A wig maker from the Russian Empire and a shop for actors.

Max Factor is named after its founder, a wig maker and make-up artist from the Russian Empire. In a profile published in February 2017, the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles described him as a Polish Jew who left czarist Russia and emigrated to the United States with his wife and children in 1904, and it gave his family name as Faktrowitz or Faktorowicz, depending on the source, citing Fred E. Basten’s biography of him. An Associated Press report of June 2009, drawing on Procter & Gamble’s website, said he had worked as a make-up artist for the Royal Ballet in pre-revolutionary Russia, and that after arriving in America he ran a make-up and perfume concession at the St Louis World’s Fair.

He moved west as the film business did. The Jewish Journal says he went to Los Angeles in 1908, aware that filmmakers were heading there, and opened a shop selling made-to-order hairpieces and theatrical make-up made by other firms. The AP report dates his Los Angeles theatrical make-up shop to January 1909, and the Perfume Intelligence encyclopaedia records the formation of Max Factor & Co on 2 January that year. The company counts its history from 1909.

The early products were made for the camera. According to the Jewish Journal, which draws on Basten’s interviews with Factor, the stick make-up actors used at the time dried into a stiff mask that cracked, and in 1914 Factor produced a thin, flexible greasepaint in cream form, in a range of shades. Film comedians including Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton came to his shop to buy it and have him apply it, the article says, and in 1913 his wigs had already gone into Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man. In 1918 he introduced a Color Harmony line of face powder and began selling greasepaint in tubes.

From the film set to the drugstore, then a run of owners.

The move to the public came through the studios. The Jewish Journal reports that Factor and his sons heard that their products were disappearing from film sets, and that through a deal with a firm called Sales Builders in 1927 the make-up went on sale in drugstores across the United States. The Max Factor website today says he launched a full range of cosmetics under the name “make-up”, a phrase it says he coined, and it sums up his approach in a line it attributes to him: “You are not born glamorous. Glamour is created.”

On 26 November 1935 the company opened a make-up studio on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. The Jewish Journal describes an Art Deco building remodelled by the cinema architect S. Charles Lee, with a laboratory, offices, factory space and a wig-making area, and with make-up rooms decorated and lit for “Blondes Only”, “Brownettes”, “Redheads” and “Brunettes”. Jean Harlow cut the ribbon on the blondes’ room, it says, and the building now houses the Hollywood Museum. Factor died at his home in August 1938, the same article records, and the family business continued without him. Donelle Dadigan, the museum’s founder, told the paper that Factor gave Joan Crawford her lipstick “smear”.

Ownership then passed through several groups. The Jewish Journal dates the company’s merger with Norton Simon to 1973. The Perfume Intelligence encyclopaedia lists Max Factor as part of the Playtex group from 1983 and as merged with the Revlon group in 1987, and the AP report says Procter & Gamble acquired the brand from Revlon Inc. in 1991. In June 2009 P&G announced it would stop selling Max Factor in the United States in early 2010 while continuing to sell it overseas. In October 2016 Cosmetics Business reported that Coty had completed its merger with P&G’s specialty beauty business, placing Max Factor in Coty Consumer Beauty with CoverGirl.

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 make-up artist’s name, sold with the studio behind it.

The Max Factor identity rests on a founder’s full name and on Hollywood. The company sold to actors and studios before it sold to the public, and when its products reached drugstores in the late 1920s they carried the authority of the film set with them. The brand’s own website still opens its story in “Hollywood’s Golden Age” and names stars such as Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich among the faces Factor worked on.

The 1935 Highland Avenue studio turned that idea into architecture. Rooms for blondes, brownettes, redheads and brunettes, as the Jewish Journal describes them, the studio’s make-up rooms by hair colour. The building itself, an Art Deco showroom now home to the Hollywood Museum, still stands on Highland Avenue.

Fragrance was part of the range too. The Perfume Intelligence encyclopaedia lists Max Factor scents across several decades, among them Hypnotique in 1958 and Le Jardin in 1982, so the name has appeared on perfume bottles as well as on compacts, tubes and mascara wands.

For a design guide, Max Factor shows how a make-up artist’s own name, backed by a film studio and the vocabulary of colour harmony, can hold a cosmetics brand together through a series of corporate owners. Compare it with Rimmel and CoverGirl, its stablemates at Coty. For this guide we use studio burgundy and footlight gold on greasepaint ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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