A San Fernando Valley maker and a “Swiss Formula” name.

St. Ives is a Californian brand. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 36, St. James Press, 2001) describes St. Ives Laboratories Inc. as a maker of hair-care and skin-care products based in Chatsworth, California, in the San Fernando Valley, selling them under the St. Ives Swiss Formula brand. The beauty-industry title Glossy, writing on 27 January 2026, calls St. Ives “the skin-care brand founded in 1980”.

The hair-care side of the business is dated a little earlier by the trade press. On 12 December 1994, The Rose Sheet reported that St. Ives was revamping its Swiss Formula hair-care systems and described the line as fifteen years old at that point. According to that report, the update brought new packaging, “contemporary graphics” and new variants: Swiss Vanilla and Extracts of the Rain Forest shampoo and conditioner were being added, while Apple Mint, Henna, Cream Rose and Keratin were being dropped. Three of the original combinations — Aloe Vera, Jojoba and Papaya — stayed in the range, and the revised products were due to launch on 1 January 1995.

The variant names in that report are ingredient and flavour names, and the umbrella name joined the words “St. Ives” to “Swiss Formula”. The skin-care side was broad by the mid-1990s. On 6 November 1995, The Rose Sheet described the St. Ives Swiss Formula skin-care line-up as including facial moisturizers, cleansers and scrubs, as well as hand, body and face lotions, sold alongside a separate Swiss Formula hair-care line.

Scrubs remain part of the range. Glossy’s 2026 report refers to the brand’s Apricot Scrub, and the current United States website sells an Apricot Face Scrub at the head of a range that also includes scrubs built around avocado and honey, rose and aloe, and green tea and bamboo. The same website lets shoppers browse by ingredient — avocado, oat, coconut, apricot, citrus and lavender, and products throughout the current range are named after their ingredients, as the 1994 hair-care variants were.

From Alberto-Culver and Unilever to Evermark.

St. Ives was sold to a Chicago-area beauty company in the mid-1990s. The Rose Sheet reported on 6 November 1995 that Alberto-Culver had announced the purchase on 31 October, and on 12 February 1996 it reported that Alberto-Culver had completed the acquisition of St. Ives Labs on 6 February. The deal, the trade title said, added the St. Ives Swiss Formula skin-care and hair-care brands to an Alberto-Culver hair-care line-up that included Alberto VO5 and TRESemmé. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the purchase to February 1996 and says it gave Alberto-Culver a significant presence in skin care.

Alberto-Culver had its own long history. English Wikipedia describes it as an American hair and beauty company that Leonard H. Lavin bought and reorganised in 1955, later headquartered in Melrose Park, Illinois, and it lists St. Ives among the company’s skin-care brands alongside Alberto VO5, TRESemmé, Nexxus and White Rain. The company history connects the St. Ives purchase with Alberto-Culver’s move into personal-care products marketed on natural ingredients, a theme it also notes in the Alberto VO5 Naturals line of the same period.

The next owner was Unilever. English Wikipedia records that Unilever agreed to buy Alberto-Culver on 27 September 2010, citing Bloomberg News, and The New York Times’ DealBook noted on 24 August 2011 that the deal had given Unilever brands including TRESemmé, Nexxus, VO5 and St. Ives. Unilever later placed a group of personal-care brands in a unit called Elida Beauty, which its press release dates to 2021.

On 18 December 2023, Unilever announced a binding offer from Yellow Wood Partners, a Boston-based private investment firm, to acquire Elida Beauty, with completion expected by mid-2024; Personal Care Insights reported the same day that the division’s brands included Pond’s, Q-Tips, Caress and St. Ives. Glossy reported on 27 January 2026 that Yellow Wood had merged Elida Beauty with its Suave Brands Company to form Evermark, led by chief executive Daniel Alter, and that St. Ives, Pond’s and Noxzema sit on the former Elida side. Evermark has owned St. Ives since 2026, and the United States website now carries an Evermark copyright line.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group belong to the bathroom shelf: deodorants and antiperspirants, hairsprays and face scrubs. Personal-care brands of this kind sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry the place or the people who started them to labels that have passed through several owners and now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups.

A brand of this kind is usually carried less by a single formula than by a container and a name: a twist-up stick, a pressurised can, a squeezable tube, each with a label that has to be read at a glance on a crowded shelf. The company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or redrawn its packaging several times. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its cans, sticks and tubes have looked over time.

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

Swiss Formula, apricots and a range sorted by ingredient.

The St. Ives identity has been revised more than once. The Rose Sheet’s December 1994 report described a change to new packaging and contemporary graphics for the fifteen-year-old Swiss Formula hair-care line, along with new and renamed variants: one formula moved from Silk Protein to Silk Pro-Vitamin, and others were dropped. The change came while St. Ives Laboratories was still independent in Chatsworth.

The naming logic has outlasted those revisions. In the 1994 range, products were called Aloe Vera, Jojoba, Papaya and Swiss Vanilla; in the 2026 range, the face scrubs are named for apricot, avocado and honey, rose and aloe, and green tea and bamboo, and the body washes carry pairings such as sea salt and Pacific kelp, or lavender and chamomile. The website’s own navigation sorts the range by ingredient, and its home page lists walnuts, green tea, apricots and coconuts among the ingredients it names. The brand name stays fixed while the ingredient in the product name changes from one item to the next.

The brand has also faced litigation: Glossy reported in January 2026 that a 2016 lawsuit over the Apricot Scrub was dismissed by a federal court in 2018. In the same report, Evermark’s chief marketing officer for face and skin care, Kara Langan, said the company planned to build on the brand’s association with exfoliation and to modernise its marketing with a more social-media-led approach, and she noted that the brands had been “quieter in the marketplace” in recent years.

The owners have changed around the name: St. Ives Laboratories in Chatsworth, Alberto-Culver from 1996, Unilever from 2010, Elida Beauty within Unilever from 2021, and Yellow Wood Partners’ Evermark from 2026. Through those changes, the St. Ives name and the Swiss Formula line were described by the trade press in 1994 and 1995, and an ingredient-named range is what the brand’s own website sells in 2026.

For a design guide, St. Ives shows how a brand can carry a saint’s name, a “Swiss Formula” line and a plain ingredient-led naming system from a California laboratory through three corporate owners. Compare it with Noxzema, which also passed from Unilever’s Elida Beauty to Evermark, and TRESemmé, which joined Unilever with St. Ives in the Alberto-Culver deal. For this guide we use apricot and kernel brown on cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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