A chemist, his wife, and a dermatologist.

Almay’s name is a compound of two people. Its history is set out in a 2010 domain-name decision of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, case D2010-1742, in which Revlon, the brand’s owner, described the origin of the mark. According to that account, in 1930 Fanny May Woititz, the wife of the chemist Alfred Woititz, complained that there were no makeup or skin-care products she could use without irritating her sensitive skin. Alfred Woititz then devised a formula for cosmetics with the help of a dermatologist, Dr. Marion Sulzberger, and the resulting products were gentle enough, the account says, for his wife to use every day.

The brand was launched in 1931. The WIPO decision records Revlon’s statement that the mark is “a fanciful combination of parts of the names” Alfred and Fanny May: the first two letters of his name and the second part of hers, joined into a single word. English Wikipedia gives the same origin, saying the brand was named after its founders, Alfred and Fanny May Woititz, and sources the story to the brand’s own history page. The decision also notes that the mark had been used for beauty products continuously since 1931, by Revlon and its predecessors.

That founding story became the core of the brand’s positioning. Wikipedia describes Almay as a brand that markets products toward people with sensitive skin, and the WIPO decision lists a series of distinctions that Revlon says the brand claims, relating to fragrance-free products, ingredient disclosure, allergy testing and formulas for particular skin types.

The partnership with a doctor is part of the same story. In Revlon’s account to the WIPO panel, the formula came from a chemist working with a dermatologist, Marion Sulzberger, and the products were made first for Fanny May Woititz’s own use. Wikipedia repeats that sequence: a wife with sensitive skin, a husband who was a professional chemist experimenting with purer and gentler ingredients, and a dermatologist’s help in developing the line.

Revlon’s second makeup name.

Almay changed owners in 1987. In the WIPO decision, Revlon states that it acquired the Almay brand in 1987 and has since expanded it to include a full line of skin-care and makeup products, and English Wikipedia gives the same year. Revlon has owned Almay since 1987, and the brand has sat beside the company’s own Revlon cosmetics line ever since, the second makeup name in the group.

Under Revlon the brand grew into a range for skin, face, lips and eyes, Wikipedia says, with botanical ingredients such as meadowsweet, grape seed, cucumber, aloe and rosehips named in its formulas. The WIPO decision records how Revlon described its marketing of the brand in 2010: on television, in print, on the internet and on point-of-sale material, with retailers also advertising Almay products in their circulars. Revlon said it sold Almay internationally through wholly owned subsidiaries and through distributors.

Revlon also told the WIPO panel that it claims to have pioneered the use of celebrities in its advertising, featuring actors, singers and models for the Revlon brand, including Almay. That approach is visible in the list of Almay spokesmodels. English Wikipedia names, among others, Lauren Hutton, Stephanie Seymour, Milla Jovovich, Eva Herzigova, Yasmin Le Bon, Kathie Lee Gifford, Courtney Thorne-Smith, Leslie Bibb and Lucy Hale. It says the model Elaine Irwin Mellencamp became the brand’s spokesperson in 2004, citing a Business Wire release of 25 February that year, and that the actress Kate Hudson became a spokesmodel in 2010, followed by the singer Carrie Underwood.

Underwood fronted the brand’s “Simply American” campaign; in May 2015 the nonprofit Truth in Advertising filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General about it, Wikipedia says, citing the New York Post. In 2017 the actress and producer Rashida Jones joined the brand, which Wikipedia sources to WWD of 7 September 2017. In June 2022 Revlon filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, Wikipedia says, citing BBC News.

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.

Two first names joined into one word.

The centre of the Almay identity is the name itself. Revlon’s own description, as recorded by the WIPO panel in 2010, calls ALMAY a fanciful mark with a “storybook origin”, and the story it tells is short enough to fit on a pack: Al from Alfred and May from Fanny May. The name belongs to two people rather than to a place or a product.

Revlon set the name in capitals, as ALMAY, throughout the 2010 complaint, in the same way that it set its own name as REVLON. The decision describes the mark as one used “continuously since 1931” by the company and its predecessors, which places the two-syllable name at the heart of the brand’s legal identity as well as its visual one. The brand has kept that name unchanged across more than nine decades and at least one change of owner.

The second constant has been the celebrity face. Revlon told the WIPO panel that it used actors, singers and models in advertising for both its own line and Almay, and the brand’s list of spokesmodels runs from Lauren Hutton and Stephanie Seymour through Kate Hudson and Carrie Underwood to Rashida Jones in 2017. Where CoverGirl built its name around the magazine-cover face, Almay paired its famous faces with a founding story about a chemist, his wife and a dermatologist, told in Revlon’s own account of the brand.

The positioning around sensitive skin, set by the founding story, gives the brand its third constant. Revlon’s 2010 account lists the brand’s claims about fragrance-free formulas, ingredient labelling and allergy testing as part of its history, and Wikipedia describes Almay as a brand marketed toward people with sensitive skin. Those claims are the company’s own, and they have been part of the brand’s story since the Woititz formula of 1931.

For a design guide, Almay shows how a coined name made from two founders’ first names can hold a brand together through a change of owner and decades of changing spokesmodels. Compare it with Revlon, its owner since 1987, and CoverGirl, which built its identity on magazine-cover faces. For this guide we use Almay teal and mist on cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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