Colour as a Season: Selling a Shade That Expires

A lipstick is a difficult thing to build a growth business on. It costs little, it lasts for months, and a woman who has found a red she likes has no reason to buy another one. The product’s durability is the manufacturer’s problem.^[1]

Revlon’s answer was to stop selling the object and start selling the moment. If a shade belongs to a season, then last season’s shade is not used up but out of date, and the purchase can repeat without the product failing.^[1]

Clothing already ran on a cycle: collections, seasons, colours that arrived and were superseded. Cosmetics had no equivalent, and attaching one to the other gave the industry a rhythm it had never possessed.^[2]

The mechanics are the coordinated launch. A named shade, released at a fixed moment, advertised as the colour of the season, and supported across press and counter simultaneously — so the product arrives as an event rather than as stock.^[2]

The counter gains as much from this as the manufacturer does. A seasonal release is a reason to rebuild a display, retrain the staff on a single story and clear the previous stock at a moment everyone has agreed on in advance — which turns a shelf that was being restocked into a shelf that is being relaunched, twice a year, forever.^[3]

Naming is doing more work here than it appears to. A number describes a pigment; a name describes an idea, and an idea can be advertised, discussed and desired in a way a number cannot.^[4]

It also makes the shade discussable between customers, which is free distribution. A woman can tell a friend what she is wearing, and the friend can ask for it by name at a counter — a transaction that a numbered range makes awkward and a named one makes easy.^[5]

And a name can be retired. A number implies a catalogue position that ought to persist, while a name implies an occasion that can end, so naming quietly builds the expiry date into the product before anyone has to announce it.^[4]

The seasonal shade was rarely one product. Lip and nail colour released together as a coordinated pair doubles the purchase from a single decision, and makes the shade visible on two parts of the body at once.^[6]

That is the 1920s idea of the coordinated face, extended and monetised. Where the earlier decade taught that the elements of a face should agree, this one taught that agreeing required buying them together and replacing them together.^[7]

Pairing also solves an evidence problem for the manufacturer. A lipstick worn alone is one woman’s choice, while the same colour on her hands as well reads as a decision made deliberately — so the matching set makes the seasonal shade visible as a system rather than as a preference, and a system is what other people copy.^[6]

Because the cost of participating is very low. A dress in this season’s colour is a serious purchase; a lipstick in it is not, which makes the cosmetic the cheapest available way to be current.^[8]

That is a genuinely attractive proposition rather than a trick, and it is worth saying so. The seasonal cycle offered real access to a fashion system that clothing priced most people out of — and it did so by making a small purchase feel like participation.^[9]

The obvious cost is consumption: a manufactured obsolescence in a product that does not wear out, and a drawer of shades abandoned for being last year’s rather than for being finished.^[10]

The subtler cost is the transfer of authority. A seasonal system requires somebody to declare what the season is, and that somebody is the manufacturer — so the industry acquired the right to tell its customers when what they already owned had stopped being right.^[11]

How much of the campaign’s reputation is retrospective is hard to establish. Fire and Ice is remembered as a landmark partly because it worked and partly because it has been cited as a landmark for seventy years, and those two reinforce each other.^[12]

Sales attribution is also unreliable at this distance. A campaign that coincides with a growing market is difficult to separate from the market, and the figures that survive come substantially from interested parties.^[13]