Hermès Beauty, a brand new métier for the French luxury house, begins its new chapter with Rouge Hermès, a graceful collection of lip colours, lip care essentials and accessories.
It’s history-in-the-making when the venerable House of Hermès decides to launch a fresh impetus to their lauded marque, with a new métier – Hermès Beauty.
While its fragrances have for years captured the imagination of perfume lovers with a certain acquired taste for artisanal scents, Hermès Beauty, through Rouge Hermès, opens its doors to limitless possibilities in the world of beauty – makeup to skincare to begin with, and then who knows, perhaps beyond that, haircare, body care, and spa essentials – the beauty access it affords will be quite endless.
Luxury for the Lips
For now, 4 talented minds –Bali Barret, Pierre Hardy, Jérôme Touron and Christine Nagel – have collaboratively dreamt up Rouge Hermès. Their synergy led to the formulation, design and creation of the first of Hermès Beauty’s incarnations consisting of a collection of objects dedicated to the beauty of the lips. Lipsticks – an emblematic collection and limited editions – with cases that are at once elegiac, functional and refillable; a lip care salve, a universal lip pencil, Poppy lip shine, and a lip brush.
These poetic objects are perfected by a line of small leather accessories created by the house’s designers and artisans – a lipstick case with integrated mirror, a pop-up lipstick case, and a moon-shaped mirror on a cord (hands-free when worn around the neck), all in Madame calfskin.
This nascent manifesto of the new métier, an illuminating standard in womanly beauty, is a multi-sensorial exception, from materials, colours and gestures, to the new sensory field of texture, with, thanks to Christine Nagel, fragrance contributing to this unique synaesthesia (of one sense stimulating another), the result of which elevates lip beauty to a beautiful art form, a lyrical lifestyle that’s fundamentally Hermès. With its harmonious play of forms and colours, and like any and every Hermès creation, they are a pleasure to look at, to use, to own. Global too, since they are portable and travel-friendly.
Heart of Hermès
Rouge Hermès, the first Hermès Beauty gesture, has the task of setting the tone for more functional beauty objects d’art. As Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Artistic Director of Hermès says, “We approach this new métier with our own language, that is to say that we are expressing the beauty of Hermès, or Hermès’ vision of beauty. I believe beauty at Hermès is not about appearance, but about well-being. Beauty is a fundamental part of a natural quest for well-being. With Hermès Beauty, as for our other métiers, we are engaged in a creative production process with the same insistence on quality as for all our objects. A beautiful object must not betray its primary function; it must do what it was designed to do.”
To Bali Barret, Artistic Director of the Hermès Women’s Universe, designing Rouge Hermès was about “finding a language of colour that enhances Hermès women, who take pleasure in feeling free and beautiful, revealing their personalities, emphasising, outlining and colouring their lips. At Hermès, colour is an irrational, intoxicating passion. More than 75,000 (and counting) colour references are kept on silk in our Lyon archive. It is that diversity and generosity that we wanted to transpose to the Beauty métier.”
Pierre Hardy, Creative Director for Hermès Shoes and Jewellery says he “focused on something essential, but in a quite playful way. They reflect an empowered attitude and are designed to be purchased as you would purchase a piece of jewellery. The idea was not to emphasise their function, but to add an element of surprise.”
“When I think of makeup, I think of materials,” says Jérôme Touron, Creative Director for Hermès Beauty. “Materials carry colour. They give it its strength and its subtlety. They give it a particular finish. At Hermès, colours travel; from silk to leather, enamel or lacquer. And today, to makeup. When I imagine a shade of lipstick inspired by a colour of leather or silk, it is a starting point. The material always takes the colour in another direction. Colour also interacts with another material: the skin. At Hermès, we exalt the material, thus exalting the skin. This comes from the choice of care ingredients and the concentration of pigments; from the actions used to apply it, this sequence of precise gestures, this choreography that is created, repeated and endlessly reinvented.”
Rouge Hermès lipsticks are available in 24 shades, each encased in a distinctly Hermès gold-black-white packaging, for $103 per tube; a Lip Balm and Poppy Shine are also $103 each. The Universal Lip Pencil goes for $57 and the Lip Brush for $120. Just for S/S2020 is the Limited Edition 3-Lipstick Totem Collection, where each shade retails at $111. All items are available exclusively at Hermès stores from 4 March 2020.
Images courtesy of Hermès, artwork by Curatedition. All rights reserved.
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