NARS

NARS is the makeup house that François Nars, a French makeup artist who had made his name on New York fashion shoots, launched in November 1994 with twelve lipsticks at Barneys New York.^[1] It belonged to the first wave of brands founded by makeup artists, with Bobbi Brown and Laura Mercier, and its best-known product, a blush called Orgasm, followed in 1999.^[2]

What it sold was a taste formed on the fashion page. The first colours were the ones Nars had used on models in Vogue, the cases were matte black and the names were chosen to be remembered.^[3] Shiseido bought the company in 2000 and kept him on as creative director,^[2] a post he still held when the house turned thirty.^[4]

François Nars was born in Tarbes, in the south of France, in 1959.^[5] He trained at the Carita school in Paris and began as an apprentice to the makeup artist Olivier Echaudemaison.^[6] By his own account it was Polly Mellen, then at American Vogue, who after a shoot in Paris told him to come to New York and work with Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Steven Meisel. It took him about six months to decide.^[5] He moved in 1984 and worked for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Vogue.^[6]

With Meisel and the hairdresser Oribe he formed a trio whose shared look, in the judgement of The Business of Fashion, came to dominate the fashion photography of the period. He came to prominence on Marc Jacobs’s shows, and for Anna Sui’s show of 1992 he shaved off the model Kristen McMenamy’s eyebrows.^[7] The faces he was known for were not heavy. Looking back in 2014, WWD described him as known in the 1990s for fresh-faced looks that let the texture of the skin show through, unlike the more opaque, foundation-laden looks popular at the time.^[8]

“I didn’t have the luxury to launch a full line and just see how it goes, so lipstick seemed like a good way to test the public,” Nars told Vogue in 2019. He settled on twelve and took them from his working palette: “Women love great reds, but also pale and neutral pinks. They were the colors I used in the pages of Vogue on girls of the time like Linda [Evangelista].” For the packaging he went to the art director Fabien Baron. “He was the only person I wanted.”^[9]

The tubes were square and matte black, and the names pointed somewhere: Schiap, an electric fuchsia, to the designer Elsa Schiaparelli; Jungle Red, a warm crimson, to the 1939 film The Women.^[9] Nars says he offered the prototypes to Bonnie Pressman at Barneys, who asked for an exclusive, and that the first lipsticks sold out immediately.^[10] The collection was widened in 1995 and became a bestseller for the store, and from the first campaign, in 1996, Nars took the brand’s advertising photographs himself.^[11] By the late 1990s it was also sold at Sephora and Bluemercury in the United States, decades before some of its peers.^[12]

The names were the most conspicuous part of the idea. Nars kept a notebook of them and drew many from films, so that a lipstick could be Shanghai Express because it looked like Marlene Dietrich’s in the film.^[13] Others were sexual: Orgasm, Deep Throat, Sex Machine. “I thought makeup was a very sensual thing,” he said in 2014; the point of such names was “to give an identity to the product”.^[14] The Business of Fashion has described Orgasm as one of the first products from a major brand with a blatantly sexual name.^[15]

The box mattered as much as the colour. “Packaging is 50 percent, and the product inside is the other 50 percent,” Nars told Harper’s Bazaar in 2025, and he dates his vision for the brand to his association with Baron.^[16] He has said that at launch it “looked like the opposite of every other brand”.^[17] The matte black, in other words, was on the outside. The makeup inside was meant to be worn lightly: “I never put on tons of foundation,” he said, describing an approach that let natural colour and skin show through.^[16] What the counter offered was a point of view taken from the fashion page, signed by the person who had formed it.

The Multiple began on a magazine set. In 1996 Harper’s Bazaar asked six makeup artists, among them Nars, Bobbi Brown, Laura Mercier and Kevyn Aucoin, to make a spring face for its March issue. Nars painted the model Carolyn Murphy’s eyes, cheeks and lips with one burnt-orange lipstick, Tangier, in about ten minutes, and the idea followed: “one product that mimics exactly what this lipstick does when applied to the eyes, cheeks, and lips”. It was meant to be put on with the fingers.^[19]

Orgasm came in 1999, first as a traditional powder blush in a peachy shade shot with gold, and became the house’s most famous product. By 2019 it was, on NPD’s figures as The Business of Fashion reported them, the best-selling blush in the United States, and it had been remade as a lip oil, a liquid blush and a loose powder. Later successes included the Laguna bronzer and the Radiant Creamy Concealer.^[20]

In May 2000 Shiseido announced that it had bought the entire NARS brand from Agora Cosmetics for a sum it did not disclose. The line then ran to 240 stockkeeping units of colour cosmetics, sold through 106 doors in sixteen countries, seventy-five of them in the United States, and by Shiseido’s figures it had done ten million dollars at wholesale in 1999. It was not yet sold in Japan. Jennifer Lister, the chief executive of NARS, indicated that the main attraction was Shiseido’s expertise in skincare, a category Nars had long wanted to enter.^[21]

Nars later said that many other large companies had approached the brand, and that he chose Shiseido for its image, built visually at the time by Serge Lutens; he “felt that Shiseido would keep the brand safe”. He stayed on as creative director.^[22] Nineteen years after the sale he was still approving and naming new products, shooting the campaigns and advising on the design of the shops.^[23] By 2014 industry sources quoted by WWD estimated NARS to be a business of about 450 million dollars worldwide.^[24] Its announcement in 2017 that it would enter China, where selling then required animal testing, set off a boycott by a small but vocal group of customers who objected that it would no longer be cruelty-free, though The Business of Fashion reported that it did not ultimately lose sales over it.^[23]

The founding range has become an archive the house returns to. For the twenty-fifth anniversary, in 2019, NARS relaunched the original twelve lipsticks with sixty further shades.^[25] For the thirtieth, in 2024, Nars, still its founder and creative director, reworked its first product, the lipstick, once more,^[26] and The Multiple was relaunched in twelve shades in 2025.^[27] Shiseido now lists NARS among the five prestige brands in which it is concentrating investment.^[28]

Its place in the longer history is as one of the first houses to sell a working makeup artist’s editorial judgement as a product line, with the artist’s name on the case and the artist behind the camera. Nars published the method as well: Makeup Your Mind, designed by Baron, set before-and-after photographs of models, the befores shot without makeup, under clear acetate overlays showing what goes where.^[29] By 2019 the model had a second generation, and newer brands from Nars’s peers, Pat McGrath and Charlotte Tilbury among them, were taking market share from the older houses.^[30] Two figures are missing from the record: the price Shiseido paid, which was not disclosed at the time,^[31] and the brand’s own sales, which Shiseido did not break out for individual brands when The Business of Fashion looked in 2019.^[30]