Bobbi Brown Chose Yom Kippur Over Fashion Royalty

Makeup artist Bobbi Brown and her eponymous line of cosmetics are both big successes. But unlike some of her peers, Brown has deliberately chosen to live outside of the New York fashion world. She lives in a New Jersey suburb with her husband, who is not a celebrity or mogul, and her children.

“My husband taught me I don’t have to be part of [the scene],” she told T magazine. She told a story in which she became the Sandy Koufax of the beauty world:

I remember one time when I really had to make a decision. It was early in my career, and it was Yom Kippur, and I felt guilty doing a cover for Cosmopolitan with Francesco Scavullo on Yom Kippur. My husband and my young child were coming into the city to get me for dinner. Scavullo said, ‘Why don’t you come out to dinner with me and Jean Paul Gaultier?’ And then my husband walked in. I’ll never forget: he was wearing a blue striped shirt, vertical stripes, and Jean Paul Gaultier was wearing his blue and white striped sweater, horizontal stripes — and I stood there saying, ‘Bobbi, pick a door, because you can’t do both.’ And I picked my husband and the kid — and that was good. As happy as I was to be working with Scavullo, that was not my life.

My husband fasts and hikes on Yom Kippur without trail mix, and then he comes home and sits in a chair until I can give him some orange juice at 5 o’clock.