A sunburn cream from Baltimore, and a makeup line built on it.

CoverGirl began inside a skin-cream company. English Wikipedia describes the brand as an American cosmetics line founded in Maryland by the Noxzema Chemical Company, the business behind Noxzema cream. Wikipedia’s history of that company says that in about 1917 Dr. George Bunting, a graduate of Washington College in Maryland, introduced “Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy”, which was soon renamed Noxzema and promoted as a cream with many uses, and that in 1920 the Noxzema Chemical Company opened a factory in a house in Baltimore. Through the 1950s the company added shaving cream, cold cream and suntan products, and in 1960 it bought the Lestoil household cleaner.

The makeup line arrived at the start of the next decade. Wikipedia dates CoverGirl’s first product line, Clean Makeup, to 1961, and says it began with only six products. It was advertised as a “medicated face makeup” because it used the same ingredients as Noxzema cream — camphor, menthol and eucalyptus — so that the new line borrowed its selling point from the company’s best-known product. The company itself changed its name to Noxell Corporation in 1966, Wikipedia says, while remaining under the management of the Bunting family; the founder’s son, G. Lloyd Bunting Sr., ran it, followed in 1973 by his grandson, George L. Bunting Jr.

The name explains the brand’s method. Wikipedia says Noxell advertised the cosmetics by having “cover girls” — the models, actresses and singers who appeared on the front covers of women’s magazines — wear its products. The idea placed the faces of the magazine stand at the centre of the line’s advertising from the beginning, and it set a pattern of spokesmodels that the brand has kept for more than six decades.

The first of those faces arrived quickly. Wikipedia, citing her official website, says the model and later actress Jennifer O’Neill signed as a CoverGirl spokeswoman in 1963 and appeared in print and television advertising that year, beginning a relationship with the brand that lasted for decades. It names Cybill Shepherd as one of the line’s earliest models, appearing in print and television advertising at the end of the 1960s, and says her fresh, natural look in those advertisements established the “girl-next-door” image the brand would become associated with.

From Noxell to Procter & Gamble, then Coty.

The spokesmodel list grew with each decade. Wikipedia records that Cheryl Tiegs was signed to represent the brand in 1979 and that an advertising campaign featuring Christie Brinkley ran in 1985. In 1992 CoverGirl signed the Canadian model Lana Ogilvie to an exclusive contract, an appointment Wikipedia sources to Black Enterprise in June 1993. Later faces named in the same article include Queen Latifah, Rihanna, Drew Barrymore, Taylor Swift, Sofía Vergara, Pink, Janelle Monáe and Zendaya, and from its third cycle the television series America’s Next Top Model gave each of its winners a CoverGirl contract.

Ownership changed at the end of the 1980s. Wikipedia says Procter & Gamble bought the Noxell Corporation, then based at Hunt Valley, Maryland, in 1989, and that Noxell continued to operate as a subsidiary. In 1997, according to Wikipedia, CoverGirl introduced the slogan “Easy, breezy, beautiful”, meant to suggest a natural look. That line stayed in use for two decades, until the 2017 relaunch.

Procter & Gamble’s beauty brands changed hands in 2016. A Coty Inc. press release dated 3 October 2016 announced that Coty had completed the merger of Procter & Gamble’s fine fragrance, colour cosmetics, salon professional and hair colour businesses into Coty. The release placed the line in a new division, Coty Consumer Beauty, alongside Max Factor and Rimmel, and set its name in capitals as COVERGIRL. Coty has owned CoverGirl since 2016.

The spokesmodel tradition continued under the new arrangements. Wikipedia, citing Time and The Washington Post, says that in October 2016 the brand named the YouTuber James Charles as a spokesperson whom headlines called CoverGirl’s “CoverBoy”. It adds that the chef Ayesha Curry joined as a spokesperson in September 2017, that the model Amy Deanna appeared in a 2018 campaign reported by The Independent in February that year, and that the actress Lili Reinhart was announced in October 2019.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell makeup and nail colour to a wide public, through pharmacies, supermarkets, department-store counters and salons. A mass-market cosmetics brand reaches its customer in a crowded aisle, so much of its identity is carried by small things seen at close range: a wordmark on a cap or a tube, the shape of a bottle, and the name printed on a shade.

Shade names do a great deal of that work. Some brands number their colours, some describe them plainly and some give them names that read like jokes, places or lines of dialogue, so a name can become as recognisable as the colour itself. Bottle and compact shapes are another constant, because a customer often meets the product on a rack or a counter display where many similar containers stand side by side.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its packaging and how its shades are named — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new strapline, a new logotype and a short film.

The largest single change to the identity came a year after the sale to Coty. In October 2017 Coty announced what it called “the biggest reinvention in CoverGirl’s 60-year history”, according to Chain Drug Review’s report of the announcement. The new brand expression was “I Am What I Make Up”, and Coty said the transformation would touch “all areas of the brand”, including packaging and product design, the in-store experience, a new logo and tagline, and the look, tone and feel of all communications, with the rollout continuing through the rest of 2017 and into 2018.

It’s Nice That, writing on 16 October 2017, reported that the relaunch replaced the previous slogan, “easy, breezy, beautiful”, that it featured an updated, geometric sans-serif logotype, and that the work was by the agency Droga5. The magazine quoted the brand’s aim to “inspire people to embrace their unique identities and unapologetically create any version of themselves, or who they want to be with makeup.”

The relaunch was introduced with a short film, Made in the Mirror, featuring six women: the chef and author Ayesha Curry, the actress and writer Issa Rae, the singer Katy Perry, the personal trainer Massy Arias, the model and dietician Maye Musk and the motorcycle racer Shelina Moreda. Coty described them, Chain Drug Review reported, as “boundary-breakers, cultural change agents and true makeup lovers.” Ukonwa Ojo, then senior vice president for CoverGirl at Coty, said: “This is bigger than a new campaign or a tagline,” and Laurent Kleitman, president of Coty Consumer Beauty, said the positioning was an example of Coty’s purpose “to celebrate and liberate the diversity of beauty.”

The film kept the oldest part of the brand intact. From Jennifer O’Neill in 1963 to the six women of 2017, CoverGirl has presented itself through named people, and Coty’s 2017 announcement, as Chain Drug Review reported it, still called the women in the film “CoverGirls”. What the 2017 work changed was the voice around them: the soft, three-word slogan gave way to a first-person sentence, and the old wordmark gave way to the geometric logotype that It’s Nice That described.

For a design guide, CoverGirl shows how a name taken from the magazine stand can carry a brand through three owners, with the identity renewed by a strapline and a logotype while the line of named spokesmodels runs unbroken. Compare it with Max Factor, which also came to Coty from Procter & Gamble in 2016, and Maybelline. For this guide we use cover blue and blush pink on powder with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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