How Zoë Foster Blake stole Hamish’s thunder
SHE used to be in the shadow of her husband Hamish Blake. But now hundreds of thousands of women hang on beauty maven Zoë Foster Blake’s every self-deprecating word.
Stellar
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SHOULD a well-meaning person happen to ask Zöe Foster Blake how she is, her mother would like her to reply, “Fantastic, and getting better.”
A positive answer, her mum believes, sets the tone for the day. The problem, though, is while it may be optimistic, it’s not always true. Foster Blake, 37, has two children under five, she’s an author, and she runs a cosmetics empire.
Her hands are full to overflowing and at times she doesn’t feel terribly “fantastic”. “I’m like, ‘I don’t think I can say that, Mum,’” she tells Stellar.
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“I’ve realised in this last year that two kids is a lot harder than one — I think any mum would agree — and I’ve just gone, ‘I’ve taken on too much’... There’s a cost to all of this; there’s a sacrifice to your health, to your family and the quality of your work, so I don’t know if it’s that aspirational. I didn’t set out as a 15-year-old to go, ‘One day, I’m going to try and do everything in one day — and be absolutely exhausted at the end of it.’”
It’s an honest admission from someone whose 652,000 Instagram followers would love nothing more than to be just like Foster Blake — to have two gorgeous babies, a blossoming career and a husband, Hamish and Andy ’s Hamish Blake, who is so devoted he is willing to make a video of himself wearing one of her face masks and send it to his own 876,000 followers.
Exhausted as she might be, Foster Blake’s life is about to get busier. Soon, she will launch her cosmetics brand, Go-To, in US stores in partnership with the Sephora chain. As she readily admits, “No-one knows me or cares over there.”
Her years building a personal brand — as a magazine beauty editor, columnist, author, prolific social media publisher and wife of one of the country’s best-loved larrikins — will mean nothing.
Her positivity as she takes on this mammoth task suggests she might be her mother’s daughter after all. “I don’t think I’ve got anything to lose, but a lot to gain — if you do it right,” she says. “It’s just a huge time for us. We’re taking over the world. Well, maybe just Australia... or one Sephora store.”
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As recently as 2012, Foster Blake was best known to many as the beauty editor who married Hamish. But not to a legion of young women, who were crazy about her. They loved her relationship column in Cosmopolitan magazine, her beauty tips on then-blog Fruity Beauty, and her novels.
Off the back of more books, more make-up, and a knack for social media, her fame has grown to the point where Foster Blake is as well-known as her husband, and her followers even more ardent.
“It used to be people would run up to us and go ‘I love Gap Year,’” Foster Blake says. “Now they’re like, ‘Excuse me, I’d just like to get to Zöe and talk about her lip balm,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes!’”
The usually Melbourne-based Foster Blake meets Stellar at a boutique hotel in Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. She wears a hot-pink chiffon Camilla and Marc frock, and her hair has been styled into a shoulder-length, fringe cut straight from the frames of Flashdance. It’s fun, cheeky and on-trend — much like Foster Blake, who has parked herself beneath a peach-coloured speech bubble her team has hung on the wall. It reads: “Holy sh*t you look amazing”.
Thursdays are good days to sit down with Foster Blake to talk beauty — it’s what she calls a “Go-To day”. Tuesdays, she says, are book days, Mondays and (most) Wednesdays are spent with her daughter Rudy, who turns one this coming week. Thursdays and Fridays stay focused on her skincare line, and Saturday mornings — if she’s lucky — are put aside for her to spend writing.
That’s plenty of plates in the air already. But there’s one more to throw into the mix: her social media presence, which not only ensures that Foster Blake and her products are talked about, but also that the conversation around them stays on her terms.
“I feel like the joy of Go-To is that I get to be the Don Draper I always wanted to be,” she says. “I love marketing and advertising and playing with words, and to have a brand is great. But to also be able to control the messages and the fun around it is absolutely my favourite part.”
She shares images of herself, Blake, their two children and her cat, an exotic shorthair named Meowbert. Her great talent, however, is turning a dull corporate plug into something worth reading. Take a recent lunch promoting women in tech. “Without modern technology,” she wrote, “my D2C skincare business couldn’t exist, my public mouthpiece (Instagram/blog/Twitter) would be enormously limited and inflexible, and my ability to buy shoes very quickly from another country would dissolve.”
