It's odd, this feeling I have before meeting Zoë Foster Blake. It's not the jitters you get before meeting a personal hero. I'm a fan of hers, sure. I follow the author and skincare entrepreneur on Instagram, like 433,000 other Australians, mostly women. I think she's incredibly witty. I've even bought stuff she's recommended. When she nominated Napoleon Perdis's The One Concealer as her favourite little tub of blemish-erasing make-up, I ordered it online. When, in 2012, she said rosehip oil was "probably the best anti-ageing tool on earth", I bought that, too (don't get excited: she's since changed her mind). I even ordered a book for my two-year-old – a cheeky take on Little Red Riding Hood – that she's been reading to her two-year-old, Sonny.
So I'm a fan, yes, but I am not one of those many women who, only half-jokingly, call themselves Zoë Foster Blake "stalkers" in her Instagram comments. I spot the dark-timber facade of Foster Blake's multimillion-dollar modern home, down a bluestone laneway in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Richmond, and I realise this is not girl crush-nervousness. It's that odd, extremely modern feeling of meeting, for the first time, someone you think you know well. I know Foster Blake because she shares, or seems to share, so much of her life on Instagram: her Gold Logie-winning husband, radio funny-man Hamish Blake; Sonny's dreamy-eyed cuteness; postcard-perfect holidays in Queenstown and the Maldives and Florence; meetings with the screenwriters of Channel Ten's The Wrong Girl, an adaptation of her latest novel. Even the contents of her fridge.
As I reach her security gate, I'm about to cross the fourth wall, to step from the partial truth of the internet, where Foster Blake is an unfailingly witty, smart and happy fixture, to the real flesh-and-blood person. And there she is to buzz me in, smiling at the top of the stairs. As the woman herself captioned a particularly stunning Instagram of Sydney Harbour recently: "Hand me my needles! I must make a tapestry of this at once."
If you doubt that Zoë Foster Blake is the young-women whisperer, consider this. The 36-year-old in 2014 launched her own natural skincare company called Go-To – itself a type of madness. After all, the cosmetics industry is a market bursting with millions of products pushed by global companies: L'Oréal, Olay, Neutrogena, Dove. And yet, two years on, Go-To employs 17 people and can barely keep up with demand. Customers bought 3000 tubes of its tinted lip gloss on its launch day earlier this year and it sold out three days later, with no paid advertising in traditional media. ("It will soothe, protect and nourish," reads the back of the tube. "It will not wash the dishes.") Most of the marketing is left to customers, Foster Blake's loyal followers, who post pictures of her peach-toned products all over social media.
In early September, women crammed into a 600-seat venue at the Melbourne Showgrounds – spilling into the aisles and around the stage – to hear Foster Blake at 9 to Thrive, an event that included appearances by fitness guru Michelle Bridges and Mamamia founder Mia Freedman. Foster Blake was by far the most popular speaker. "We were absolutely blown away by the number of people who packed in to see Zoë speak," says organiser Olivia Ruello, the Australian chief executive of networking community Business Chicks.
It appears that the Foster Blake appeal is about authenticity. In the beauty, style and celebrity world – a universe often full of fakery, hidden sponsorship deals and empty-headed consumerism – Foster Blake remains real, and has done so from the beginning, with Fruity Beauty, the semi-anonymous blog she started in 2006 while working in magazines. "You get the sense," says Tim Burrowes, founder of marketing website Mumbrella, "that you are seeing the real person with Zoë."
How does Foster Blake balance commercial interests and remain such a trusted influencer? Particularly when she leads such a frankly sumptuous life? Her "mushy-pea-green" front door, as Foster Blake calls it, is one of the few unloved architectural flourishes the couple inherited from the previous owners, who had Grand Designs Australia document the construction of the home. The result is spectacular: rooftop views of the Melbourne Cricket Ground and city, a cellar, even a wine prep room.
