Glamour Babes

The mothers are ambivalent. Some say their daughters would be trying on makeup at home if they weren't trying it on here. Some say this is okay, but only on special occasions. Some say this place troubles them, but so does the notion of banning something because that might cause their girls to want it more. ("I wish they were excited about a Lego party," says mom Rebecca deGuzman. "Do they have to show their bellies?")

Some of them, like Leigh Wilson, say, "Oh, Natalie! You look beautiful!"

Natalie Wilson is 4. She's here for the birthday of her older sister, who's turning 6. Earlier, she had her makeup done: blue eye shadow and lip gloss. For a while, she keeps rubbing her lips together, feeling the strange stickiness. She holds her hands out from her sides to keep her blue nail polish from getting on her clothes. She wears a tight black sequined top.

Her grandmothers are here, too, admiring the scene.

"I would've loved it as a mom," one of the grandmothers says. "Somebody else does all the work."

A club counselor, Neva Amestica, 17, announces it's time for the girls to do the cha-cha slide and arranges the girls in the aisle. But when the music starts, Natalie toddles from her assigned spot, her belly sticking out. She whimpers at her mom, who picks her up.

(Behind the shelves, a glass perfume bottle falls, liquid bursting across the floor, the pink-feathered atomizer bulb flopping like a dead sparrow. A little girl stands very still beside it.)

A counselor sprinkles glitter she calls "fairy dust" on a little girl's head. She tells the girl to close her eyes and make a wish, and not to tell anyone what she wished for. What do little girls dream of? Something pink?

Sadly, the founder of Club Libby Lu, Mary Drolet, is not available to comment on the fantasies in her store. Drolet is a former executive at Montgomery Ward and for Claire's, which sells jewelry for girls. Her publicist says Drolet named this store after an imaginary childhood friend.

Drolet is going to do an interview and then she is abruptly not going to do an interview because, her publicist says, there was a scheduling mix-up and plus, she's leaving the country. This is after the publicist calls in a state of alarm one day. In some newspapers, Blaizgis says, Club Libby Lu has been the victim of a "feminist backlash." She says articles have suggested Club Libby Lu is "forcing girls to grow up too quickly." What she hopes to get across is the store's "sense of fun."

"We are about fun and play and pretend," Blaizgis explains another day. "And we offer that experience -- particularly around the birthday experience -- [we] really help provide and create that special day and that special memory. You only turn 7 or 8 years old once."

This is true. And there is something magical about the store, sweet-smelling and dusted with glitter, like candy for the soul. A spa for 6-year-olds! Of course! It was just a matter of time.