Salma Hayek couldn’t keep her hands off guests Thursday during a luncheon to unveil her 100-stockkeeping-unit Nuance Salma Hayek line that will bow in August exclusively in 7,000 CVS Pharmacy stores and online. In the sun-basked dining room of The Mondrian Hotel, Hayek dabbed her secret potions on CVS executives and beauty editors. “You have to try this,” said the petite Hayek as she held the hand of Lori Bloom, wife of CVS’ Mike Bloom, executive vice president, merchandising, supply chain, marketing and advertising. “It will get rid of my wrinkles,” smiled Lori Bloom.
To say that Hayek is passionate about her new beauty endeavor with CVS, would indeed be putting it mildly. The project, which she said has been on her mind for almost 10 years, in the works for six years and under development for the past three, had the actress literally in tears and on the edge of her cushioned chair. To the crowd, the Mexican beauty convincingly discussed how she sought to create a line to honor her grandmother’s beauty secrets, a cosmetologist who studied at Vichy Labs in Paris, and who also combined Native American and Mayan remedies into her potions. Ingredients used by her family, some not even known to top chemists, are cornerstones of the collection and range from familiar rosewater to the more obscure tepezcohuite.
“I took three years off my [acting] career to work on this,” she said in an exclusive interview with WWD. “This is not something that required 14 hours. Nooo, baby. This has been a full-time job.”