New York socialite Nancy Jarecki has put her husband's Moviefone fortune and her own reputation behind a surprising venture, a line of pubic hair dyes called Betty. Not only is she the company's ...

Nancy Jarecki, in true socialite style, is fashionably late for her appointment with Radar—not an easy accomplishment considering the interview is taking place in her living room. We're in the Upper East Side's posh Studio Building, where the neighbors include such silver-spooned residents as Wendy Vanderbilt Lehman. But when Nancy—wife of Moviefone cofounder and Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki—enters the room, apologizing profusely, it's immediately clear that she's no Vanderbilt. A tall mid-westerner who's one part Jerry Hall and one part Joan Cusack, Jarecki comes off as the kind of girl in high school who was as comfortable going to the prom with the captain of the football team as she was getting high with the metalheads.

The subject of the interview is Jarecki's new cosmetic brainchild, Betty, a line of pubic hair dyes, and she dives in without a moment's hesitation, explaining how she wants betty to double as both a name for her product and a polite term for one's nether regions. Vagina, pink taco, bearded clam, man in the boat ... this is not the language of the chattering classes—Jarecki's core demographic.

"Those words are all so ugly," she says, casually dressed in blue jeans and a Santa Fe style blouse-and-vest combo. "I wanted the name to be Traci Lords meets Doris Day. I wasn't gonna call it Private Parts. I wanted to create a comfort zone."

It's a funny conversation to be having in the luxurious house that Moviefone built. Decorated in Italian Renaissance style by a rotating cast of who's who in interior design—Daniel Romualdez, Dermot Robinson, and Muriel Brandolini—the apartment's dark walnut and mahogany walls are adorned with the art of Victor Muniz, Laddie Dill, Erica Ranee, and a 12-feet-tall portrait of Nancy by Ahn Duong, which, of course, can only fit on an interior dining room wall that's two stories high. And signalling an effort to exhibit taste that's not entirely new money, the living room houses a 1906 Steinway—a nod to the Studio Building's birth year—and, for that Brahmin touch, four furniture pieces plucked directly from Cornelius Vanderbilt's late nineteenth century Tiffany room. It's Jarecki's fine balance of class and crass that necessitates the PG-rated neologism she has brought to an otherwise racy conversation.

She offers an example of how her new phraseology can empower a room. "I was at a party last night where I took Betty as a gift for somebody. They opened it up and were like, 'Oh my god, is that blah-blah dye?' I said, 'It's color for the hair down there.' 'What's it called?' 'Betty.' 'So it's for your ... ?' 'It's for your betty.' From that point on, everybody just started talking about their betty. It happens all the time. They'll say, 'Wow, I just found a gray hair down there,' or, 'I haven't seen my betty in 20 years, but I feel like I want to do something with my betty.'"

"Do I have a betty?" I ask.

"Of course, men have betties, too. Everyone's got one!"

It all started in 2001, after the Jareckis sold their interest in Moviefone to AOL Time Warner for more than $600 million and moved to Rome for two years with the newly acquired fortune. While patronizing a salon there, Nancy noticed women with fresh dye-jobs leaving with what looked like doggie bags. "What are those?" she asked the receptionist. In hushed tones, she was told they were take-home bags of extra hair dye, so that, in private, women could match their pubic hair to their fresh coiffures. Brilliant, Jarecki thought, and went about researching the viability of marketing such a product commercially. Gynecologists were called, top New York salons were consulted, focus groups were assembled and, soon enough, interns were hired and BettyBeauty Inc. was born.

Retailing for $20 per kit, Betty comes in five colors, including black, brown, auburn, blonde, and, for the adventurous, hot pink. It is currently available on the BettyBeauty website, at high-end salons and spas, and in professional beauty supply stores (plans are also in the works to stock the shelves of Sephora and Nordstrom chains around the world). Extensive research by the BettyBeauty R&D team shows a market for pubic hair dye that is, by turns, both fashion and function: 62 percent of women aged 20 to 39 who routinely color their hair say they would try Betty, while 61 percent of women aged 40 to 60—including baby boomers enjoying sex lives well after their menopausal years—say they'd like to cover up those unsightly grays. With the U.S. hair care market worth $3.2 billion—$38 billion worldwide—there seems to be huge potential for a product that colors your naughty bits.

