Wednesday, November 16, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
Naomi saw it in under three seconds.
We were at Sant Ambroeus on Madison — our Wednesday lunch, the same corner table we’d had since I started eating there at twenty-five.
Naomi Park.
My closest friend in the city, which meant the person I trusted enough to be honest with and who trusted me enough to be blunt.
She ran a family office out of Midtown — $1.2 billion, three generations of Korean shipping money.
She was thirty, sharp, beautiful in the way that women who grew up with money and taste are beautiful: deliberate, maintained, aware.
Five foot six, slim, dark hair cut in a bob that she had blown out twice a week, skin that she managed with a dermatologist in the West Village and a monthly laser appointment.
I walked in wearing a stone-coloured The Row cashmere turtleneck — fitted, the kind that cost $1,400 and looked like it cost $400 and felt like it cost nothing because the cashmere was so soft it disappeared — tucked into high-waisted charcoal Brunello Cucinelli trousers.
Black suede Aquazzura Purist pumps, ninety millimetres.
My hair was down.
The gold chain.
No other jewellery.
The turtleneck was fitted enough to show my body — the waist, the hips, the breasts.
The breasts especially.
A turtleneck on a 34DD was a statement whether you intended it or not.
The fabric clung to the upper curve, stretched across the fullest point, and settled into the line where the underwire of the new La Perla sat.
I hadn’t intended the statement.
I’d just wanted something warm and clean and simple.
The body underneath the sweater had made the editorial decision for me.
Naomi looked up from her phone as I sat down.
She looked at my face.
Her expression changed.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Eliana.
What did you do to your face.”
“I’m not wearing makeup.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.
I’m asking what you did to your skin.
You look—” She stopped.
Leaned forward.
Studied me the way she studied financial statements — line by line, looking for the discrepancy.
“You look like you’ve been Photoshopped.
In person.
I can see your pores and they’re gone.
They’re literally gone.”
“It’s a new product.”
“What product.”
“I can’t tell you yet.”
“Eliana.”
“I can’t.”
She sat back.
Picked up her espresso.
Looked at me over the rim.
“Your hair is thicker,” she said.
“Your skin looks wet.
Not oily — wet, like you just washed your face and it stayed that way.
Glass.
And your boobs are bigger.”
I hadn’t expected that last one, although I should have.
Naomi noticed everything.
She noticed when a fund was up 2% before the quarterly report.
She noticed when a CEO’s tie was different from his usual brand.
She noticed when her cleaning lady used a different product on the bathroom counter.
“I’ve gained a little weight,” I said.
“You have not gained a little weight.
You’re the same size everywhere except your chest, which is at least a full cup bigger than the last time I saw you, and I saw you two weeks ago.” She set down the espresso.
“Did you get work done?
Quietly?
Because if you did, tell me who, because the result is extraordinary.”
“I didn’t get work done.”
“Then what.”
I looked at her across the small table.
Naomi, who knew everything about my professional life and most things about my personal one.
Naomi, who’d held my hand during a bad trade in 2014 and whom I’d held when her mother had been diagnosed and who had never, in five years of friendship, looked at me with the expression she was wearing now.
The expression was confusion layered over admiration layered over something that looked like envy and something deeper that looked like want.
“I’m working on something,” I said.
“A new venture.
The product I’m using is related.
I can’t share the details until the structure is finalised, but when I can, you’ll be the first call.”
“A venture.
You’re launching a beauty company.”
“A beauty and personal-care platform.”
“With what?
Because whatever is on your face right now doesn’t exist.
I spend—” She caught herself.
Started again.
“I have spent serious money on skincare.
Serious.
La Prairie, Augustinus Bader, the Barbara Sturm clinic.
I’ve done microneedling, I’ve done PRP, I’ve done every laser that has an FDA clearance.
Nothing — nothing — has ever produced the result I’m looking at on your face.”
I almost told her.