All is quiet in the house. Sonny is upstairs napping; the nanny, who comes three days a week while Foster Blake works from home, is having a break. We go into the sitting room where the words "I love my bastard" run along a wall in red cursive neon (an in-joke between the couple). On another wall is a rainbow of a bookshelf, with novels clustered according to spine colour. Through the window, bare-armed workmen roam, building a structure over the pool to provide shade and privacy (the latter being one of the couple's current bugbears, but more on that later).
I'm keen to know how the whole Instagram thing works. If I had a product, for example, how would I get her to post about it? "I just say no," she says immediately. "I go out of my way not to do sponsored posts." Foster Blake is in one of her signature outfits, slightly zany but carefully fashionable: black pants and a grey knit over a frilly-collared Miu Miu blouse of printed unicorns. She bought her sneakers – a sparkly ladybird on one, a pineapple on the other – from the Gucci flagship store in Italy "because it was heaven" (I look them up later: $620 a pair).
I assumed she was paid for some endorsements, so to hear that she's not is a mind-bending moment. But hang on, I recall Instagram posts spruiking yoghurt. "That was an ambassadorship!" she says, about her role with Yoplait. In an ambassadorship, she explains, she becomes the face of the product, contractually. This includes marketing and advertising duties and maybe three or four Instagram posts. She now says she wouldn't do something like the yoghurt again – it made her look too commercial to her devoted followers – but she says she's proud of her other ambassadorships, for Bonds sportswear (with Blake) and travel company Expedia.
Media Watch recently took Foster Blake to task for posting about her fridge of Youfoodz ready-to-eat meals. But she didn't get paid for her glowing review, as she pointed out in the post. The fridge full of food was, however, provided to Foster Blake for free. Youfoodz is not alone. Hundreds of companies send Foster Blake free stuff in the hope they will score an Instagram mention. "When we got home from hospital with Sonny, the house was full of [free] stuff," she says. "It is lovely, and we don't take any of it for granted. But we don't need it."
She sees Instagram as a "recommendations platform" and her posting of products "a service" to save women money and time. It's also, she says, a "caption competition" for her wit (picture of Sonny in cap: "Mum and Dad went to NYC and all I got was this shitty hat and lifelong abandonment issues"). Yes, she will post about some free stuff, she says, but she will also spruik the $7 bag of coconut chips she found "as a normal human being" at the local supermarket.
Why would I suddenly go, 'Here's me with no bra and greasy, spotty skin, just to show you I'm human.' You know I'm human.
In the early 1970s, novelist David Foster was playing drums in a Canberra jazz band. He was a gifted young scientist, but preferred writing (he went on to win the 1997 Miles Franklin Award for The Glade Within the Grove). He was married with three small children, but ran away with the band's beautiful singer Gerda Busch, who had two small children of her own. In 1974, they settled in Bundanoon, in NSW's Southern Highlands. "She was a glamorous nightclub singer and I was the drummer in the band. Familiar story, isn't it?" says Foster, 72, on the phone from the property where he still lives. Busch and Foster married and had another three children – daughter Antigone, 41, who is a singer and musician, son Levi, 40, a DJ and events company manager, and five years later, Zoë, the youngest of what had turned into a Brady Bunch tribe of eight. "I was basically raised by wolves or my siblings," Foster Blake says with a laugh.
The family lived in a century-old sandstone house with no TV. Money was tight: they survived on Foster's writing grants and Busch's job as a drug and alcohol worker at a men's prison, where she still works at 70. Processed sugar – or "white death" as Gerda called it – was banned, and they ate only what their property provided. Young Zoë was unimpressed, though she now calls it a "supremely fortunate childhood".
Foster Blake has described her father while she was growing up as dramatic, loud and "a bit terrifying". But she now clarifies this: he was just trying to live the writer's life with "kids everywhere", she says. "We were just jerks. We were loud, we fought constantly. I get it now."
Father and daughter are both novelists, but they don't really read each other's books. Foster Blake's four novels are all unapologetically commercial, following perky, lip-glossed protagonists overcoming various romantic hurdles. The critics don't like them much. "Sentences inflate into paragraphs with incessant and pointless inventories of outfits, hairstyles and shades of lipstick," sniffed one about Playing the Field. "I'm not writing for them," she shrugs.
