GREAT BARRINGTON — Lots of companies start at the family dining table or in the garage with the dream that the business will outgrow the house. But Jane Iredale, who runs a cosmetics empire that now reaches more than 48 countries, grew her house instead.
Now, as Iredale Mineral Cosmetics celebrates its 20th anniversary, Jane Iredale is finally moving out of her home-headquarters-hybrid at 28 Church St., to a 20,000-square-foot, honest-to-goodness office building next door.
“The joke is that it’s Jane’s Way,” said Iredale, who bought the real estate piecemeal — including two warehouses — in her South County neighborhood during the past two decades.
Advertisement
Over the years, her company has grown, too, first as one of the earliest players in the mineral cosmetics business and soon after as purveyor of a wide variety of beauty products.
The block where she lives and works is rich with history. A modest sign, marking the birthplace of W.E.B. Du Bois just steps from an Iredale warehouse, reads: “I was born by a golden river.” Du Bois’s’ river is the nearby Housatonic, and it’s one the makeup maven loves for its beauty almost as much as the wild beds of roses, asters, turtlehead, anemones, hydrangeas, and lavender that grow alongside her Church Street home every year.
“The garden really does inspire me with the colors and smells. I really do think it helps my brand,” said Iredale, who worked for many years as a casting director and TV producer before starting Iredale Mineral Cosmetics.
A British transplant, she began studying at New York University in 1974. During that time, she started the Manhattan-based Great Amwell Company with musical composer and producer Bill Perry. Her career encompassed film, TV, and theater, adapting six Mark Twain novels for PBS and writing the stage book for “Wind in the Willows,” a Broadway show that earned her a Tony nomination.
Advertisement
“She was a very skilled casting director, good at picking out talent that was going to go somewhere [such as] a young Steven Weber and a young Cynthia Nixon,” Perry recalled.
Perry, who also has a home in Great Barrington, described Iredale as “fearless,” recalling union ugliness that he said followed them to the set of PBS’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in Kentucky.
“One day, Jane was in her motel room, and there was a knock on her door. Three burly Teamsters came up, asking, ‘Why was she not only using Teamsters?’ They were very big and intimidating. Jane went to the closet and they said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘I’m going through my wardrobe to find a frock that I will wear on TV tonight when I denounce you.’ They were so startled.”
To be sure, there was no shortage of drama, even if the work was gratifying. Still, Iredale said, the grueling pace burned her out.
“I’d had enough of not having any control over my own life,” she said.
A longtime devotee of health food and holistic medicine, she had seen the toll TV and film took on women’s skin, and she moved briefly to upstate New York before settling in the Berkshires with a desire to do something about it.
“[Modeling agency founder] Eileen Ford said, ‘I would never hire a model with bad skin.’ I thought, ‘Wow that’s life changing,’ ” she said.
Advertisement
In 1994, she set out to create a loose mineral powder that could “be put on quickly, but never thought about.” She formulated what is now called her Amazing Base, and began testing it with plastic surgeons and dermatologists.
“A plastic surgeon in Seattle started using the powder and loved it. Then, I brought it to the Lahey Clinic and plastic surgeon Dr. Brooke Seckel. That kind of credibility started to snowball,” she said.
Not everyone is a fan. Dr. Ruth Tedaldi, a dermatologist who doesn’t carry Iredale’s line, said the brand was an early leader in mineral makeup. But she believes that it, along with mineral makeup competitors such as Bare Escentuals, don’t do enough to help the skin, especially post-procedure.
“My basic criticism is that it’s absolutely drying,” said Tedaldi, founder of Dermatology Partners in Wellesley. “As you age, the last thing you want is something that draws out your wrinkles.”
Iredale’s customers — resort spas and medical offices numbering more than 5,000 in the US alone — would disagree. And Iredale continues to innovate beauty products that fight aging, acne, and stress.
“It’s the woman who has an ‘Aha!’ moment. She’s pregnant, or she’s breaking out. She’s trying to find something better for her skin,” she said.
Iredale has no plans to move her operation out of the Berkshires. After all, her 100-year-old mother, Tess, assembles the packaging for The Magic Mitt makeup remover in her house across the street from Iredale’s.
“In a big city, you feel you can’t make a dent, but here you can actually change people’s lives,” she said. “It’s a reward to be able to make a difference.”
Advertisement
Jill Radsken can be reached at jill.radsken@gmail.com.