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Lip shtick: at the Neiman Marcus in NorthPark Center, more women buy more makeup for more money than anyplace else in Dallas--maybe in the world. No wonder I couldn''t resist.

Article Excerpt
FIRST, A CONFESSION: I do not like to wear makeup. Whether this is a consequence of living in Austin, where flawless, coverage foundation can mark you as a hopelessly unhip out-of-towner--"That's so Dallas," Austinites like to sniff-or simply my own failure as a woman, I'm not sure. Only when it was forbidden by my mother, in junior high, did I wear makeup with abandon. Back then, my vision of worldly sophistication involved gobs of electric-blue eyeliner and bubblegum-pink lip gloss, which I gooped on at school in the girls' bathroom. Later came an unfortunate smudgy-black-eyeliner phase and then a brief but theatrical flirtation with a vivid shade that I hoped made me look French. That all came to an end when I went off to a liberal arts college in New England, where mascara was considered proof of a less-than-rigorous intellect. I've used makeup sparingly ever since, and in sandal wearing, Frisbee-toosing Austin, that's the norm. Only as I've entered nay thirties, as the fine lines around my eyes have begun to multiply at an alarming rate, have I started to wonder if maybe there isn't something redeeming in all those compacts and tubes and bottles. With this in mind, I found myself drawn to the nerve center of all that is cosmetic, the city where the Mary Kay empire was born, the place where women lip-line and shadow and contour-shade before going to the gym. Yes, Dallas. My precise destination was, naturally, Neiman Marcus-not the flagship downtown store but the trendier NorthPark Center location, which happens to sell the most cosmetics of any of Neiman's 35 stores in the country. So far-reaching is its influence that many high-end cosmetics companies choose to roll out their new Lines here after introducing them in New York. Bobbi Brown debuted in New York at Bergdorf Goodman, then ventured into the national market by offering ten shades of lipstick at the NorthPark Neiman's. The rest is history.

I arrived a few minutes before the store opened to find that a handful of women were already standing outside its glass doors, exquisitely dressed and coiffed and powdered as if they hoped to be photographed at any moment for W. Was there an event at Neiman's? I asked a sleek young Asian woman perched atop impossibly high heels. "No," she said, as if I had asked a very stupid question. And so I stared at the window display--a basketball hovering, inexplicably, above a three-inch-high Manolo Blahnik pump-and waited. Before long, a security guard turned the lock mad swung open the doors ("Good morning, ladies!"), the fights brightened, and we "all rode the escalators down one floor to Cosmetics: a florid world so rooted in fantasy that Neiman's saleswomen privately call it the Land of Oz.

What waited for us below was an expanse of cream-colored marble, roughly the length of a city block, where row...

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