When Allure magazine comes to town, women listen.
Once a year, the beauty mag’s editor-in-chief Linda Wells treks across the U.S., leaving New York behind to spend an evening in Los Angeles wooing a bevy of Hollywood’s “A,” “B,” and even “C” list beauties into remembering that the pages of Allure are the place to be seen. It didn’t seem to be a tough sell to get the glamour girls out on the town for a dinner at the ultra-chic West Hollywood restaurant Dominick’s.
“I’ve never met Linda Wells, and I wanted to come and say ‘Hi,'” Jenna Elfman explained, then added one of the more salient points of the invite. “Plus, I’ve heard that the food at this restaurant is delightful, so I’m very excited about eating, because I love to eat.”
But for every fit and beautiful Jenna Elfman-type in the packed crowd, there were an equal number of the super-skinny scary ingenues, the ones that make you want to force-feed them. Lindsay Lohan of Herbie: Fully Loaded fame looked like a shadow of her former self, as did her posse of blonde clone pals that kept her surrounded all night, while Grey’s Anatomy up-and-comer Ellen Pompeo was downright skeletal.
Nicole Richie gushed over the magazine, saying, “I love Allure. I’ve shot with them before, and they are amazing. I love the magazine, and so I obviously wanted to come,” but didn’t mention food, as she obviously hasn’t eaten since she and Paris Hilton broke up their Simple Life friendship a couple of months ago. She’s so skinny it hurts.
Happily, we spotted some other Hollywood females at the posh party who haven’t succumbed to the no-food ingenue diet. Looking great and actually eating the ahi tuna and portobello mushroom appetizers were girls who have grown up on screen before our eyes into slim, beautiful young women. Michelle Trachtenberg, Jessica Biel, Alyson Hannigan, Emmy Rossum, and Sara Foster are women who haven’t yet felt the need to give up their healthy lives in order to meet some weird desire to be ultra thin.
A few lucky guys braved the mostly-female gathering, including Ryan Seacrest, Joshua Jackson, Aaron Eckhart, David Spade, and Dylan McDermott; and of course they all ate like normal people when they weren’t chatting up a good-looking gal. There were the beauty creators along for the fun, too, including John Paul DeJoria and his wife Eloise (the two who are better known as John Paul Mitchell Systems), makeup artist Troy Jensen (who was tapped to do Linda Wells’ makeup for the big event), and celebrity hairstylist and salon owner Chris McMillan.
Ironically, those skinny-minnies in the glam crowd probably didn’t have the strength to lift the humongous goodie bags that the clever Allure folks actually had the valets put into partygoers cars before they brought them out. The product-packed canvas tote easily weighed fifty pounds; you needed a solid meal and some serious strength to lift that ultimate swag bag out of the car!