"I've heard about this idea in brainstorming sessions, and I'm sure it's come up in L'Oreal boardrooms," says Ben Greer, a high-powered sales and marketing consultant in the beauty industry and former chief marketing officer for Charles Worthington Hair Care. "But nobody's taken it to the next level. A lot of people might dismiss it as something that will never work, but [with the Brazilian craze fading], perhaps this is the time."

But what's far more interesting than the market potential for Betty is the unlikely person behind it. This is a woman whose baby shower was thrown by Diane Sawyer and who, when near Nashville, will pop in on Al and Tipper Gore for lunch. She has Uma Thurman, Candace Bushnell, and the Seinfelds on speed dial. Hence, when Nancy Jarecki speaks of matching the drapes and the carpet, you assume she's talking about interior decorating. It's akin to a Plum Sykes or a Tinsley Mortimer selling glow-in-the-dark condoms.

David Patrick Columbia of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, for one, isn't impressed by the venture. "It's as common as 7-Eleven stores," says Columbia of the army of well-heeled women launching fashion and beauty lines. "They don't want to be called socialites. They want to be called philanthropists or businesswomen. Tinsley Mortimer with the handbags, Nicky Hilton with hotels, the list goes on....

"But Tinsley Mortimer has a bigger name than the Jareckis do," adds Columbia with a touch of hauteur. "The Jareckis are only established on their fortune. It's not a name of influence. I mean, Nancy is out there; you can go to parties in the Hamptons and see her there. But she's no Jayne Wrightsman."

Still, there's no question that the Jareckis have some powerful friends, and they're not above bending some of those highly-influential ears. At a recent dinner with fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, a proud Andrew was heard to declare, "It's going to be bigger than Moviefone!"

The product passed one major test already. It came in the form of a breakfast meeting with the Prada-garbed devil herself, Anna Wintour. "When I was going to press agencies, to hire them to help me launch Betty, everyone was like, 'Hmmmm, Vogue will never do it. They don't deal with the area down there.'" But Jarecki had the pull to get a face-to-face, and she met with the editor, ostensibly to run a few thoughts by her. "One idea is definitely happening," she told Anna in a Condé Nast boardroom. Wintour was intrigued: "Okay, show me," she said. "I made her close her eyes, set out the product, and then told her to open them," Jarecki recalls. "Anna picked up the auburn ... and said, 'Clever, very clever.' She put it back down and was like, 'My, you have been a busy girl, haven't you.'"

The result was a four page feature in this month's Vogue. The uptown cabal at work?

"Even if you're a socialite," says marketing consultant Ben Greer, "Anna doesn't give you four pages."

In any event, when it comes to hocking her wares, rather than taking a page out of the Hilton playbook, Jarecki is taking cues from Si Sperling—the nebbishy pitchman who, in a stroke of marketing genius, coined the hit commercial catchphrase, "I'm not only the president of Hair Club for Men, I'm also a client." In conversations about her own true colors, Jarecki continually reverts back to the mantra, "I am a true blonde." It's always offered with a wink and an emphasis on the word am—a nod to the fact that looks can be deceiving. "It's a deception I'm playing with," Jarecki offers. "With Betty, all the blondes will now be true."

Of course, a hot pink pudendum would never be mistaken as natural, and there are plans to extend that part of the line. In the works are a St. Patrick's Day Betty (shamrock-green with a four-leaf-clover-shaped stencil included) and a Valentine's Day Betty (cherry-apple red). "The possibilities are endless," Jarecki enthuses. "Why not plaid?" And in a move that would add new meaning to the term Skate Betty, Jarecki entertains the idea of doing "a skate culture graphic." Perhaps a checkerboard skull and crossbones? "Sure! Look, I know there are people who are going to be buying it for a sex romp."

Which raises the inevitable question: Is Betty, er, edible?

"I get that question, a lot," says Jarecki. "And, 'If I'm having oral sex with my girlfriend, will it come off on my face?' Heterosexuals and homosexuals want to know if it rubs off during intercourse the more you perspire. The answer is: It doesn't come off if you engage in any sort of physical activity. So, go for it."

Photos courtesy of Patrick McMullan