From a Hollywood cosmetics house to a New York company in her own name.

The brand takes its name from Sally Hansen, born Sally Finney in Kansas City, Kansas. English Wikipedia says her parents owned a small cosmetics company, La Finné, and that as a teenager she left home for Hollywood, where she worked as a dancer and actress on stage and screen. While working in Hollywood, Wikipedia says, she also wrote a beauty and lifestyle column titled “Your Candid Mirror” for the Los Angeles Times under her maiden name. The brand’s website still quotes lines it attributes to her in that newspaper in 1934.

Her first business was her parents’. Wikipedia, citing a May 1942 article in The American Perfumer & Essential Oil Review, says she took over the family company and reinvented it as House of Hollywood, in partnership with her husband and her brother, and that she was made president of the California Cosmetics Association. Through the retailer S. H. Kress & Co. she sold products under a label called La Bonita, among them a make-up named Cool Off and another named Film Tone, which Wikipedia says drew on the make-up she knew from film sets.

In 1946 she left House of Hollywood and moved to New York City, where she founded Sally Hansen Inc. The company’s own “Sally’s Story” page and Wikipedia agree on two details that still define the brand: the company carried her own name, and it had a logo modelled on her signature. Wikipedia says its first two trademarks were Hard As Nails and Mend-A-Nail, and the brand’s website says it launched with two nail products, including Hard As Nails. Wikipedia adds that she employed mostly women in her factory.

Maradel, Del Laboratories and Coty.

In 1962 Sally Hansen sold the company. Wikipedia, citing a United States Patent and Trademark Office assignment record dated September 1962, says the buyer was Maradel Products. A history of Del Laboratories published in the International Directory of Company Histories and reproduced by FundingUniverse fills in the buyer’s story. Maradel was incorporated in New York in 1961 to acquire established health-and-beauty businesses, and in 1962 it bought Sally Hansen, Inc. alongside several other companies.

That history also ties the brand to Revlon. It says Maradel’s chairman from 1963 was Martin E. Revson, the younger brother of Revlon’s founders Charles and Joseph Revson, who had been Revlon’s sales manager and executive vice-president before leaving in 1958, and that Revlon itself held a sizeable stake in Maradel until 1983. Maradel consolidated its plants at Farmingdale, New York, and renamed itself Del Laboratories in 1966.

Under Del the name grew into a range. The FundingUniverse history says Del was selling nail-care products under the Sally Hansen label, including Hard as Nails, by 1967. It records that Del acquired the La Cross manicure-implement business in 1978 and folded it into the Sally Hansen line in 1994, that the Sally Hansen division moved into facial cosmetics, hair bleaches and depilatories, and that a professional line followed in 1994–95. The same history says Del moved its headquarters to Uniondale, New York, in 1997, while its principal manufacturing remained at Farmingdale.

On 10 December 2007 Cosmetics Business reported that Coty had agreed to acquire DLI Holding Corp., the parent of Del Laboratories, adding Sally Hansen, N.Y.C. New York Color and La Cross to Coty Beauty. English Wikipedia’s article on Coty, citing Women’s Wear Daily and The Wall Street Journal, records the acquisition in 2007. Coty has owned Sally Hansen since 2007, and the brand’s website today links to Coty’s terms of use and consumer-affairs service.

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 founder’s signature as the mark.

The centre of the Sally Hansen identity is a person’s handwriting. From the start, the company says, the brand carried a logo modelled on Sally Hansen’s own signature, and the name has stayed on the products through three owners: Maradel, renamed Del Laboratories, from 1962, and Coty since 2007. The brand’s “Sally’s Story” page adds a design detail of its own: it says that Jack Newton, whom she married in 1947, was the graphic designer who worked on the design of her namesake brand.

The second constant is a product name. Hard As Nails was among the company’s first two trademarks, Wikipedia says, and the FundingUniverse history describes it as the most prominent Sally Hansen product in Del’s range by 1967. The company’s website still introduces the brand through Hard As Nails, calling it one of the two nail products it launched with.

Today the website organises the brand into five categories: nail colour, nail care, sunless tanning, hair removal and beauty tools. The FundingUniverse history records the Sally Hansen division adding hair bleaches and depilatories, and absorbing the La Cross manicure implements, during the Del years. The site frames the whole range around a do-it-yourself idea, telling readers that “beauty is better when you do it yourself,” and it reaches back to the founder’s own words, quoting lines it attributes to her Los Angeles Times column of 1934.

The founder’s story is itself part of the brand. The website presents Sally Hansen as “the original self-made woman,” and the “Sally’s Story” page retells her years as a dancer, writer and cosmetics businesswoman in Hollywood before the move to New York. The page closes on the founder’s own words, again quoted from the Los Angeles Times in 1934.

For a design guide, Sally Hansen shows how a founder’s signature and one plainly named product can carry a brand from a 1946 New York start-up through Del Laboratories to Coty. Compare it with essie and OPI, two other nail-polish names. For this guide we use polish berry and deep plum with blush pink on bottle white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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