A women’s shave gel from a household-products company.

Skintimate is a shaving brand made for women. Its present owner, Edgewell Personal Care, lists it on its brands page with the line “Skintimate—Since 1996,” and English Wikipedia’s article on S. C. Johnson & Son describes Skintimate as “a brand of shaving cream for women” that the company sold, along with the men’s gel Edge, in 2009. For most of its history before that sale, then, Skintimate belonged to the Wisconsin family company better known for household products such as Glade, Pledge, Raid and Windex.

The brand had a sibling in the same portfolio. Edge, the men’s shave gel, carries the line “Edge—Since 1970” on the same Edgewell page, and the two names were treated as a pair when S. C. Johnson came to sell them. Edge addressed men; Skintimate was the women’s counterpart in shave preparation, the category of gels and creams applied before a razor.

When the sale of Skintimate was announced in May 2009, the Reuters report carried by The Boston Globe named its main rival in women’s shave preparation as Gillette Satin Care, a Procter & Gamble line.

From S. C. Johnson to Energizer, and a new name for the owner in 2015.

On 11 May 2009 Energizer Holdings, the St. Louis company best known for its batteries, said that it planned to buy S. C. Johnson’s Edge and Skintimate brands. The Reuters report, published by The Boston Globe the next day, said the purchase, which Energizer planned to support with a new share offering, would add shaving creams and gels to Energizer’s Schick-Wilkinson Sword razor business, which Energizer had bought from Pfizer in March 2003. Wikipedia’s articles on Energizer and on S. C. Johnson both record the sale of the two gels in 2009.

The purchase put the gels in the same company as the Schick razors. On the current Schick site Skintimate appears among the women’s brands alongside Hydro Silk, Intuition and Quattro for Women.

That business was then separated from the batteries. On 30 April 2014, Wikipedia says, Energizer announced that it would split into two publicly traded companies, and it listed Schick, Edge, Skintimate and Wilkinson Sword among the shaving brands of the personal-care side. In February 2015 the company named the two businesses. The arrangement was unusual: according to Wikipedia, citing Edgewell’s own spin-off information and a PR Newswire release of February 2015, the original Energizer Holdings was itself converted into the personal-care company and renamed Edgewell Personal Care, while the household batteries business was moved into a new company that took the Energizer name. The separation took effect on 1 July 2015.

For Skintimate, that means the 2015 change was a change of its owner’s name rather than a sale. The company that bought the brand from S. C. Johnson in 2009 is the company that owns it now, under a different name and with its headquarters in Shelton, Connecticut. Its other brands, on the same Edgewell brands page, include Schick, Wilkinson Sword, Edge, Intuition and the sun-care line Hawaiian Tropic.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell razors, shaving creams, gels and depilatories, the everyday products of the bathroom shelf. Shaving and hair-removal brands in general are bought often and quickly, so their identity has to work at arm’s length, on a crowded shelf, through a name, a colour and a familiar shape of can, tube or handle.

Much of that identity is carried by packaging and advertising rather than by a single logo. A can of shaving cream or gel is a cylinder that can be printed all the way round; a razor is a handle and a cartridge that change shape from one generation to the next; a depilatory is a tube or bottle that sits beside skin creams. Slogans and jingles belong to that identity too, and several of these names have passed between owners over the decades, so the company on the back of the pack may not be the one that first put the name on the front.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the brand, who owns it now, and how its packs and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name built from two words, and a voice about self-care.

The Skintimate name does most of the identity work. It joins “skin” and “intimate” into a single word, and the brand’s current copy leans on the pairing directly. On Edgewell’s brands page the brand introduces itself in the first person: “We’re Skintimate, and we’re about helping everyone fit a little bit of self-care into each day.” The same text talks about reimagining the shower as a place “where we can get intimate with our skin,” and ends with the sign-off “Be good vibes.”

That voice places the shave gel inside a wider idea of body care. Edgewell’s text speaks of a “body-care collection” that “transforms everyday routines into recharging rituals,” and of loving “our armpits, knees, and forearms just as much as our face.” On the same page, the copy for the men’s gel Edge talks instead about experience and about leaving men feeling “smooth, refreshed, and free of irritation.”

The brand’s web presence has been folded into its sister razor brand. The address skintimate.com now opens the Schick US website, where Skintimate is listed with Schick’s other women’s brands, and where a notice says the site is no longer shoppable and directs visitors to retailers.

The brand’s age is part of its presentation too. Edgewell’s brands page gives its names a short dated signature in the same form, a dash followed by a year: “Edge—Since 1970” for the men’s gel and “Skintimate—Since 1996” for the women’s. Set side by side, the two lines place Skintimate twenty-six years after the sibling it was later sold with, and give a brand without a founder’s name a date to stand on.

Skintimate has had two owners, S. C. Johnson until 2009 and the former Energizer Holdings since then, and the second of them has carried two names. The brand itself has kept its name throughout, as has its men’s counterpart Edge, and the two have stayed together since they were sold as a pair.

For a design guide, Skintimate shows how a coined name can carry a product’s positioning on its own, and how a brand voice can widen a single category, shave gel, into the language of self-care. Compare it with Edge, its men’s sibling from S. C. Johnson, and Schick, the razor brand it now sits beside. For this guide we use gel berry and soft pink on foam white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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