Quick: Where were you when you first fell in love with Clinique Black Honey lipstick? I’ll go first. The year was 1998, and after watching Julia Roberts apply it while driving (relatable), then share it with her stepdaughter (germy) in Stepmom, I dug a tube out of my makeup drawer and wore it solidly for the next year.
Clinique turned the spotlight back on Black Honey Almost Lipstick last year by expanding the varieties of honey to include two additional shades, but the original has been around since 1971. When Carol Phillips, a former beauty editor at Vogue, teamed up with Dr. Norman Orentreich, a dermatologist, to start Clinique for Estée Lauder in 1968, she wanted a lip color suitable for workingwomen, which was a distinction at the time. Her solution was a pot of dark, gooey gel, a little slippery for anyone intent on climbing the corporate ladder, but a success nonetheless.
Nostalgia is having a moment. Maybe you posted photos from 2016 on Instagram and TikTok. Maybe you caught J. Crew’s ski collection that looks snatched from Robert Redford’s closet in Downhill Racer. How about those Old Navy ads with Lindsay Lohan and Charo in leotards and scrunchy socks? The Devil Wears Prada is click-clacking its way back to movie theaters, as if print media were alive and well. Surely you saw and grumbled about the images from Love Story, the new series about J.F.K. Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. If all you got out of them was a camel skirt, tortoise hairband, or sheer lipstick, at least that’s something. Coincidentally, Internet sleuths believe that Bessette used to wear a lipstick similar to Black Honey.
The shade, which appears to be nearly black in the tube, has the distinction of looking appealing on pretty much everyone, probably because it’s so sheer. “It takes you by surprise,” says Christie Sclater, the senior vice president of global marketing at Clinique.
Sclater points to another moment that revived the shade’s popularity. “There was a post on TikTok where someone was like, ‘Hey, I think Liv Tyler wore that in Lord of the Rings.’ And it caught on like wildfire. I wish we could say we came up with the idea, but it wasn’t us.” The product has a nostalgic pull for a whole range of ages. “We keep hearing, My mom introduced me to that. Or, That was my very first lipstick,” says Sclater.
Not one to let a TikTok frenzy go to waste, the company sprinkled Black Honey wherever it could: on an eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara, and a lip-and-cheek oil. Clinique followed that by relaunching Chubby Stick, the oversize crayons that first appeared in 1997 as a lip-and-cheek color. This year, highlighter and contour sticks join the collection. They can all be applied without a mirror, “so you don’t have to think so hard,” says Sclater. Even the word “chubby” sounds nostalgic in the age of Ozempic.
“Nostalgia is not a strategy,” said Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. But, so far, the approach is working for Clinique. The makeup feels playful and fun, something the beauty business lost when it switched the focus to performance, with mascara ads boasting of increasing lash length by 70 percent, and serums claiming to make skin 85 percent firmer, whatever that means. Professional-level makeup skills with their cut creases and nose-thinning sleights of hand eclipsed the slap of tinted moisturizer and lip gloss. Precision was the goal. The results may be impressive, but they also may have sparked a yearning for something you could scribble on quickly in the elevator, like a real workingwoman who’d rather think about something other than her makeup.
To me, Clinique is the gateway drug of beauty; it’s often the first department-store brand people buy after graduating from the drugstore. It was for me, at Saks Fifth Avenue at Plaza Frontenac, St. Louis. Clinique was friendly. It offered makeup you could rub on with your fingers, along with better skin in three simple steps. It was optimism and possibility made easy.
Vacation, the sunscreen brand, also taps into a yearning for a sweeter, simpler time, when “sunscreen was a hell of a lot more fun,” says Lach Hall, a co-founder. “That was in the 80s, 70s, 60s, and 50s, when it was all about tanning.” Sun damage and cancer are buzzkills, and no one is nostalgic for that.
The Vacation team created an aesthetic based on “memories of the nostalgic side of what people think about when they think about a vacation,” says Hall. The idea was to bring back what used to be called “fun in the sun.” Its sunscreens look a little racy—one resembles Johnson’s Baby Oil; another, Reddi-wip—with an added dose of S.P.F. On Vacation’s TikTok and Instagram, people frolic in teal and pink bikinis or pose in power suits, holding mobile phones the size of bricks. One of the biggest hits is the reimagined Bain de Soleil that they call Orange Gelée, with S.P.F. 30.
The products’ scents also tap into vacation memories, with banana, coconut, and orange blossom, along with notes that duplicate pool water, inflatable rafts, and a wet Lycra swimsuit. “It elicits joy and transports you to this paradise, this vacation state of mind,” says Hall.
When life seems perilous, we often want to return to the comforts of the past. Some of that clinging is wistful and sentimental. It’s been 22 years since Barack Obama talked about “the audacity of hope.” And since hope currently seems impossible and even naïve, it’s not surprising that the small artifacts of a happier time are popular again.
That could be leotards and scrunchy socks from the days when the gym was flirty and no one biohacked or peptide-stacked. It could be Lancôme Juicy Tubes and Baby Oil, slicked on before we really registered the dangers of climate change. Even Donald Trump plays the nostalgia game every time he pumps his fists and jiggles his whatever to “Y.M.C.A.” That orange stain looks a lot like something from The Simple Life.
Some of the stores that ruled the malls in the 90s are back and better than ever. Look at Gap. Besides its dazzling success under designer Zac Posen, it’s also cooking up a line of fragrances that tap into the brand’s glory days. Bath & Body Works, too. Doesn’t cucumber melon sound like a balm for the soul right now?
Linda Wells is the Editor of AIR MAIL LOOK