The Tamesis
When you open a scarlet box set from nail brand Celisse, you’ll not only find original tilings of their entire collection, but you’ll also discover a delightful relic: a printed brochure. It promises “beautiful, healthy nails in simple steps,” with step-by-step instructions for shaping, polishing and applying polish, complete with visuals. This booklet is a tactile break in the age of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, where video tutorials serve more algorithms than actual education. It’s part of a larger trend of new beauty brands embracing vintage prints.
“We are inundated with digital content,” said Jessica Blumenthal, co-founder and CEO of Celisse. “Doing your nails at home is an offline moment where you sit down and read the manual. You don’t have to pick up your phone.” Blumenthal found inspiration in beauty packaging from the 1920s and 1930s when developing the manual with designer Kat Jones. “These Cutex manuals kept popping up on eBay, and I bought one called How to Get Lovely Nails. It was more of a catalog, but on the other hand, it did show some techniques,” she adds, noting that it was a key reference in developing their “modern heirloom” brand image.
“When I was 12 years old, I was reading magazines or watching Klutz [books]Holly Falcone, Celisse’s other co-founder, added that her experience as a professional manicurist informed the manual’s friendly, outspoken tips and tricks. “There was no YouTube.” Manuals like Celisse harken back to a time before social media, when you learned technology from Kevyn Aucoin’s books make faces. Rather than offering a quick-cut 15-second “how-to,” the printed manual offers a well-designed 2D tutorial that counteracts the overwhelming video stream on your feed and encourages you to slow down.
“I love designing physical ephemera; doing things digitally all the time is nerve-wracking,” says Annie Kreighbaum, founder and president of Kraum, a newly launched brand of tiny brushes designed for detail (think applying product to the inner corners of your eyes or getting razor-sharp wings). “When you watch tutorials online, you go at the pace of the person you’re watching. That’s one of the most frustrating things about trying to learn digitally – the information is all bite-sized, and if you can’t keep up, you have to actively press buttons and use your device to go at your own pace.”
Kreighbaum collaborated with designer Adriana Deleo, with whom she previously worked on early packaging at Glossier, to create Kraum’s 40-page brochure. Impressively, the detailed instructions and accompanying illustrations were written and drawn by Kreighbaum himself. “Half of what Croum provides clients is education,” she added. Like Blumenthal, she found inspiration in beauty packaging of the past, particularly Chanel cosmetics from the ’90s and 2000s, which included charts for applying lipstick and eyeshadow. “I always thought their line drawing style was unique,” she said, citing Bob Ross as “a huge inspiration for educating about different brush types and hand tools.”
Printed brochures are not only an opportunity to satisfy the collective desire for more analog escapism, they are also a key tool in bringing customers closer to the brand story. Heretic Parfum, for example, is partnering with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust for its first-ever holiday season to celebrate the late illustrator and author’s “mischief and magic” through fragrance gifts and an 80-page book anachronistic manual. It’s no longer a traditional guide with follow-up instructions, but a visual feast of photos, illustrations, human stories (starring Dita Von Teese, among others) and what Douglas Little, master perfumer and founder of Heretic, describes as “advice on how to spend the holidays when your temperament leans toward the gothic.”
