Laura Mercier

Laura Mercier made its name on the complexion rather than on colour. The line, launched in 1996, sold a French makeup artist’s way of covering skin without making it look made up, as products to be used in order. The house calls it the Flawless Face;^[1] the firm that bought the line in 2021 credited it with pioneering the natural, “flawless face” category.^[2]

It matters here for two reasons. It turned a technique of the photographic set, a heavy theatrical concealer dotted on so thinly that skin still looked like skin, into a retail routine. And it began as a retailer’s idea as much as an artist’s: by Mercier’s account, the proposal came from a department-store buyer from Texas who admired Bobbi Brown.^[3]

Born Michèle Mercier in Provence, she changed her first name to avoid confusion with the actress Michèle Mercier.^[4] After three years at art school in Paris she trained as an aesthetician at the Carita beauty institute, where the makeup artist Thibault Vabre taught. He took her on as his assistant at twenty, and she worked on French Elle shoots with him before going out on her own.^[5]

In 1983 or 1984, by her account, Elle put her on a team testing models for its American edition, and New York, a city she had once called “too scary”, began to seem possible.^[6] She moved to the United States in 1985.^[4] She worked with the photographers Steven Meisel and Patrick Demarchelier, and for eight years with Madonna;^[5] by 1996 her work was often on the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and W.^[7]

Skin became her speciality.^[5] As shoots moved outdoors, heavy studio makeup had to be adapted for sand, sea and a dark tan. She built a method on camouflage, a heavy, dry concealer used in theatre and film, dotted over very little foundation so that “the skin would be like real skin”; photographers liked it, she recalled, because the makeup was never cakey.^[6]

Janet Gurwitch was executive vice president of Neiman Marcus and, she later said, one step from becoming its first woman chief executive, “but then I met Bobbi Brown who was doing such a great job at our store”.^[8] She proposed a line under Mercier’s name and left Neiman Marcus to build it.^[9][10] Mercier’s condition went into the contract: she would be in the laboratory with a chemist, formulating the products herself.^[9] The backer and distributor, Kusin Gurwitch, was founded by Gurwitch and Gary Kusin, a co-founder of the Babbage’s software stores.^[11] Gurwitch said they started with 3.5 million dollars of their own and needed about ten million in the end.^[10]

WWD announced the line in February 1996 as Laura Mercier Classique, to open on 1 March at the NorthPark Neiman Marcus in Dallas before rolling out to Henri Bendel and other stores. Gurwitch’s pitch was that “you may not know her name, but you know her work”. The paper added Mercier to “the growing list of makeup artists coming out with cosmetics lines”, and she named texture as her difference: “sometimes you find great colors, but the quality of the product is not emphasized.”^[11] She later recalled the timing: “right after Bobbi Brown and François Nars launched, so there was pressure.”^[12]

Later reports disagree about Bendel. WWD in 2016 dated the launch to March 1996, in selected Neiman Marcus stores and at Bendel;^[13] a WWD report of 2001 named Bendel as the store where the collection was first launched, in the summer of 1996.^[14]

The products followed the method. The first things Mercier made, she said, were the camouflage and a foundation, heavily pigmented but meant to be used a drop at a time and blended to an out-of-focus finish. In New York she had developed adult acne at twenty-four and covered it daily with camouflage, thinking it “so stupid that it doesn’t exist on the market”. The same went for the primer she used under everything, a mineral-oil product that came by the litre.^[15]

Gurwitch later claimed the primer as a first, and Mercier said that afterwards “everybody started doing one, too”.^[16][15] That is their claim, not an established fact. The tinted moisturiser has two stories: a London newspaper called it a world first, launched with the brand in 1996,^[17] while Mercier said tinted moisturiser had been popular in France “for ages” and hers began as “a try-out” for America.^[15]

The products make the sequence the house still teaches: prime the skin, perfect it with foundation and then concealer where needed, and set it with loose powder. The house dates the Flawless Face to 1996.^[18] By 2006, the line’s tenth year, the phrase was the subtitle of Mercier’s own guide, The New Beauty Secrets: Your Ultimate Guide to a Flawless Face.^[19]

The house names three products as its founder’s own: Secret Camouflage, the Translucent Loose Setting Powder and the Tinted Moisturizer.^[21] The camouflage was her favourite: “It looks like a second skin, doesn’t cake and leaves your skin glowing,” she said in 2005.^[22] The powder is the last step, pressed and rolled into the skin with a velour puff. Talc heads its published ingredient list, and the house advertises it as “The #1 Loose Setting Powder in the US”, citing Circana’s sales figures for 2024.^[23]

The line was sold by teaching. For three or four years Mercier worked on sets and on the brand at once, until a twenty-seven-hour music-video shoot ended, she said, in a nervous breakdown, and she gave up freelance work.^[24] By her count she spent seventeen years going from store to store, one-on-one with customers, and the products came from what they asked for: “it wasn’t based on any studies whatsoever.”^[25] Gurwitch put the counter policy as “education with purchase, not gift”.^[26]

Success came, Mercier said, “too quickly”, and money had to be found fast.^[27] On 2 November 1998 the Neiman Marcus Group bought 51 per cent of the company, then Gurwitch Bristow Products, for about 6.7 million dollars.^[28] In July 2006 the business, by then Gurwitch Products and described by WWD as the licensee of the Laura Mercier brand, was sold to Alticor, the parent of Amway, at an undisclosed price; it stayed in Houston, with Gurwitch as chief executive.^[29]

In June 2016 Shiseido Americas agreed to buy Gurwitch Products, with Laura Mercier and the skincare line RéVive, from Alticor; the business had net sales of 175 million dollars in 2015.^[30] Shiseido declined to comment on the price; its American chief said the intention was that Mercier would keep an active involvement. The line joined a portfolio that included NARS.^[31]

Five years later Shiseido, now making skincare its core, sold Laura Mercier, bareMinerals and BUXOM to the private equity firm Advent International. The agreement of 25 August 2021 set a price of 700 million dollars for the three before adjustments, half in cash at closing and half as a seller note due seven years later.^[32] The sale closed on 6 December, and Advent placed the brands in a new company, Orveon, based in New York.^[33] Advent’s adviser on the deal was Janet Gurwitch, by then one of its operating partners.^[34]

Orveon still owns the line. Its chief executive, Ginny Wright, who joined in 2025, said in 2026 that Laura Mercier had strayed from its core identity in recent years; the thirtieth year brought a relaunch of Secret Camouflage and a paid collective of tastemakers in place of conventional influencers.^[35] The house’s website, in its founder’s name, gives the one belief the brand began with: “Makeup should enhance, never mask.”^[36]

Its place in the longer history is an old rule in a new form. This site traces the demand that makeup be used but not seen back to Ovid; Laura Mercier divided that demand into steps and sold each one. The sources here do not settle when the phrase Flawless Face was coined, what the 1996 formulas contained, or whether the primer and the tinted moisturiser were the firsts they have been called.