Some of her father's writing, on the other hand, is so highbrow as to be almost unreadable – and he admits this. His novels tackle themes such as the decline of Christianity and the destructive nature of male sexuality. "She struggles with my work and I struggle with hers, to be fair," says Foster. (I found the first chapters of both father and daughter's novels to be pretty difficult.)
"The thing we have in common seems to be wit, which is different to humour," continues Foster. "Zoë has it in a people-friendly form and I have it in a vicious, satirical form." Foster is proud but also "surprised" at his daughter's success. With typical bluntness, he says, "I didn't see her as particularly outstanding at school. She wasn't as academically successful as her brothers and sisters even."
By high school, Foster Blake wanted to escape Bundanoon. She dreamed of "shiny and glossy" Sydney. The day after her year 12 results, Foster Blake flung her things into her boyfriend's ute. "I remember Dad following me down the driveway and he was like, 'You haven't finished your lunch! Where are you going?' There was something driving me." She moved into a Coogee share house and deferred an arts degree. But that year – 1998 – turned out to be the loneliest 12 months of her life.
Foster Blake does not know why she deferred university. (She eventually went on to complete a media and communications degree at the University of NSW.) "It was a really lonely, horrible year," she says. "I had no money. The only friend I had was my grandma. I did telemarketing and night packing at Coles." It was a big year of lessons, about having no money and working "shitty jobs". In December that year, Foster Blake became a Benson & Hedges girl, selling cigarettes in night clubs. One night she met NRL star Craig Wing, who was soberly minding his friends' coats. In their decade together, Wing played four grand finals with the Sydney Roosters and was dubbed one of rugby league's sexiest footballers ("She could always pull the alpha males," notes her father). Says Foster Blake: "To me, he was heaven and we were a lovely couple for a while there."
But being a WAG was not all glamour and red carpet (she fictionalised her experience in Playing the Field). She read newspaper reports about Wing being seen with swimwear models. Insecurity festered. And she didn't like the macho culture. "I saw that trinity of pack mentality, wealth and popularity and it was just a bit of a monster. I wasn't very happy in that world." They broke up in 2009.
In 2004, when Zoë Foster was 23, she met Hamish Blake, then 21, at a "horrible men's deodorant launch thing". They instantly became friends. Blake tells me on the phone: "I had never met anyone like her – confident, hilarious, obviously beautiful and very full of fun and life. I've come to know it as the Zoë magic." For years they were friends. Foster was with Wing, Blake with lawyer and actress Anna Jennings-Edquist. They even wrote a dating book together.
Then they found themselves single in 2010. There were no fireworks (and at first, Foster Blake says, no physical attraction to Blake: "No offence, honey!"). There was just a slow realisation that, when Blake wasn't in Sydney, she missed him more than was normal. "We had a few conversations and it slowly unravelled," she says. Slowly, or quite quickly, really: they married in December 2012. "I love Zo," Blake says, using his nickname for her, "and I probably didn't compliment her enough on the salmon she cooked the other night, which was excellent."
The Foster Blakes have become one of Australia's best-known celebrity couples, so it's no surprise the paparazzi often hide down their laneway. It's distressing and, they say, getting worse. Websites such as Mamamia, the Daily Mail and Buzzfeed copy photos of Sonny – anything actually – from the Foster Blakes' social media accounts and repackage it as news, making them look, the couple says, like they are "oversharing".
The typical Buzzfeed list – 29 Times Hamish Blake's Son Was The Cutest Kid You've Ever Seen – makes Foster Blake's blood boil: "I think it's gross." She knows the counter-argument: if she doesn't want the Sonny shots used, don't post them. "I spend my life with this child; it would be weirder for me never to post a photo of him. And we are as sure as shit not exploiting him."
