![]() ![]() In 2016 it bought Elizabeth Arden for about £600m in a move that added anti-ageing creams and celebrity fragrances to a company known for selling makeup and hair dye. Since the late 1980s, the company, which is listed on the New York stock exchange, has been controlled by the billionaire investor Ron Perelman. It also made a big splash in the 1980s with a supermodel campaign featuring the likes of Iman, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington, which promised to make women “unforgettable”. It has clocked up many firsts since, including being the first beauty company to feature a black model, Naomi Sims, in its advertising in 1970. Photograph: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images The subsequent advertising campaign promised women “matching lips and fingertips”.Ĭindy Crawford at the second annual Revlon Unforgettable Women Contest in 1990 at the Metropolitan Museum of the Art in New York City. Lipstick became the firm’s next big item in 1940 after Charles Revson noticed a woman in a restaurant whose lips and nail polish did not match. Named Cherries in the Snow, it was inspired by the scarlet-lipped Hollywood starlets of their day, and is still on sale today. Using a blended pigment formula, it was the first red nail varnish at a time when the only shades available were pale and sheer. ![]() ![]() During the Great Depression of the 1930s, they started with a single product, a nail polish. It was started by Charles Revson, his brother Joseph and a chemist, Charles Lachman, who contributed the L in the name. “They are somewhere on the spectrum.”įounded in 1933, Revlon is one of the industry’s most famous names. “Everybody isn’t contouring or going for the ‘no-makeup makeup’ look,” says Dover. With more women taking their fashion cues from social media sites rather than glossy magazines, the big makeup trend is less obvious than in the days when Revlon’s glamorous red pout held sway. You can compare prices, research products and check reviews it is more challenging and competitive than it has ever been before.” “New brands are launching all the time, and because of social media they are much more visible. “Online is putting real pressure on legacy brands,” says Dover. About a fifth of British women now buy their makeup online, a figure that jumps to 52% for 16-24-year-olds. The shift to home working and mandatory masks encouraged many women to neglect or ditch their makeup bag altogether, while the closure of department store beauty halls sent shoppers to the internet, a habit that has stuck. It is back up at about 33% today, but Dover says this shows “how demand has dropped and not really come back yet”. In the year to April 2020, 44% of women bought a lipstick for themselves, but in 2021 that figure dropped to 30%. Sales recovered a bit in 2021, but by nowhere near as much as a lot of brands hoped for.”ĭue to the pandemic, women have become accustomed to using and buying makeup less frequently, with cosmetics sales in the UK still below pre-pandemic levels, according to Mintel. “We’ve seen from our data that the recovery from Covid-19 in colour cosmetics has been quite slow. ![]() Revlon’s financial crisis is “not entirely surprising”, says Samantha Dover, the category director of beauty and personal care research at Mintel. It is a fall from grace for the 90-year-old beauty icon, which invented matching lipstick and nail polish, and set the pace in beauty halls during much of the 20th century.ĭuring its heyday, Revlon was second only to Avon in sales, but in a sign of its ailing fortunes, the company has now fallen outside the top 20, according to a recent industry poll, as sales shift from beauty halls to the web, and celebrity brands such as Kylie Jenner-backed Kylie Cosmetics – with its near-26 million Instagram followers – and Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty are hailed as the new taste-makers. This week Revlon filed for bankruptcy protection in the US, a legal process that enables the ailing company to continue trading while it figures out how to repay its substantial debts. ![]()
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