The Lipstick That Stayed On: Hazel Bishop and the Lipstick Wars

Most lipsticks had the same weakness: they came off. They came off on cups and cigarettes and collars, and they came off on other people, which was exactly the point the advertising for this one would make. Hazel Bishop’s lipstick promised to stay, and on its first day at Lord & Taylor in New York the store sold out of the line.^[1]

The lipstick made a fortune. Very little of it reached the chemist who made it.

Hazel Bishop graduated from Barnard College in 1929 with a degree in chemistry and spent the years that followed in research — first as an assistant in dermatology, then as an organic chemist in industry. In 1948 she and the lawyer Alfred Berg set up the Hazel Bishop Corporation.^[2]

Her own account of what she had made was precise: “The smear-proof lipstick derives its color from pigment plus stain, rather than from stain alone.”^[2] The stain came from bromo acids, which colour the lip itself, and lanolin was added to soften their harshness.^[2]

Bishop is often credited with inventing indelible lipstick. She did not.^[3] Staining lipsticks built on the bromo acids were well established before her: by the 1930s castor oil had become the usual solvent for the acids, and glycol-based formulas — Baudecroux’s Rouge Baiser of 1927 among them — were in production alongside.^[4]

What was new was the combination, and the confidence of the promise. A stain alone gives a tint; pigment alone wears away. Bishop’s lipstick used both, so that something of the colour stayed when the surface had gone.^[3]

The formula was Bishop’s. The selling was Raymond Spector’s. Starting in 1950 with spot radio announcements in fifty-seven markets, his campaign moved to spots on three television shows and then to sponsoring whole programmes, among them I Confess, Candid Camera, This Is Your Life and The Martha Raye Show.^[5]

The newspaper advertising promised a lipstick that would not “eat off, bite off or kiss off” — a line close to ones Vivaudou had used in 1940 and Richard Hudnut in 1949.^[5] Even the stain’s drawback was turned into a selling point. It survived soap and cold cream overnight, so the company suggested that its wearer would “Wake up Beautiful,” an idea other long-wearing lipsticks used too.^[5]

By 1953 Hazel Bishop was the largest television cosmetics advertiser in the United States, and by 1954 it had spent more than $2.3 million on television.^[5]

Sales in 1950 came to about $50,000, at a small loss. By 1953 they had reached $10 million, with a quarter of the American lipstick market; they rose to $12 million in 1954 and fell back to $10 million in 1955.^[7]

The fall had a cause. In 1955 Revlon became the sole sponsor of The $64,000 Question, and its share of the lipstick market rose from 15 to 28 per cent while Hazel Bishop’s fell from 28 to 24.^[7] The company that had shown the industry how to sell lipstick on television was outspent at its own game.

Competitors answered quickly. Revlon launched Indelible-Creme lipstick in 1951 and later Living Lipstick, and Coty brought out “24” in 1955.^[8][9]

The claims grew faster than the products. In 1953 the Federal Trade Commission agreed that words such as “indelible” and “smear-proof” could be used in advertising only with the word “type” attached — a lipstick could be indelible-type, not indelible — and Revlon dropped Indelible-Creme the same year.^[8][9]

Bishop resigned as president of her company in 1951 and went to court against it. The dispute was settled in 1954: she received $310,000 for her services and for her 200 shares — by then only 8 per cent of the company’s stock — and agreed not to endorse the retail sale of any other product for twenty-five years.^[10]

When she later lent her name to a perfume, the company sued her, and won. She went on working as a consulting chemist, a market analyst and a teacher.^[10]

The sources used here give no retail price. The product’s name was Long Lasting Lipstick; “kiss-proof” and “no-smear” were the language of its advertising and of the race it started, not its name.^[11]

The sales figures are those reported at the time, by a company with every reason to report them well. And the brand’s later history — sold, merged and renamed several times from 1958 onwards — has left nothing on sale under Hazel Bishop’s name that the historian cited here knows of.^[11]