Photo by Andrei Taranchenko

Want to know who does Megan Fox’s hair & makeup? What PR company handles Laura Mercier cosmetics? Need to find an organic lip product for a story or shoot? Product placement for a gift bag? TheLookbook, a killer directory for fashion PR contacts and celebrity stylists, have just added a beauty division with more than a thousand beauty brand PR contacts and the top hair stylists & makeup artists working in the industry.

Beauty is currently in a BETA format, so you can access BEAUTY contacts free until Friday, so test it out. If you are a PR Firm, hair stylist or make up artist and are  are interested in being listed, please contact beautyeditor@thelookbook.com.

For more information about TheLookBook, have a listen to the PR Couture podcast with co-founder Kristin Calavas

Purple Lab NYC caught PR Couture’s interest as the young brand made full creative use of social media including Twitter, Facebook. blogging and video blogging to launch their first product, Huge Lips Skinny Hips, a moisturizing lip gloss plumper made with Hoodia, a natural appetite suppressant.

Learn from your community

Founder Karen Robinovitz is a former beauty journalist who won’t release a product unless it replaces every other product in her make up drawer. Karen is a big fan of traditional media and not ready to give up her glossies, but has also been promoting the benefits of social media for the last several years. When it came to launching Purple Lab, Karen knew that social media had reached it’s tipping point, and that being authentic and accessible through social media was a necessary and viable means to build the Purple Lab brand.

Karen also believes in the immense value in the feedback (positive or negative) and questions that come out of this kind of engagement. Case in point, Purple Lab requested favorite color swatches from women through Twitter. Now, they are working on creating shades of lip color based on those swatches and are naming the new colors after the contributor’s twitter name! Purple Lab’s latest video, which shows each Huge Lips Skinny Hips color being worn by women of different ethnicities,  provides visual insight into how the colors work on different skin tones, and was the result of receiving many emails asking this very question.

Read more

TheLookbook, a searchable database for brands, public relations firms, stylists and celebrities, will be launching a Beauty and Makeup Artist division in the Fall of 2009. In preparation, founders Kristin Calavas and Rhonda Richford have hired Shannon Levy, former Managing Editor of Makeup Artist magazine, as Beauty Director. Levy is also a Contributing Editor for On Makeup magazine and will continue in this capacity while working as Beauty Director for TheLookbook.  Prior to her tenure at Makeup Artist, she was a beauty reporter and contributor at InStyle magazine.

For more information about The Lookbook, check out this PR Couture post and podcast with co-founder Kristin Calavas and skim the following below:

Information available through TheLookbook includes:

• Current information for public relations and sample requests contacts at major fashion houses, including email addresses.
• Comprehensive listings of fashion public relations firms and their current clients.
• Up-to-date stylist information including agency information and a list of celebrity clients.
• Celebrities’ stylist information and notes on fashion or beauty endorsement contracts.
• A fashion Keyword search to enable professionals to call in items for shoots using common terms such as “jeans,” “bikinis,” or “menswear.”
• A Stylist Keyword search to enable users to find celebrity endorsements or contracts using brands such as “L’Oreal” or “Neutrogena.”
• TheLookbook’s red carpet credits blog that list comprehensive outfit red carpet credits for celebrities, with a search function to review a celebrity’s history.