Former Police Officer Refines the Quick Draw : Makeup: Newport Beach entrepreneur says her basic ‘universal color’ kits can reduce a woman’s application time to 5 minutes with good behavior.

As an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, Adrienne Brennan would keep a stash of makeup in her locker and a lipstick tucked into the sock of her uniform.

Brennan, who felt that wearing makeup helped her retain her femininity while working her beat, learned to put on her cosmetics in a hurry.

Today the Newport Beach resident, retired from police work, has parlayed her quickie makeup maneuvers into a new cosmetics line--a venture that has earned her the nickname “the cosmetic cop.” Brennan has created “Your Face in Five by Adrienne,” a cosmetics kit designed to help women whittle their makeup routine to five minutes.

“I’m not a makeup artist,” she says. “I’ve never gone to [cosmetology] school. I’m a wife and a mother. My gift is that I’m very well organized.”

A disorganized makeup drawer is a key reason why a woman spends so long on her makeup. She has to dig through piles of cosmetics for brushes and vials of powder. Many cosmetics even come with opaque lids, so they have to be opened to see what’s inside.

“Most women spend 20 to 30 minutes on their makeup,” Brennan says. “Or they say they don’t have time to wear it.”

Brennan’s kit folds out into an artist’s palette so that all of the shadows, blushes and powders are right at the fingertips.

Using the kit is supposed to be so simple that, like Brennan, you don’t need to be a makeup artist to use it. Too often, Brennan says, women come home with a pile of new makeup after a professional make-over and have little luck duplicating what the makeup artist did in the studio.

“The cosmetics industry has created a myth, an aura, that makeup is complicated. It isn’t,” Brennan says. “I’m trying to take the intimidation out of makeup.”

As cosmetic companies continued to expand their lines, offering a vast array of foundations, blushes and shadows for every skin tone, Brennan’s system bucks the trend toward specialized makeup.

“Women are so bogged down with ‘These are fall colors, and these are winter colors, and these are warm colors, and these are cool colors,’ ” she says. “Who understands that if you’re not an art student? A color is a color. It looks good on you or it doesn’t.”

To simplify makeup, Brennan has narrowed the choices to a small palette of universal cosmetics that she says work on all skin tones.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re white, black or Hispanic. Your foundation is the only thing that needs to change,” she says.

In Brennan’s system, the eye shadows come in neutral hues of taupe, brown, beige and slate. The foundation, a sponge-on powder, is the only item that varies from kit to kit, and it’s available in four shades.

“You don’t need 32 foundation colors,” Brennan says.

Many people in the cosmetics industry would disagree.

“From our perspective, the most basic part of your cosmetic routine is that the foundation match your skin tone exactly,” says Nikki Gersten, spokeswoman for Prescriptives in New York City. “I can’t imagine just four [foundation] colors. We have about 130 different shades of foundation. You have to offer a broad range because there’s a huge variety of skin tones and ethnicities.”

Brennan says that not only can all women wear one of her four foundations, they can also pick from just two blushes contained in her kit, a deep mauve shade and a warmer brick hue. She argues that most women look good in the two shades of lipsticks she’s selected--a mauve and bright red--but admits that some women might want to substitute their own lipsticks.

“I’m not saying only wear this lipstick, but these colors are universal to all women,” she says.

A black woman from Irvine was skeptical of wearing the bright red lip color until Brennan tried it on her lips during her five-minute make-over. She ended up loving the color.

While makeup artists might spend 45 minutes on a client, Brennan makes over her clients in five minutes. She first speedily covers the entire face with a powder foundation using a small sponge. Brennan says the foundation usually provides enough coverage to hide circles under the eyes--no extra concealers are used. She then sweeps a powder blush onto the cheeks.

“Women worry so much about what is the right place to put their blush. I tell them, ‘You have a cheek. That’s where you put it. You’re going to be blending it anyway.’

“Makeup is not a tattoo. If you make a mistake, you can fix it.”

The foundation and blush take about a minute.

Next, Brennan uses a small, stiff brush and fills in the brows with powder, picking an eye shadow that matches the hair or eyebrow color. The same brush is dipped in shadow again and used to line the lower eyelids.

“I never use a pencil, but some women are married to them,” Brennan says.

Eye shadow is brushed over the cleft of the eye, just above the lids and below the brow bone.

“Use any color darker than your skin,” she says. She lightly applies mascara, and the eyes are done in under three minutes.

The final step: Line the lips with a sharp pencil, add lipstick and blend. As promised, she’s done in five minutes.

Brennan made her first “Face in Five” prototype kit three years ago. Since then she has sold 10,000 kits for $79 on infomercials aired on Orange County cable TV and through an 800 line. Response has been so good, she says, that she has temporarily pulled the infomercial to stock up on kits.

Her next goal: to produce a 30-minute infomercial to run nationwide. She also wants to market her kits overseas. A major retailer has asked to meet with her to discuss carrying her kits, although Brennan says that selling her less-is-more makeup system side by side with huge cosmetic lines might pose a conflict.

“I’m selling the exact opposite of what most cosmetic companies are selling,” she says.