The New Yorker:

As Estée Lauder prepared to launch a new perfume, she relied on three key aspects of her industry: materials, marketing, and the ability to guard information.

By Kennedy Fraser
September 7, 1986

I wanted a new fragrance, so I started mixing the finest oils and essences. I worked on one, and that came out lovely. I worked on another, and that came out lovely. I put them together and that came out beautiful.—Estée Lauder on the making of her new scent, Beautiful.

Away with those blue-and-white boxes! Mrs. Lauder wanted pink. Just as the new scent, Beautiful, was to be unveiled before several hundred eager employees at her company’s sales meeting in May of 1985, Estée Lauder had had one of her legendary intuitions, and now the packaging was to be changed to a bright pink.

“Don’t say hot pink or Shocking pink,” her public-relations staff instructed me. “We consider those incorrect. This is Mrs. Lauder’s personal choice of an audacious pink. This is Beautiful Pink.”

Even as the field executives were flying in from all over the country to the three-day session at the Woodcliff Lake Hilton, in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, a shell-shocked inner circle was rallying to produce new samples—not only of boxes but of a host of matching sales accessories to pep up store counters at the time of the scent’s September debut. For most of the sales meeting’s three hundred-odd participants—most of them women, well coiffed, well painted, and very ladylike in their style of dress—the bombshell brought only the slightest shift in the schedule of their seminars. “The New Heroine,” the theme, or “color story,” of Estée Lauder’s new cosmetic promotion for the forthcoming fall was nudged forward; the blushing new Beautiful remained behind closed doors while last-minute transformations were carried out. As unperturbed and placid as some dowager, the “Christmas ‘85 luncheon” went right on waiting in a ruby-lit ballroom down the hallway, its silent tables all decked out with frosty twigs and shining balls.

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