Shades Cosmetics
Brand Identity and Packaging for the new Los Angeles-based small-scale beauty brand, Shades Cosmetics.
Shades Cosmetics is a new small-scale beauty brand based in Los Angeles, California founded by Vaneese Valenzuela. Vaneese has been a beauty lover from a young age and after working in the industry for over a decade selling for top beauty brands, she made the choice to follow her dream of creating her own brand that she could pour her love and passion into. Shades Cosmetics has been tasked with the mission to make everyone who uses their products feel beautiful. They believe makeup has no rules and that beauty is a form of creation.
As Shades Cosmetics prepared to bring their first product to market, Blushful Liquid Blush, they required the creation of a brand identity that could successfully convey their core values of equality, empowerment, and elegance. In addition, a flexible packaging design was also needed to properly support the rollout of all five versions of the product at launch.
To represent equality within the identity, it was important that the color palette of the brand could flexibly illustrate a wide spectrum of skin tone shades, aligning directly with the importance behind the name Shades Cosmetics. This was accomplished through the use of three different nude hues, representative of lighter, medium, and darker shades of skin. All three colors are of equal importance and can be intermixed completely with one another when designing branding material, negating the idea of any hierarchy of color within the identity system. To activate a sense of elegance within the brand identity, the use of the typeface Lust Sans was vital. Lust Sans is a soft organic sans serif that implements high-stroke contrast and provides the option for letterforms to adorn additional decorative tails or swashes when preferred. To exude confidence, the identity leans into a minimalistic natural approach. The brand is confident enough to remain minimal and be direct but allows itself the range to get creative with its appearance when preferred — echoing the relationship it urges its audience to have with its products.
Client
Shades Cosmetics
Sector
Fashion & Beauty
Service
Brand Identity
Packaging
Year
2023
