So make yourself a cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot!) and settle down for a read.
This is going to be rather long.
Consider yourself warned.
Tatcha had appeared on my radar for the first time around March 2014.
When I first heard about this magical "Japanese" company, I immediately wanted to know where and how I could get my grabby hands on their stuff. Imagine my surprise then, when upon checking the company's website, I learned that Tatcha is headquartered in the US and does not sell its products in Japan. And apparently, has no plans to do so.
My bullsh*t detector immediately went into overdrive.
I read Tatcha's geisha beauty secrets PR spin and felt a wave of nausea coming over me. Even I, the ultimate bs mistress that I am, can only handle so much idiotic PR drivel in one sitting. Please, I beg you, tell me that people don't take this geisha stuff seriously. They can't be that naive. Or can they?
Still, Tatcha was getting rave reviews and I was becoming more and more curious.
Until I try something, I do my best to keep an open mind, geisha beauty secrets magically uncovered in Kyoto by a woman, who it seems, can't speak Japanese, and all.
So imagine my surprise when one beautiful early summer morning in 2015 I fired up my gmail and, lo and behold, there was a message from Tatcha in my inbox.
One miss Alexandra was contacting bloggers and offering to send me Tatcha's introductory Ritual Discovery sampler to sample. Of course I said yes. I sent miss Alexandra my address and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, I decided to follow up.
Miss Alexandra responded that sadly, Tatcha being a small company, it didn't have a budget for working with international bloggers. That of course, was a pretty dumb lie. Other international bloggers, in Europe and in Singapore, were already showing off their Tatcha PR booty on Instagram.
But they were popular bloggers with thousands of followers and I was a no-name nobody.
I truly hoped that miss Alexandra was just a clueless summer intern, who didn't know any better. But no, she's an actual Tatcha PR employee. Scary! She clearly assumed that since I was a no-name nobody very far away, lying to me would be pretty harmless.
Well, you know, this is them innernets generation. I might be a small fish in a country far away, but we do have wi-fi over here. And as a small fish beauty blogger, I do follow big fish beauty bloggers. And shock and horror, sometimes we even talk to each other. Because the popular kids on the blog know that in order to stay popular they need the support of (the) hoi polloi like me.
But apparently, miss Alexandra over at Tatcha slept during her PR101 classes. If she had paid attention, then she would have known that simple "Sorry, our mistake. At this time, we are targeting a different audience. Let's keep in touch." was a perfectly acceptable way of getting out of this situation. No need to lie. At least that's how we used to handle it back in my days.
Anyway, when I saw one of the popular bloggers with thousands of followers proudly present her PR sample of Tatcha Ritual Discovery Kit, I left a comment.
Tatcha reacted with lightning speed. Suddenly, the company was apologizing for the "misunderstanding" and offering to rectify the situation. Pretty pathetic that it had to come to that.
I declined Tatcha's offer and instead did a haul.
This is what I got. Like I told you, despite this unpleasant experience, I was trying to keep an open mind. My policy has always been "no dissing until you try it".
One good thing about Tatcha is that the company sells trial sizes. That is a marvelous idea. Considering how much full-size Tatcha products cost, this is an affordable way to sample what the brand has to offer. And this is exactly what I did. The two full size products that ended up in my shipment were freebies. And I really do appreciate the gesture. One of them, the indigo cream, turned out to be the discovery of the year for me.
My shopping list:
- Dry Skin Ritual Discovery Kit
- Revitalizing Eye Cream Travel Size
- Moisture Rich Silk Cream Travel Size
- Deep Hydration Firming Serum Travel Size
- Soothing Triple Recovery Cream (Indigo) Travel Size
- Camellia Beauty Oil Travel Size
- Deep Hydration Revitalizing Eye Mask (Single Set)
- Deep Hydration Lifting Mask (Single)
- Classic Rice Enzyme Powder Travel Size (freebie for signing up for Tatcha's mailing list)
and 3 (yes, three) foil packets that are complimentary with every order, and which you can select yourself:
- One Step Camellia Cleansing Oil Packet
- Enriching Renewal Cream Packet
- Soothing Renewal Treatment Packet
My order also included two complimentary full-size products:
- Indigo Soothing Triple Recovery Cream - I love this stuff! Could bathe in it!
and
- Silken Pore Perfecting Sunscreen Broad Spectrum SPF 35, which is very nice, but at US$68 for 60ml is not worth it. Especially considering the relatively low and very un-Japanese (for a company that plays up the whole Japanese mystique spiel) SPF.
Tatcha's "origins" story makes any Japanese woman, who had the misfortune to hear it, laugh. As it does anyone else with even the most basic understanding of Japanese culture and cosmetic market. "Othering" in any shape or form is borderline discrimination. "Othering" to pitch and sell a product is the lowest, most arrogant form of marketing. And I suppose that is at least one of the many reasons why Tatcha does not have a physical presence in Japan.
Yet at the same time othering of mystical, mythical creatures, such as geisha for example, makes perfect business sense, if the products you're pitching are skincare and beauty. The myth, the aura, and the exoticism all help to sell the magic.
Tatcha identified this niche, created a vaguely plausible story to lend it some basic legitimacy and now is laughing all the way to the bank. There's even a real life geisha in the mix, one Kyouka, who made her full fledged geiko debut in the Gion Kobu district of Kyoto on October 29th, 2012.
She's the one on the right, pictured here still in her maiko days, from the looks of it.
Image: Wikipedia commons
That fact itself rings all sorts of warning bells to anyone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of what real geisha are and how they operate. To put it plainly, self-respecting geisha don't sell their services to western skincare companies. And if they do, they don't want that fact to be widely known in Japan (reason number 2 why Tatcha is not available here).