I'm reading Foster Blake's best-selling Amazinger Face, an update to 2011's Amazing Face. It's everything she learnt as a beauty editor at Cosmopolitan (then-editor-in-chief Mia Freedman gave her the gig based on what Foster Blake calls a "pretty ballsy" CV, with a fake quote from Rupert Murdoch). I've shunned most make-up since my daughter's birth two years ago because eczema took up residence on my sleep-deprived eyelids. Most days I look like a panda with conjunctivitis. Reading Amazinger Face is a re-entry into the world of make-up and I feel weighed down by it.
I go slightly bonkers as I immerse myself in Foster Blake's beauty advice. To "briefly" look after my 42-year-old skin, Amazinger Face suggests 12 tasks including antioxidants each morning, growth factors and peptide serums. I wake at night contemplating tubular mascaras (they smudge less) and fret that I haven't been using a tongue scraper (she picked this habit up while attending a transcendental meditation course). I become anxious about my neglected décolletage, having not realised my face ends at my boobs (a Foster Blake motto). Like a fool, I thought it ended at my chin.
Reading Amazinger Face from front to back is probably a mistake. ("It's a dip-in, dip-out book!" Foster Blake admonishes me later). But I find myself focusing on the skin of a male colleague, noting its uneven tone and blemishes. That's probably because, unlike me, he isn't thinking about oils, serums and microdermabrasion. Doesn't Foster Blake think beauty is all a bit, you know, sexist? "I know, it is so unfair!" she says. But, she says, she enjoys the "girlie-girl" stuff. Her feminism, she says, is embodied in her beauty writing and in her femininity. "That's discarded as not a proper form of feminism," she says. "I call bullshit on that because we are all women. How we choose to show our strength and inspire other women is up to us. Confidence is a big thing for women and it does pertain to their appearance. You can say that it superficial, but it's not."
Foster Blake has certainly mastered the art of keeping up appearances. In the taxi on the way to the interview I can't find her in my Instagram feed. Then I remember: a few months ago I stopped following her because her life seemed unrelentingly perfect. It got too much. "Don't worry," she says when I confess. "I purge people from my Instagram all the time!"
She has blogged about her digestive issues, and her painful, pregnancy-induced inflammation of a pubic joint, but Foster Blake says she will never be one of social media's warts-and-all women who reveal themselves without make-up. "I am a beauty editor. I take pride in my appearance," she says. "Yeah, I'm editing. But that's always who I have been. Why would I suddenly go, 'Here's me with no bra and greasy, spotty skin, just to show you I'm human.' You know I'm human.
"And also," she continues, "I do live a really good life. I feel like it would be almost disingenuous to pretend otherwise. I have shit going on that I could write to elicit sympathy but I don't want to. I'm not using it as a platform for that. I am using it to make people feel better." Her brand, and Blake's brand, is fun. "Sonny makes a lot of people really happy. My husband makes people laugh. Go-To makes people happy."
Later, Foster Blake emails more thoughts. An envelope had arrived that afternoon containing an affirmation from her mother (Busch regularly sends these to her kids). "I choose my emotions more deliberately towards my greatest joy, my greatest clarity, my greatest fun," it reads. Foster Blake was raised on her mother's belief that the subconscious mind is powerful, and that you can manifest what you want. "That might be the deeper reason I choose to showcase the shiny, fun stuff," Foster Blake writes. "It's kind of how I've always chosen to live life: being mindful that what I put out, I get back." A later email says: "Mum told me I was a very powerful manifestor when I was a kid, and so I've always believed I am."
Elle editor Justine Cullen describes her friend in what is a more familiar way: strategic, whip-smart and intolerant of fools. "Zoë really epitomises this rise of the nice girl. She's a great role model for Australian women." Foster Blake feels a growing responsibility to use her influence beyond beauty and fun. "You can't just pluck [a cause] out of the air," she says. "I fully expect it will come." (In a departure from her cheery persona, she recently tweeted about Canadian author Kelly Oxford's 1 Million Women campaign against sexual assault.)
Foster Blake is already an inspiring business mentor to young women. It's exciting to think about her wielding her influence on more than just lip-gloss selection. "You know," says her dad, "interviewers often say that they would love to hate Zoë, but they can't."
I have to agree.