Shu Uemura
Brilliant colors reveal themselves in the world’s first totally clear lipstick case.
Product design for Japan’s makeup master, Shu Uemura.
Tsao & McKown presented four concepts for lipstick covers to the Shu Uemura creative team. Each was meant to explore and reinterpret what a lipstick cover could be, beyond the constraints of typical appearance and formal function.
Bubbles: Formed in cast glass or acrylic with bubbles captured in it. Allows for transparency and the use of a smooth dynamic material with texture, shape and light.
Crystals: Rendered in a textured skin of embedded crystals, evoking a very distinctive materiality that lends itself to the sensation of touch while drawing attention to its sparkling composition.
Rubberized Fiber: Combines grip with soft translucency, allowing the lipstick to be seen through a web of threads. Allows for randomized compositions and multiple options for being rendered in color.
Organic Metal: Cast in polished metal, rendered with the ergonomic and aesthetic attributes of an organic form contoured for gripping, opening, twisting.
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HistoryCosmetic Industry
The History of Beauty
Q&A with Geoffrey G. Jones
The human desire to attract reflects basic biological motivations. Every human society from at least the ancient Egyptians onwards has used beauty products and artifacts to enhance attractiveness. However, beauty ideals have always varied enormously over time and between societies.
Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry
Geoffrey G. Jones
This book provides the first authoritative history of the global beauty industry from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how today’s global giants grew. It shows how successive generations of entrepreneurs built brands which shaped perceptions of beauty, and the business organizations needed to market them. They democratized access to beauty products, once the privilege of elites, but they also defined the gender and ethnic borders of beauty, and its association with a handful of cities, notably Paris and later New York. The result was a homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world.
Reading Our Lips: The History of Lipstick Regulation in Western Seats of Power
Sarah Schaffer, Harvard Law School
This paper traces the history of lipstick’s social and legal regulation in Western seats of power, from Ur circa 3,500 B.C. to the present-day United States. Sliced in this manner, lipstick’s history emerges as heavily cyclical across the Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Western European, English, and American reigns of power. Examination of both the informal social and formal legal regulation of lipstick throughout these eras reveals that lipstick’s fluctuating signification concerning wearers’ class and gender has always largely determined the extent and types of lipstick regulations that Western societies put in place.
Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick
Meg Cohen & Karen Kozlowski
Freud dug it; Marilyn wouldn’t leave home without it. Lipstick: It’s an icon, a turn-on, an international symbol of the feminine mystique. Today it finds its place in history. Read My Lips is the book for everyone who’s ever fallen for the allure of painted lips or bought, borrowed, or stolen a tube of Five Alarm Red. A scenic tour of a lush landscape, Read My Lips celebrates the one cosmetic women can’t live without, the quick glam fix rivaled only by the little black dress for gotta-have-it-ness. For a device of such small stature, lipstick has inspired great feats. Read My Lips records them all—from Cleopatra, who enhanced her hue with henna, to Paloma Picasso, who donned her trademark red at the tender age of three. More than lip service, these colorfully illustrated pages include lipstick lore, art, literature, and photography, as well as memorable Hollywood moments and an inside take on the history, business, and psychology of painted lips. Chanel to Urban Decay, lipstick has left its mark as a girl’s best friend. Part owner’s manual, part cultural history, Read My Lips is a slick celebration of lipstick’s many traces.
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InspirationMeaning of Wabi-Sabi
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
Leonard Koren
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional.Tadao Ando
The Japanese view of life embraced a simple aesthetic that grew stronger as inessentials were eliminated and trimmed away.
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HistoryPerception of Beauty in Different Cultures
The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty
Gillian Rhodes
What makes a face attractive and why do we have the preferences we do? Emergence of preferences early in development and cross-cultural agreement on attractiveness challenge a long-held view that our preferences reflect arbitrary standards of beauty set by cultures. Averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism are good candidates for biologically based standards of beauty. A critical review and meta-analyses indicate that all three are attractive in both male and female faces and across cultures. Theorists have proposed that face preferences may be adaptations for mate choice because attractive traits signal important aspects of mate quality, such as health. Others have argued that they may simply be by-products of the way brains process information. Although often presented as alternatives, I argue that both kinds of selection pressures may have shaped our perceptions of facial beauty.
Cosmetics as a Feature of the Extended Human Phenotype: Modulation of the Perception of Biologically Important Facial Signals
Nancy L. Etcoff, Shannon Stock, Lauren E. Haley, Sarah A. Vickery, David M. House
Research on the evolution of signaling has shown that animals frequently alter visual features, including color cues, to attract, intimidate or protect themselves from conspecifics. Humans engage in conscious manipulation of visual signals using cultural tools in real time rather than genetic changes over evolutionary time. Here, we investigate one tool, the use of color cosmetics.
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Physical ContextCurrent Industry News
GCI Magazine
GCI magazine is the business information resource for marketers, brand managers, manufacturers and executives in the global beauty industry. Industry professionals look to GCI for the strategies, trends, analyses and market data that translate into brand impact.
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Classic Cases
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Inspirations
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Case Sketches
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Drawings
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Models
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Product: Rouge Unlimited
Shu Uemura’s Rouge Unlimited range breaks all boundaries in color creation, formulated with revolutionary hybrid pigments for pure color pay-off. wide range of color, coverage, and textures allow unlimited lip creation.
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AwardGood Design Award 2008
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ArticleNY Times Style Magazine: Case History
We always thought the transparency was important, but thought, Let’s make that the packaging.
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ArticleAllure: Living Color
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ArticleNew York Magazine: Gina Brooke Talks About Shu Uemura and Leaving the U.S. and Her New Gig at Hourglass Cosmetics
Gina Brooke is one of the most sought-after makeup artists in the business, thanks to her celebrity clients Madonna, Britney Spears, Anne Hathaway and her business sense. Five years ago she became Shu Uemura’s artistic director and is credited with single-handedly revamping the lash business for the L’Oréal-owned company after launching Lash Bars around the world. But Brooke left Shu Uemura in January after her contract was up, and shortly after her departure, L’Oréal announced it was pulling Shu Uemura color cosmetics from United States shelves, literally inducing eyelash panic among beauty fans.
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ArticleTime Business: Shu Uemura, Makeup Pioneer, Dies
The edokko, the natives of Tokyo, have a special gift: an ability to push the envelope, to innovate, to pioneer. That was certainly true of Shu Uemura, who went from being the only man in his Tokyo beauty school class to Hollywood makeup legend to international entrepreneur. In convention-worshiping Japan, he defied convention — and made his name and fortune by doing so.
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Client
Shu Uemura
Founded and named after legendary Japanese make-up artist and beauty pioneer, Shu Uemura, the brand breaks all boundaries in beauty creation. Inspired by an aesthetic and professional spirit of the artisan, the Shu Uemura brand was developed on the founder’s holistic philosophy that beautiful make-up starts with beautiful skin. Believing that quality of skincare is essential in creating beautiful make-up, the most advanced skincare formulas using powerful phyto-ingredients are used as the first step to revealing every woman’s unique beauty.
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Consultants
Tetsuo Fukaya
Founding Manager at KAITAISHINSHA Inc.
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T&M Team
Calvin Tsao
Zack McKown
Nisha Patel
Sandra Steving
Andrew Tripp