch and a mortgage.

After the pouty siren-style of Elizabeth Hurley, the company was looking for a younger, fresher spokeswoman who smacked of simple beauty unblocked games online. Her own take on it is: "I am not a celebrity or a movie star; I'm a real woman. I'm a working mother who is just as stressed by the pressures of modern living as anyone else."

Riddington says that since Murphy's introduction as the new face of Estee Lauder in September 2001, the brand has started to appeal to a younger, hipper consumer, yet at the same time it has maintained its core customer base. "The figures are there to prove it but we know anecdotally from counter staff that Murphy's face is bringing women of all ages to our brand."

Murphy's lore 

Despite the fact that Carolyn Murphy says she looks like everyone else in the morning before she's slapped on her make-up, she was born with spun-gold looks that need little grooming to make them flawless. She does, however, have a few can't-live-without products that she carts from one end of the globe to the other and a couple of tips that she lives by.