Of course there is a new breed of geisha out there, as well. Women, who started in the business as part-time geisha (usually as university students for whom it was simply a part time job), eventually graduated to full-time geisha status. They brought with them new, thoroughly modern, attitudes to this traditional profession.
On one hand, it's good, because as the world goes forward, geisha evolve along with it. On the other hand, we get individuals such as Kyouka, who are willing to lend their faces and names to foreign brands, so long as it leads to more international exposure for them. In other words, very business savvy, for whom this is just a stepping stone to bigger, brighter things. Because trust me, we haven't heard the last of Kyouka yet.
I have a strange feeling that a book detailing the beauty practices of modern geisha, co-authored by Victoria Tsai (Tatcha's founder), is in the works. And along with that, the usual media circus. Just wait and see.
Patience, my friends.
"International" is the key word here, for obvious reasons. Such approach would be laughed at domestically. And besides, Japanese women have other, more credible and a lot more experienced, skincare and beauty guru to follow than geisha. The geisha beauty secrets legend appeals to western weeabos and women who have never been inside a Japanese drugstore.
Tatcha's founder, Ms Tsai, is very careful of how she presents her company. She spins her geisha yarn very carefully, but anyone familiar with the history of beauty in Japan can easily call her bullsh*t.
For example, on Tatcha's website, she says:
The beauty secrets she learned from the geisha introduced her to a different approach to skincare — that less is more. Their skin care philosophy and time-tested ingredients were captured in an ancient text widely considered to be the oldest beauty book written in Japan...
Ahhh...
She needed geisha to figure it out? Really! Really?
All she needed to do was go to any Matsumoto Kiyoshi (a popular Japanese drugstore chain) and take a look at the cleansing isle. But then we wouldn't have the sappy "how Tatcha was born" story and without the "geisha beauty secrets" spiel it would be impossible to charge the kind of prices that Tatcha does now.
And speaking of geisha beauty secrets, kabuki actors use the same techniques. But I guess "the skincare tips I learned from kabuki actors" wouldn't carry the same
The second part of Ms. Tsai's words, that "their (presumably geisha's) skin care philosophy and time-tested ingredients were captured in an ancient text..." is simply not true.
The text she is referring to, and which she claims recorded and described the skin care philosophy of geisha, is nothing other than "Miyako fūzoku kewaiden" (A Handbook of Cosmetics in the Capital) published in 1813 (republished in 1982).
screenshot source: Amazon.co.jp
It was a compilation of traditional (and not so traditional) beauty, skincare and makeup techniques to assist the Japanese ladies to look their best. It was not exclusive to the geisha world, as Ms. Tsai would have you believe, though she is very careful not to say it outright. She puts the imagery in your head and lets your mind work out the association on its own. By the time you finish reading the stories on Tatcha's website, you are convinced that "Miyako fūzoku kewaiden" holds the keys to eternal life. Or at least, to eternal beauty.
Yet in reality, there is absolutely nothing mythical or mystical about it.
This is Ms. Tsai's account of how she came to know this book:
I first heard whispers about these books from geisha I met while researching the products that would eventually form the foundation of TATCHA's skin care ritual. The techniques they described were time-tested but rarely written down or shared beyond the wall's of the geisha house. Geisha are serious about keeping secrets, even their phone numbers and addresses are not listed and must be procured through several intermediaries.
Very surprising, since this book is not, and has never been a secret. Unless of course Ms. Tsai's geisha friends were playing a practical joke on her, there was no need to secretly whisper about it, because it is very well known to anyone who is interested in the history and evolution of beauty in Japan.
And Ms. Tsai isn't the first who thought it might be a good idea to look for inspiration in this old text. Pola Beauty has been doing it for years. In fact "Miyako fūzoku kewaiden" is required reading for Pola Beauty's researchers.
Also odd are these claims:
As I began my search for this book, I learned that very few people even knew of its existence, and that only a few written copies still exist. I turned to museums, hoping to find some documentation or clues about how to find it.
Months later, a researcher and I tracked it down in an antique bookstore. When I finally held the book in my hands, I could barely breathe from excitement. Its whisper-thin pages danced with delicate calligraphy, recording centuries of secrets – most of which remain startlingly relevant in our modern times.
Odd, because used copies of the 1982 reprint are readily available on Japanese Amazon (just google: 都風俗化粧伝).
But I guess "an old beauty manual I found at Book Off" wouldn't carry the same
So now you have reasons 3, 4, 5... 7 - 11 as to why Tatcha doesn't have an actual store in Japan. Japanese women would laugh so loud, you could hear them in San Francisco.
And speaking of San Fran, that's where Tatcha is headquartered.
While the majority of its products are indeed formulated and made in Japan, the company is very much American. And to be honest, Tatcha is not claiming to be a Japanese company.
That is another one of those crafty associations that our brains make when they hear the words "geisha" and "skincare".
But just as the fact that my MacBook was made in China doesn't make Apple Inc. a Chinese company, the same is true about Tatcha. That its products are manufactured in Japan, doesn't make Tatcha a Japanese company. It only adds another, carefully planned and designed, layer of passable credibility to Tatcha's main marketing points - magical geisha beauty secrets, you folks! Straight from Japan, you folks!
Ok, I need a break now.
This is the summary of my first impressions:
Tatcha is an American company that sells Japan-inspired, nicely packaged, ridiculously overpriced, but overall quite average cosmetics (Pola Beauty, or even SK-II it ain't, trust me) to mainly western women, who don't know any better (a single bio-cellulose sheet mask for US$28, anyone?).
In the coming weeks I will be reviewing the products I purchased, tried and used up.
I'm tired now.
My limits of nonsensical geisha PR drivel have been reached for the day.
I need a nap.
To be continued...
PS. Yes, I finally got me my own domain. Yay for me!
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