Hazel Bishop: The mind behind “Kissable” lipstick
No woman’s makeup is complete without those luscious looking lips in different shades of pink, red, orange or magenta and so on. In the 1950’s, lipstick was there in the make-up kits of women but it was just a pigment suspended in a mixture that could be smeared on lips. The problem was, the pigment rarely stay put on the lips, it would leave the lips and smear the wearer’s teeth, or the food she ate or the person she kissed. So a constant touch-up was required. So in these same 1950’s Hazel Bishop became a household name because of the formula she found out for ‘long lasting’ lipstick. She had narrowly missed joining a medical school in 1929 because of the Great Depression and had to utilize her undergrad chemistry degree for work. She spent the next twenty years in various chemistry positions, first as a research assistant and junior chemist at academic institutions, and then as an increasingly senior chemist at petroleum companies. But she always had a dream of having her own business and she spent her nights working on this dream of hers concentrating on lipsticks.
In order to manufacture lipstick that could last long chemists were searching for something that could stain lips and not just cover them. They used bromo acids for this. Optometrists usefluorescein sodium eye dropsto stain the tissues of the eye when they check for damage to the eye during regular check-ups. Add some bromine to fluorescein and you get a bromo acid, which does what the eye drops do—stains tissue. So lipsticks made from these hues stained the lips but also dried them so that the colour would peel off. Bishop concentrated on this problem and tried bromo acid with different moistening ingredients. She finally zeroed in on lanolin. Consequently, she succeeded in making a long lasting lipstick by keeping the bromo acids level low and supplying enough moisturizer.
After this, Bishop stuck with simple names like ‘orange red’ to define colours and gave instructions with her product as to how women should apply her lipstick and then completely blot it off their faces. She made a respectable $50,000 the first year. She partnered up with Raymond Spector Advertising, andHazel Bishop’s Lasting Lipstick made 10 million in the next four years.
Bishop’s long lasting lipstick had become quite a rage and competitor companies like Revlon were trying their best to come up with something as good as Bishop’s. But unfortunately Hazel Bishop Inc. was struggling with its own in-house problems. Bishop sued her advertising partner, Specter, who had managed to gather up most of the stock in Bishop’s company. She ended up resigning, with a settlement of $295,000.
But as long as there is long lasting lipstick around in the cosmetic circles, Hazel Bishop will be remembered forever.
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Author: Technology Blog
