The Refillable Lipstick: The Case Becomes a Keepsake Again

Hermès sold its first lipsticks from 4 March 2020, in selected shops in thirty-five countries. Rouge Hermès came in twenty-four shades, the mattes inspired by the Birkin bag and the satins by the house's silk archive, which holds over seventy-five thousand colours beside more than nine hundred leather shades.^[1]

The case was the point. Designed by Pierre Hardy, it came in lacquered, brushed and polished metal in black, white and gold, each one assembled by hand, and the launch report called it fully rechargeable and free of plastic.^[1] It was made to be kept; what would be sold afterwards was the lipstick inside it.

Five years later Louis Vuitton followed. Its first make-up line, launched in 2025 with fifty-five lipstick shades in cases designed by Konstantin Grcic, was in the group's words designed to be refillable and conceived as precious objects designed to be kept and passed on forever. Grcic explained the choice of brass and aluminium as a way to use less plastic and lengthen the products' lives: objects to be used daily and kept for years.^[2]

Passed on forever is a phrase that belongs to jewellery, silver and watches, and it marks a deliberate claim about what the case is: not packaging, but a possession.

The claim is older than it sounds. Lipstick was being sold in metal cases by the 1890s,^[3] and a sliding metal container of 1915^[4] and a swivel mechanism patented in 1923^[5] made the tube an industrial object. When wartime shortages forced lipstick into cardboard and plastic, many women moved the new sticks into their old metal cases.^[3]

In the 1950s the refillable luxury case was a product in its own right. Revlon's Futurama cases of 1955 were designed by the jewellers Van Cleef and Arpels and ran from under two dollars to over thirty in sterling silver; in 1957 Helena Rubinstein launched refillable cases of her own and agreed with Revlon to fix the price of refills, and both companies were charged by the Federal Trade Commission.^[3]

The economics of a refillable case are the same as they were in 1957: the part that does not wear out is bought once, and the part that does is bought again, from the house that made the case. What has changed is the argument. The 1950s cases were sold on their looks, designed by jewellers and made in silver. The cases of the 2020s are sold on their looks and as a reduction in plastic, the reason Grcic gave for his metals.^[6]

Hardy described his case for Hermès as a constant yet ever-changing object.^[7] It is a fair description of the refillable lipstick in general: a permanent case around a consumable, returning every few decades under a new rationale.

Whether customers refill. A refillable case uses less material than a disposable one only if it is actually refilled, and neither announcement cited here gives any figure for how often that happens.^[8][9] Whether the refill becomes the norm across the trade, or remains a luxury feature as it did in the 1950s, is a question for the coming decade.