Janetta Mackay: Me and Bobbi B

A Bobbi Brown makeup lesson. Picture / Supplied.

Viva's beauty editor on the candid in-between moments that make an interview.

It was the best beauty intro I never got, mid-way through an interview Bobbi Brown paused and said she wanted to sort out a better foundation skin match for the interviewer. Proceedings were delayed for a mini makeover and another beauty editor and I who were waiting in the Sydney studio muttered about missing out on gold.

Our colleague was flustered, but as we told her later, she's the one with the story to tell. It wasn't like she was publicly bailed out, the interview had actually been suspended to fit in a quick filming obligation and it was in the in-between moment that Brown quietly asked the beauty editor - who had left her foundation behind and was making do with a BB cream and powder mix - if she would mind if she got one of her team to sort her out while she waited for the interview to resume. Personal shopping sorted.

I'm thinking of wearing orange makeup to all my interviews from now on. But maybe it's Brown who has it all thought out, with a way to make her round of interviews more entertaining.

As is often the way when you interview someone well known, friends and colleagues will ask later what were they really like? A profile writer I know hates this question and huffily points people to her pieces. Fair enough, for her style of extended encounter features convey a sense of the subject's personality, but with 15-minute sound-bite snatches it is often what goes on around the interview that reveals more than pro-forma answers.

Bobbi Brown with Janetta Mackay. Picture / Supplied

As far as Brown goes, I've interviewed her twice and thrown a few quick questions her way backstage at New York Fashion Week, where I also saw her work the room for a book launch. She's tiny and lively. This time round, I wanted to talk more about her approach to being a brand rather than do a bio or ask for makeup tips.

We didn't have a lot of time, but she was as free of artifice and as incisively direct as I remembered. She also seemed more relaxed. The empathy with women struggling with work-life balance and appearance issues are ones she also genuinely grapples with, which saves her positive messages from being glib or saccharine.

You get the impression she would be a tough boss and a staunch friend. (She said no to doing Nicole Kidman's makeup for a big event in favour of attending a friend's 40th birthday).

At a function later that evening, Brown came over and asked me a few genuinely curious questions about New Zealand. I'm hoping she will make it here one of these days. I'd really love to chat over coffee. But I'm sure she would rather head for the hills with her family.

• Read Janetta's interview with Bobbi Brown here.

- VIVA