The Artist at the Counter

The decade opened on a small table at Bergdorf Goodman in New York. In February 1991, by her own account, the makeup artist Bobbi Brown put ten brown-based lipsticks on sale there, creamy, matte and odourless and made to be mixed;^[1] her aim, she later told CNN, had been a lipstick that looked like lips.^[2] François Nars followed in November 1994 with twelve lipsticks at Barneys New York,^[3] and early in 1996 Laura Mercier’s line was announced for a first counter at Neiman Marcus in Dallas.^[4]

M·A·C, from Toronto, had shown the way. It began as a professional line made to suit its founders’ own photographic work: neutral shades instead of the pinks and purples that dominated the major houses, and matte textures that photographed better. Its counters were staffed with makeup artists “of both sexes (and all genders)” rather than interchangeable sales associates.^[5] By August 1997 Women’s Wear Daily was describing a whole category of artists’ lines that had followed it, Bobbi Brown Essentials, Trish McEvoy and François Nars among them, and retailers who said the older houses had answered by going into the brush business, reworking their testers and bringing back the makeover.^[6] The Estée Lauder Companies bought its way in: a majority interest in M·A·C in 1994, and the whole of Bobbi Brown Essentials in October 1995.^[7][8]

The artists published as well. Kevyn Aucoin’s The Art of Makeup appeared in 1994 and Making Faces in 1997, technique set out as photographed steps with the products named,^[9][10] and Bobbi Brown’s first book came out the same year.^[11] The trade’s knowledge was now sold alongside its products.

The colour of the decade’s argument was not pink. In 1994 Chanel’s Vamp, a blackberry nail colour devised by Dominique Moncourtois, a makeup creator at the house, made its debut on the Paris runways, reaching consumers whom a magazine looking back in 2023 described as “fed a steady diet of wan neutrals and one-note reds.”^[12]

Two years later the argument became a company. Urban Decay launched in January 1996 with ten lipsticks and twelve nail enamels named Roach, Smog, Rust, Oil Slick and Acid Rain,^[13] under the tag line “Does Pink Make You Puke?”^[14] Its founder, Sandy Lerner, had by the company’s own account searched for months for polish in unusual colours, “lamenting the fact that there were 500 colors of pink polishes, but no greens or purples.”^[14] By 1998 its website called the line “the alternative to the predictable palette of traditional color cosmetics.”^[15]

The rebellion sold through ordinary channels. Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters carried it,^[14] and in 2000 the company was bought by LVMH.^[13]

The decade’s most original product was not a new formula. In September 1994 M·A·C created the M·A·C AIDS Fund to support AIDS organisations in Toronto, the city where the company had begun, and made one lipstick, a deep red called Viva Glam, the Fund’s only way of raising money. M·A·C paid for making it and the department stores that sold it gave up their margin, so that all the profits went to the Fund.^[17]

Its face was RuPaul, announced at a launch party in New York in March 1995 in a campaign titled “Who is the MAC Girl?”, in a blonde wig, a red bustier and red thigh-high boots. The campaign’s historian finds no apparent precedent in the industry for a man fronting a cosmetics campaign aimed at women. By the end of 1995 the lipstick had raised $3 million, and by 1998 the Fund’s total stood at $16 million.^[17] The company now says that Viva Glam has raised more than $540 million.^[18]

Range was the decade’s other argument, and it was made by people who had lived with the lack of it. As a model, Iman recalled in 1994, she had been “constantly mixing and matching to get one foundation and powder for my own skin tone.” That summer she launched her own line at JCPenney for African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Native American women, with sixteen foundations to be worn, she said, “from the lightest Japanese to the blackest African”; on QVC the weekend before, by her account, women had bought five thousand of its kits.^[19]

The idea was not new. Flori Roberts had sold makeup made for Black skin at department-store counters since the 1960s, and in 1992 the line was sold, with her Dermablend, to Ivax Pharmaceuticals;^[20] Fashion Fair had done the same since 1973.^[21] M·A·C’s early range was built to suit all skin colours, darker ones in particular,^[22] and Bobbi Brown’s first lipsticks were organised around the wearer rather than the season, a story told in full elsewhere in this archive. What the decade did not do was make a wide range the industry’s standard. That waited for the foundation ranges of the late 2010s, and for the measurements that tested them.^[23]

Put together, the artists’ products and their own accounts describe the face they argued for. Bobbi Brown remembered the fashionable face of the 1980s — white skin, red lips and contouring — as what she disliked.^[24] Style.com dated her yellow-toned foundation stick to 1992,^[25] and she later recalled going into stores to teach women why blush should be the colour of the cheek.^[26] François Nars became known in the 1990s for fresh-faced looks that let the texture of the skin show through, unlike the heavier, more opaque foundations popular at the time,^[27] and his blush Orgasm, a peach powder with a gold cast, dates from 1999.^[28]

The plate here is reconstructed from those products rather than from any one woman’s routine: a sheer, matched base, groomed natural brows, a matte neutral eye, a warm flush and a mouth the colour of lips. The steps beside it say what each one takes to do now.

The counter itself was opening up. In a department store the beauty adviser had generally represented a single brand and been paid commission on her sales; Sephora, a French chain owned since 1997 by LVMH, set rival brands side by side, arranged by product rather than by house and within the customer’s reach.^[29] Its first American store opened at 555 Broadway in SoHo in July 1998, 8,100 square feet of it,^[30] with 190 brands.^[31] At the opening a fragrance consultant predicted that it would change the way cosmetics are sold, and Leonard Lauder asked how a shop without gifts with purchase would fare in the malls.^[30]

Europe, meanwhile, was changing what went on the box. A directive of 1993 required cosmetics sold in the Community to list their ingredients in descending order of weight, and named 1 January 1998 as the date after which products containing ingredients tested on animals to meet its requirements were to be kept off the market, unless alternative tests had not been validated by then.^[32][33] They had not, and in 1997 the date was moved to 30 June 2000.^[33] The ban the decade had promised arrived in the next one.^[34]

The decade’s look is harder to document than its products. Popular accounts give it a “grunge” face and, later, “heroin chic”; this archive has not found a source it can cite for either as a dated makeup fashion, which is why the plate above is built from the products the decade’s artists sold and described. The one documented brow in the sources used here, François Nars shaving off a model’s eyebrows for Anna Sui’s show of 1992, belongs to a single show, not a fashion.^[35]

Many of the figures are the companies’ own. The sums Viva Glam raised in the 1990s come from the press of the time as gathered by its historian; the total of more than $540 million is the company’s figure and has not been checked here.^[36][37] Even the date of Sephora’s American opening wavers: the trade paper’s report, dated Friday 17 July 1998, describes a debut on the Thursday, while the same paper’s later timeline gives 17 July.^[38][39]

Nor do the sources settle what the artists’ lines did to the industry. The trade press of 1997 recorded retailers who believed the older houses had changed their counters in response; that is the retailers’ judgement, and it is reported here as theirs.^[40]