The light fantastic
YSL’s new foundation is the NEXT step
in the Touche Éclat world takeover
It’s mid-morning in a glassed-in courtyard
in the historic Marais district of Paris, and the Yves Saint Laurent marketing
team’s sylph-like marketing reps – willowy and faultlessly soigneé are fanned
out across the room’s lime-stone expanse. Each is wearing one or more items of
YSL finery, including the silk safari dress, a 1968 creation that still looks
fresh today. On practically every hand, one sees YSL’s signature gold rings
with their chunky trademark stones. To underscore the morning’s
well-orchestrated brand imprinting, all teeter elegantly on the iconic sky-high
Tribute platform heels.
Yves
Saint Laurent Touche Éclat
The Touche Éclat high lighter pen, another
talismanic “jewel” of the YSL repertoire, is the focus of today’s gathering.
The highlighter, which magically erases signs of fatigue, softens wrinkles and
is a staple in every chic woman’s makeup bag, has been spun off into a
foundation. More on that in a minute.
Used by stars from Salma Hayek to Demi
Moore and still selling at a global rate of one every 10 seconds, Touche Éclat,
even at the venerable age of 20, is the beauty icon that ticks all the boxes.
It performs its difficult yet critical tasks of brightening complexions and
banishing fine lines while simultaneously acting as a very covetable object.
(In print ads, Jourdan Dunn and Ginta Lapina wield their gold Touche Éclat
stylos as though they’re holding cigarettes). And its success has inspired
countless knockoffs, so many of which fail to make the grade. Some cheap
imitators miss the mark completely and are just liquid concealers in sad white
plastic cases – no luminosity, no magic. “Touche Éclat doesn’t cover; it
illuminates”, says Lloyd Simmonds, creative director of makeup for YSL.
“Wherever you want a bit of a lift, it gives a little light”.
For any woman who has joked that she would
happily cover her entire face with Touche Éclat the morning after a late night,
the idea of a companion foundation is surely the beauty world’s version of
catnip. The YSL team thought so too. “Touch Éclat is the number one concealer
worldwide”, notes Isabella Weinstabel, international marketing director for YSL
Beauté. In other words, spinning the brand off into a foundation is what the
French might call a case of n’hésitez pas (no-brainer).
The global foundation market for a juicy
prize indeed: according to market analyst Euro monitor, it’s worth $12.643
billion annually. And it’s a pot that’s only growing in size, thanks to
burgeoning economies in the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China)
countries, which are considered the next frontier for expansion-minded
retailers. The three-year project began with a skin-tone survey of 7,000 women
worldwide; a global range of colours was essential if they company was going to
challenge the world’s top-selling foundations (a cluster that currently
includes Shiseido, Kanedo, Clinique, Lancôme Paris and Estée Lauder).
But foundation is tricky, and creating one
that can legitimately be called Le Teint Touche Éclat was no small feat. The
foundation customer wants it all. It’s a tendency that Caroline Nègre,
international scientific manager for YSL Beauté, charmingly describes, with a
Gallic shrug, as a “paradox”. Women, she says, “want both a perfect complexion
and something sheer and subtle”. The goal, then, was to create a product that
can “embellish without masking the expressivity of the face”.
YSL
Le Teint Touche Éclat ($60)
Translating the Touche Éclat “light” into a
foundation required jettisoning many traditional ingredients. Gone is the
alcohol, which dries out skin; it was replaced with boosted water and oil to
keep skin dewy. Also sent packing were opaque fillers and mother-of-pearl
pigments in favour of sheer proprietary ingredients: soft-focus gel and “fluid
light concentrate” – a suspension of gold micro particles to evenly reflect
light. The result is a line of 16 shades (down from 22 in Europe) of
transparent colour for luminous skin without that sparkly “disco-ball effect”.
And the lighter formulation with no mother-of-pearl means that shades at the
darker end of the range will have that signature Touche Éclat glow without an
ashy cast.
Le Teint Touche Éclat also manages to be
both sheer and buildable (makeup-artist speak for “you can apply more for
increased coverage without it getting goopy”). Still, Simmonds is of the
less-is-more school: “I encourage people to use foundation just where you need
it and only when you need it. Because otherwise, why? You don’t need it”. The
result is what he calls a “dewy luminosity”.
Throw in some YSL hauteur and a pair of
Tributes and isn’t that what we all want?