The impulse was physical — a loosening in my chest, the need to share, the human pull toward showing someone the thing you’ve found.
I wanted to take out my phone and show her the five jars.
I wanted to tell her about the anti-aging compound and the glow serum and the breast firming and the hair and the body hair prevention.
I wanted to say: A man I met at the Pierre gave me these, and they work, and he wants me to run the company, and I’m going to, and the market is a hundred billion dollars and that’s conservative.
But I didn’t.
Because Lukas hadn’t authorised it, and I didn’t operate without authorisation on deals I hadn’t closed, and this was the biggest deal of my life.
“Stay tuned,” I said.
The same thing I’d said to Diana Chen.
Naomi looked at me for a long time.
Then she smiled — a tight, impressed smile, the smile of a woman who recognised a play when she saw one.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “I want in.”
“Noted.”
We ordered.
I had the branzino.
She had the chopped salad.
We talked about her fund’s Q4 positioning and a SPAC deal she was considering and a man she’d been seeing who worked at KKR and was handsome and attentive and entirely too interested in her family’s money.
Normal things.
Wednesday things.
But she kept looking at my face.
Between sentences, during silences, when she thought I wasn’t watching — her eyes would drift to my cheekbones, my jawline, the skin at my temples, the spot below my ear where the light was catching something that light didn’t usually catch.
* * *
I went back to the office at two.
Closed the door.
Pulled up the AURA model.
I’d been building this spreadsheet for three weeks.
Revenue projections, margin structures, distribution models, regulatory pathways — the full architecture of a company that didn’t exist yet, modelled on assumptions that I’d been refining every time Lukas revealed another detail.
The addressable market for prestige skincare alone was $180 billion globally.
That assumed a conventional product portfolio — serums, creams, treatments — sold through conventional channels at conventional price points.
But the products weren’t conventional.
They didn’t compete with La Mer or Augustinus Bader or any of the brands Naomi had listed.
They replaced them.
They made them irrelevant.
If the products performed on other women the way they’d performed on me — and I had no reason to believe they wouldn’t, because the science was either real or it wasn’t, and it was real, my body was the proof — then the pricing model was wrong.
Not too high.
Too low.
A product that actually did what every skincare product on the market promised to do was not a $200 serum.
It was a $2,000 serum.
Or a $5,000 subscription.
Or a membership model with recurring revenue that would make SaaS margins look modest.
I ran three new scenarios.
Membership-based, tiered pricing, geographically segmented rollout.
Conservative: $4 billion in year three.
Base: $12 billion.
Aggressive: $30 billion.
Thirty billion.
In a market that currently valued its best-performing brand — Estée Lauder — at $60 billion, on products that didn’t work.
I picked up my phone and called Lukas.
He answered on the second ring.
No greeting — he never greeted.
“I don’t need the last two weeks,” I said.
“I’ve run the numbers.
I’ve modelled the market.
I’ve seen what the products do.
I’m ready to formalise.”
Silence.
One second, two.
“You have two weeks left,” he said.
“I don’t need them.”
“The products aren’t finished.”
“Lukas.
My skin looks like it’s been retouched.
My breasts grew a cup size.
My body hair is gone.
My best friend just spent an hour staring at my face.
What else is there?”
“Two weeks.”
“Why ?”
Another silence.
Longer this time.
When he spoke, his voice was different — lower, quieter, and the tone carried something I hadn’t heard from him before.
Something that sounded less like a scientist holding to a protocol and more like a man making a decision.
“Because I want you to be certain,” he said.
“Not about the business.
About everything.”
The line went dead.
I put my phone on the desk and looked at it and felt the heat — the same heat, always the same heat — climb from my stomach to my chest to my throat.
About everything.
Two words that meant nothing specific and everything specific and I knew exactly what he meant and the knowing was a warmth that settled low in my body and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon while I modelled revenue curves and pretended the curves I was thinking about were on a spreadsheet.