Social media, she says, lets her shape the message. “You get to choose how your baby news gets announced now — you don’t have to wait for someone else to do it, that’s out of your control and you’re caught unaware,” she says. “That doesn’t seem fair to me.”
Many of her posts incite dozens of laughing emojis in their comments, but Foster Blake takes the platform seriously and feels a keen sense of responsibility towards her followers. “You say ‘Buy this lipstick’ and they’re going to go and do it, so it has to be a good lipstick. I don’t put anything up there willy-nilly, I have to really use it [and] like it.”
Not everyone is a fan of her Instagram posts. In 2016, Foster Blake and her family became the focus of a debate about “sharenting”, a term coined to describe the act of oversharing children’s images and information by parents via social media.
“We are as sure as sh*t not exploiting him,” Foster Blake hit back at the time, referring to Sonny, four, who still makes regular appearances on his mother’s feed.
Two years on, her thoughts on the issue haven’t changed. “I’ve always just said it would be disingenuous to pretend these two humans don’t take up most of my day and my heart and my life,” she explains. “I think we’re pretty reserved but we just go, ‘This is our life,’ like we do with everything. We’re writers and entertainers and Hame’s a speaker, so it’s inevitable that we share.”
The photogenic family is now headed on a long vacation, with stops in Italy and the US. There will be no social media hiatus.
“Hell no!” she exclaims. “You get your best content on holidays. It was talked about and I’m like, ‘Hmmm.’ But I’m not going to be on email. For me it’s a good ‘off’ time to be on social media, and just mindlessly scrolling; sometimes you don’t want to dive into your novel on the beach. You want to see what the rest of the world is doing.”
Former magazine doyenne Mia Freedman was first to spot Foster Blake’s potential, when she offered the then 23-year-old the role of beauty editor at Cosmopolitan in 2004. “I knew she was talented and had a unique voice, and the beauty editor chair was the one that most often led to becoming an editor,” the co-founder of Mamamia Media Company tells Stellar.
“When I tried to push her in that direction, though, she told me in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t interested, which floored me. She said she wanted to stay being creative and had no interest in being a manager. I was impressed that her ambition wasn’t linear. It was lateral.”
Foster Blake’s unique approach to beauty — injecting humour and frivolity into a subject often treated by women’s magazines with dead seriousness — quickly endeared her to the magazine’s readers.
“Beauty was very not fun back then,” Foster Blake recalls. “It was more like, ‘We’ll tell you what to do and what to use,’ and I think I came into it going, ‘It’s allowed to be fun, and funny.’ I think the best way to get people to learn stuff, and the sneakiest way — and I do a lot of teaching, from beauty to relationships — is to educate through fun and humour.”
Foster Blake’s disinterest in management has not changed, and she openly admits it’s not her strong suit, anyway. “I love people but it doesn’t mean I’m any good at managing them,” she shrugs. “There are managers and makers, and I’m a maker. They’re different sides of the brain.”
Writing is, Foster Blake says, in her veins. Her father, David Foster, is a Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novelist. Lipsticks and eye palettes, on the other hand, were an acquired taste — cosmetics and skincare were not a part of her childhood growing up in a blended family in Bundanoon, a small town in NSW’s Southern Highlands.
“I think boredom was probably what propelled me to get out of there more than anything,” she says. “I love that town, and I’m grateful for that. Because we had no TV, we were forced to use our imagination.”
She is unapologetic about her love of make-up, but it’s words, she says, that will be at the core of any undertaking. “Writing just never felt like work, so even when I’m writing a book, it’s a pleasure, and the less time I have, it’s like a secret pleasure. To be able to go to my office and just write... it’s like shopping to me.”
Foster Blake is gearing up for Go-To’s global launch. Her products have already landed on the US Sephora website and will head to more than 400 of its North American retail stores next month. She is also in the midst of fielding global publishing deals for her children’s book No One Likes A Fart, working on a new non-fiction book and raising a family.
If all goes according to plan and American women fall in love with Go-To’s Exfoliating Swipeys, Very Useful Face Cream and Transformazing masks, Foster Blake has a long list of to-dos in reserve.
She’s considering television again, two years after her novel The Wrong Girl was adapted into the Network Ten show of the same name. But she’s conscious of her workload, and making sure she doesn’t miss out on precious time with her kids. So, she finally admits, she is willing to let a ball drop from time to time.
“Trying to do it all,” she says, “is a bad idea.”