The Look of Nothing: Selling the Natural Face

Among the products Revlon sold to young buyers under its Natural Wonder name from 1968 was a range called Un-Lipsticks. A 1969 advertisement listed their shades, among them Nothing, Nothing Frosted, Skinnylip Pink, Enough Buff and In the Flesh.^[1]

The joke in the names became the proposition of the decade that followed. Through the 1970s the counters sold, with great care, makeup that promised not to look like makeup.

The plainest statement came from Cover Girl, which had sold medicated makeup to the young since 1961. In 1970 its Baltimore maker, Noxell, introduced a range of Cover Girl Super Sheer cosmetics, in the words of the industry’s historian James Bennett “better suited to the prevailing ‘natural look’”: a liquid foundation in Sheer Bare, Sheer Buff, Sheer Blush and Sheer Beige, a pressed Translucent Powder in Sheer Nude and Sheer Natural, and a two-panned Translucent Blusher Duo.^[2]

Max Factor launched its Pure Magic Super-Sheer Medicated Make-up line the same year.^[2] The shade names had stopped describing a colour and begun describing the absence of one: bare, nude, natural, sheer.

Estée Lauder’s version was more elaborate, and its names more candid still. Its Fresh Air Make-up of 1970 paired a base described as “a rich lightweight liquid to smooth out texture and tiny imperfections” with a Face and Cheek Tint, “a natural, glowing, skim-on blush”, and Tender Lip Tints offering “little shrugs of color, light and skimmy, and lots of gloss and polish.”^[3] A Tender Cheek Tint, in Fresh Air Pink, Polished Peach and Afternoon Bronze, was sold the same year as part of a range called Little Nothings.^[3]

None of it came from nowhere. The house had sold See-Through Make-up in 1966 and The New Transparencies in 1967, and a transparent gel rouge, Go-Blush, in 1969.^[3] The sheer face was on its counters before the decade began; the 1970s made it the main event.

The eye changed most visibly. False eyelashes had gone to extremes in the 1960s, and as fashion moved towards a more natural look in the 1970s many women, in Bennett’s account, switched to lash-extending mascaras that were easier to use.^[5] Maybelline brought out Great Lash, a water-based mascara, in 1971, and in 1974 a comb-on mascara called, without apparent irony, Look Natural.^[6]

Estée Lauder had taken that position early. The house was against false eyelashes and did not sell them, and the lash-lengthening mascara in its eye collection of 1969 promised “Naturally longer, glossier eyelashes, no need to fake it.”^[7]

Advertising gave the look a face. The Smithsonian’s finding aid for the Cover Girl advertising archive describes how, by the 1970s, “a new social emphasis on looking and dressing ‘naturally’” and the brand’s Clean Make-up campaign produced an advertising focus on “the wholesome glamour of the ‘girl next door,’ a blue-eyed, blonde all-American image.”^[8] Bennett, writing of the same campaign, notes that brunette models were used but that blondes, Cybill Shepherd among them, predominated because they looked cleaner and fresher.^[9]

The natural face, in other words, had a particular face in mind. The same finding aid records that the Cover Girl look was updated to include African-American and Hispanic models in the 1980s.^[8] For darker skin, the decade’s answer came from somewhere else, and from a different kind of counter.

The word was moving onto skin care too. In 1971 Revlon brought out a Natural Herb Cleanser and a Natural Honey Lotion, a Skim Milk Natural/Organic skin-care range under its prestige Ultima II name, and a Borghese Garden Collection made with extracts of fruits and vegetables.^[10] Bennett’s caution about such words applies as well here as anywhere: terms such as natural, organic and hypoallergenic “have no agreed definitional standards and should be treated with some degree of skepticism when applied to ingredients.”^[11]

There was a practical logic to the sheer face as well. By the 1970s foundations came in shades that could be matched to a much wider range of complexions than before and gave a more natural-looking film of colour, and a face made up to look natural, Bennett observes, removed many sources of colour clashes.^[12]

The sources used here document what was sold, not how many women wore less makeup or wore it differently; none gives sales figures for the sheer ranges or measures the look’s reach. Nor do they date its beginning: the products that sold it were on the counters by 1970, and some of Estée Lauder’s transparent makeups several years before.^[13]

Why the fashion turned is not settled either. Bennett suggests that the hexachlorophene scare of 1972, which increased consumer distrust of synthetic chemicals, “may have accelerated the process” of a shift already under way by then; he offers it as a possibility, and it is reported here as one.^[14] And the Un-Lipstick shades come from a single advertisement of 1969 as reproduced by the same historian; how long each stayed on sale is not recorded.^[15]