Embelleze Brand Guidelines: Nova Iguaçu Henê, Novex Redrawn in 2023 and a Salon Network

A Baixada Fluminense factory and one straightening cream.

Embelleze is a Brazilian hair-care company from Nova Iguaçu, in the Baixada Fluminense on the edge of Rio de Janeiro. Portuguese Wikipedia names its founder as the businessman Itamar Serpa and places its factory in the same municipality, with distribution centres in Portugal, the United States, Venezuela, Panama and Colombia. When Brazil Beauty News profiled the company in April 2016, it described a business with almost 50 years of history, founded in Nova Iguaçu, with a catalogue of more than 500 hair products and subsidiaries in the United States and Portugal.

The company’s story begins with a single product. Portuguese Wikipedia says Serpa began planting seeds imported from the Andes in Espírito Santo in 1977 and, three years later, moved to industrial-scale production of a hair-straightening cream known in Brazil by the popular name henê, which became the firm’s main product. That one cream gave the business its start before the range widened into treatment, colour and salon lines.

Over time the name came to cover a group. In 2016 Brazil Beauty News described a Sistema Embelleze made up of the cosmetics brand itself, the Instituto Embelleze for training beauty professionals, Embelleze Salon, which develops products for professional use, and the BellezaPura salon. Portuguese Wikipedia dates the franchising of the Instituto to 1998 and a partnership with the franchise holding company SMZTO to 2003; by September 2021 Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios (PEGN) described the Instituto Embelleze as a brand of Grupo SMZTO.

Product names sit at the front of the range. The company’s own site gives two as its headline names, the Novex treatment creams and the Maxton hair dye, within a portfolio it puts at more than 500 items spanning treatments, colour, shampoos, conditioners and straightening products. Portuguese Wikipedia adds the Natucor colour line to that list, and the company site lists a newer family of relaxing creams called HairLife.

Training schools, a microfranchise and export lines.

The Instituto Embelleze is the part of the name many people meet in the street. It runs courses for hairdressers, manicurists, pedicurists, make-up artists and barbers, according to Portuguese Wikipedia, which also records the opening of an Instituto in Colombia in 2012. In September 2021 PEGN reported a new format, Embelleze Pro, designed to bring the courses to towns of under about 100,000 people by using idle chairs and quiet days in existing salons. The pilot unit was in Bom Despacho, Minas Gerais, alongside about 300 regular Instituto units in larger cities, PEGN said.

The format says something about how the brand is shown. A salon joining Embelleze Pro did not have to change its own name, PEGN reported; it added an Embelleze identification to its facade, and the franchise package covered visual identity, equipment and the franchise fee. The salon needed an average of six chairs and a space reserved for classes, and practical lessons were combined with distance learning.

Abroad, the company has sold under its own name and created lines for export. Brazil Beauty News reported in April 2016 that Embelleze distributed to more than 30 countries, including England, Spain, the Netherlands, Colombia and Angola, and had announced factories in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. It had also launched NutriSalon, which the publication called its first professional line made only for international markets, with labels written in English, French and Arabic.

At home, the same article said, Embelleze had moved in 2014 to two launch cycles a year, in April and August, in place of a single September cycle, and in 2015 had aimed new lines at niches such as curly hair and platinum blonde hair. The executive quoted throughout was Jomar Beltrame, then vice-president of the Sistema Embelleze, who told the publication that relaunches with changed ingredients or packaging counted among the company’s new products.

Brazilian beauty, as the companies present it.

The Brazilian beauty brands in this group introduce themselves through a small set of fixed elements: a short brand name, a plain wordmark, and named lines that run across perfume, make-up and body care, so that a fragrance family or a lipstick range can carry its own name under the house name. O Boticário took its name from the Portuguese word for an apothecary and began in 1977 as a compounding pharmacy in Curitiba; in 2026 one of its franchise shops was refitted with an interior modelled on the old boticas.

The way the products are sold shapes how the brands appear. Some grew through franchise shops and kiosks in shopping centres, others through direct sales, in which representatives order from a catalogue or a service centre and sell to their own customers, and most now combine shops, sellers and online stores. Campaigns follow the same channels, from television spots for Dia dos Namorados to launches timed to a fixed date such as the lipstick day on 29 July.

Group ownership is common, and this guide describes it plainly, by date. Grupo Boticário was formed as a holding company in 2010 and has since launched or bought brands including Eudora, Quem Disse, Berenice? and Vult. Where a brand has passed to another owner, including an international cosmetics group, the entry gives the owner and the date of the deal; where a brand remains independent, the guide says so only where a dated source does.

Each entry draws on corporate pages for founders, owners and franchise networks, and on dated independent press for anything beyond the company’s own word. Product lines are named as the companies publish them; the guide does not describe what the products do, and the palettes and typefaces shown are an unofficial interpretation rather than any brand’s own.

A new logo, slogan and packs in 2023.

The clearest documented identity change concerns Novex rather than the company mark. Mundo do Marketing reported in December 2023 that Embelleze had rebranded Novex, giving the line a new logo, a new slogan and new packaging with a cleaner look that set out each product’s ingredients and purpose more directly. The work and its campaign had been run for more than a year by the branding agency Troiano, the publication said, and the new era of Novex opened with an event at Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro with the company’s brand ambassadors.

The same report listed the media around the relaunch: a Novex advertisement on a digital panel in Times Square, a Carnival 2024 box at the Sapucaí under the name Novex Rio Praia, sponsorship of the reality series A Fazenda, and spots on radio and television. It also described an out-of-home campaign for Natucor, made with the bus operator Itabus, in which a fully wrapped bus carried the line through the streets of Rio de Janeiro in the last weeks of the year.

Television has long been part of the brand’s presence. Portuguese Wikipedia records Embelleze in segments on Rede Globo programmes and a 2012 treatment line named Monalisa after a character in the telenovela Avenida Brasil. Mundo do Marketing noted a 2023 tie-in in which an actress from the Globo telenovela Elas por Elas used Novex Recarga de Queratina on the morning programme É de Casa, as part of the storyline of both shows.

Taken together, the sources describe a company whose identity is spread across many names: the corporate Embelleze mark, product lines such as Novex, Maxton and Natucor, export lines such as NutriSalon, and a training network whose franchise is run by another group.

For a design guide, Embelleze shows how a hair-care maker can let its product lines carry the identity, with Novex redrawn in 2023 while the company name works as an umbrella over factory, schools and salons. Compare Lola Cosmetics, another Brazilian hair-care name, and Natura. For this guide we use deep plum, copper and rose sand with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Embelleze’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.