Cosmetics: Kiss and Sell

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running a business that is firmly based on psychology and fashion. He gossips delightedly about a competing company's "nose" (perfume tester) who, he insists, has hardly any sense of smell at all, and he is wryly amused by the copycat nature of the industry. Any new shade or fragrance that looks salable will almost instantly spur development of three or four nearly identical competing products. Says Bergerac: "Maybe that is one definition of creativity." He denies that Revlon stoops to any industrial espionage, though he believes competitors do and suspects that such shenanigans are inefficient anyway. More than once he has floated false rumors of what products Revlon would introduce next—and then sat back to laugh while rivals scrambled to reproduce those nonexistent products. Did he have any trouble adjusting from the hard-goods world of delivery schedules and manufacturing specifications to the selling of glamour and other intangibles based sometimes on plain old hunch? On the contrary. Says he: "It's like being reborn!"

The cosmetics industry, of course, is not all paint and puffery. It has a hard technical side, as Bergerac points out. For example, a fragrance may exude an alluring aroma when first sprayed on but then change or lose its scent altogether in an hour, unless manufacturers observe the strictest quality control. Product testing can be as grueling as in a factory making any other kind of goods. To be sure that makeup will withstand long wear, Revlon sometimes requires a woman to sit for hours in a room where the temperature is 90° F. and the humidity 100%; windshield wipers have to clear away the steam from the windows so that analysts can peer in.

There are special problems in creating makeup for black women, and the major cosmetics houses long neglected them. All skin "exfoliates"; minute pieces come loose and peel off, with the result that everybody gets a new coat of skin every 28 days or so. On white women the effect is often unnoticeable, but the exfoliation can make ashen spots show up on dark skin, unless it is covered with special emollients. The upper and lower lips of black women sometimes differ in color—slightly, but enough to require application of a special base to the relatively lighter lower lip if a lipstick is not to come out two different shades. To tap this market, Revlon three years ago brought out a line of Polished Ambers cosmetics—under the Revlon name rather than some specially invented one, as Bergerac proudly notes. He explains: "In doing it that way you do not discriminate. What we are saying is that black ladies are important enough for us to use our own name in appealing to them." (The courtly Bergerac still uses the word "ladies" quite as often as "women.")

The financial side of the business was often overlooked by the original entrepreneurial managers, who relied on high profit margins to cover up sloppiness. Under Charles Revson, Revlon ground out products in huge volumes, took long risks with new lines and often wound up getting piles of merchandise returned from stores. Many other cosmetics makers still do, but at Revlon, Bergerac has put in tight inventory controls and persuaded customers to pay bills more promptly. He figures that if the company were still being run the way it was when he arrived, it would have to