Modern Living: Mirror, Mirror

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A few times every century, a great beauty is born. I am not one of them. But what nature skipped, I supplied—so much so that sometimes 1 cannot remember what is real and what is fake.

—Princess Luciana Pignatelli,

The Beautiful People's Beauty Book

It is not that the princess has a weak memory: even an IBM super multiprocessor system would be hard put to keep track of the surgical, spiritual, chemical and cosmetic chicanery credited with transforming her from what she calls "a lump" of a young girl into the "internationally renowned beauty" of today. Her nose has been bobbed, her eyelids lifted, her breasts treated with cell implants. Hypnosis, silicone injections, and mysterious processes she calls "diacutaneous fibrolysis" and "aromatotherapy"—all have somehow been fitted into a schedule already jampacked with appointments for facials and pedicures, yoga lessons and gym classes. In The Beautiful People's Beauty Book (McCall; $5.95), Luciana Pignatelli reveals the secrets and sham, pressures and rewards of a lifetime dedicated to pleasing that most demanding, unrelenting, infinitely precious of friends—the mirror.

Disastrous Union. Most of the princess's 36 years have been spent in the pursuit of beauty. But then, as she explains, "glamour can begin only when all the groundwork has been laid." For Luciana, the groundwork came early in adolescence, when "all legs and big feet, thick at the waist and thick in the nose," she was taken in hand by her half brother, Rodolfo Crespi (married to Consuelo Crespi of the best-dressed set). Rudi pushed lipstick, Consuelo set aside some best dresses, and at 18, Luciana was shuttled from Rome to London to have her nose fixed (the working model was a cross between Vivien Leigh's and Consuelo's). Six months later, she changed her name as well by marrying Prince Nicoló Pignatelli Aragona Cortes; the union was "a disaster" from which she emerged, 15 years later, with two children, one title and "a shattered ego."

To help rebuild it, she had silicone injections to fill out her cheeks and plastic surgery that lifted her upper eyelids but did nothing for her spirit. Hypnosis, yoga, cell implants and love affairs helped her morale, but by the end of one liaison Luciana realized, "I had really become very plain looking—almost nothing on my face, nothing on my nails, the most casual clothes." After another year during which she was "so bored I used to remove the hairs from my legs, one by one, with tweezers," Luciana went back to Rome to face facts and her mirror: beauty, after all, was her business. She became a fashion coordinator and beauty consultant to Eve of Roma, a cosmetic house, and that led directly to another husband: Eve's president, Burt Avedon.