By Rosa Smith. Cover artwork Giovan Battista Dell’Arno.
A minimalist square, almost an abstract Mondrian painting: black and white in a supreme dialogue of opposites, geometric rigor against the velvety opulence of iridescent powders. Chanel is more than make-up, it’s a cultural icon. But why does that black, squared compact continue to captivate us, a century on? Is it the zen minimalism that enchants Gen Z on TikTok and Vinted, where empty packaging becomes collectible talismans, or is it the alchemy of textures that transforms a daily gesture into pure allure? In an age of digital excess, this timeless treasure—now reimagined in cosmic glitter holiday editions—remains an object of desire, elevating both the gaze and the ritual. Its story begins deep in the archives, where Coco Chanel’s revolutionary spirit set the stage for an icon that continues to steer beauty culture.
Chanel Makeup Origins: The 1920s, the Dawn of Empowerment and Early Cosmetics
When Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel introduced N°5 in 1921, she didn’t simply debut a new fragrance; she disrupted an entire era. It was the first perfume ever conceived by a couturier, created alongside perfumer Ernest Beaux, and it ushered in a new vocabulary of beauty built on chemistry, restraint and seduction. The aldehydes — then a daring innovation — gave the scent an almost impossible brightness, while the squared, almost monastic bottle read as a declaration of female autonomy in a world still enamored with ornate, swirling designs.
By 1924, Chanel pushed further, unveiling her first makeup line, which included lipsticks, loose powders, and blushes. The products — housed in black lacquered metal compacts and ivory tubes with sliding metal caps — felt as if they had come straight from the workshop of modernity. The black-and-white packaging, radical at the time, suggested a Baudelairean interplay of light and shadow translated onto the face. Easy to use and elegant, the compacts proudly introduced the double-C insignia to women and their admirers. These were small objects but charged with meaning, imagined not as frivolous adornments but as tools of empowerment for women emerging from a postwar landscape, shedding corsets and embracing freer silhouettes.
This pioneering story is celebrated in the 2024 book CHANEL: The Allure of Make-up (Thames & Hudson), written by acclaimed journalist and author Natasha Fraser. Accessing the Maison’s archives in an unprecedented way, Fraser highlights both iconic imagery and lesser-known photographs of the early products, alongside cinematic campaigns featuring legendary women. In the introduction, she writes: “Chanel’s gift was being 100 per cent authentic to herself and living and breathing her values. ‘I dress for myself first,’ she said. ‘If I wouldn’t wear it, I don’t make it.’ Like all true geniuses, she possessed a 360-degree view of her world — understanding every element and never quite satisfied. Mercurial, Gabrielle Chanel was armed with confidence yet grounded by her work ethic and honesty to her brand. Her inexhaustible creativity, combined with a sixth sense, gave her a Midas touch. Her feisty ‘why not?’ became a rebellious determination that no one would stop her from designing clothes out of jersey, dreaming up a perfume and naming it after her favourite number, and delving into beauty and makeup”.
In those suspended years, as Europe attempted to gather the fragments of its own identity, Chanel offered a different kind of transformation. Her vision of beauty proposed a new way of being — sharper, simpler, more modern — that women could choose and wear. It was a quiet revolution, one in which “less” became not only a new definition of luxury but a statement of self, spoken every day without a word. As Mademoiselle herself said: “Age doesn’t count. You can be ravishing at twenty, charming at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life.”
Chanel Square Compact: The 1950s–’80s, Carré Galbé and Lagerfeld
In the 1950s, under Pierre Wertheimer, the Carré Galbé was born: a proto-iconic black compact, squared but gently curved, lacquered in black and white, with the interlocking CC at its center like a heraldic seal. A portable object transforming makeup into travel-ready art in a post-war Europe where luxury reinvented itself with discretion. Designed to fit in the palm of the hand and a mini handbag, with a built-in mirror and pressed powders, the square compact made touch-ups in public a small ritual of style.
In 1954, Coco’s historic return to fashion coincided with the rise of Rouge à Lèvres: creamy, smooth lipsticks designed for the rhythm of the modern working woman entering the post-war economic boom. Shades ranged from cherry reds to muted pinks, elegantly transitioning from day to night without a change of makeup. Lipstick became the natural complement to the tweed suit: a subtle accessory of power.
By the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Carré Galbé visual language was amplified: surfaces glossier, edges sharper, logo more graphic. When Karl Lagerfeld became Chanel’s creative director in 1983, compact aesthetics fully mirrored runway sensibilities: absolute black, clean geometry, gold details. These glossy monoliths of pressed powders and eye palettes embodied the image of a strong, urban, international woman, perfectly aligned with the polished visual culture of the ’80s—glossy magazines, cinematic ads, early music videos. Iridescent powders and satin lipsticks became not just luxury, but a language of social status in a yuppie era where opulence was performative.
How Chanel’s Heritage Got a Glow-Up: The 1990s–2000s Era of Luxe Packaging
The 1990s cemented Chanel’s grip on the language of luxury, but they also quietly redrew its boundaries. With Egoïste, launched in 1990 as a men’s fragrance, the house proposed a more ambiguous, almost theatrical idea of masculinity: woods, spices and a name that invited men – and, increasingly, women – to think of scent as a statement of character rather than a gender marker. The campaign’s baroque grandiosity and its polished, almost mirrorlike flacon resonated well beyond fragrance counters, helping to normalize the idea that a product coded “for him” could be borrowed, layered and ultimately shared. In that atmosphere, Chanel’s makeup universe—its dark liners, sculpting powders and highshine lacquers—started to speak more naturally to a mixed, and later explicitly unisex, audience.
Chanel’s 1995 Rouge Noir: The Nail Polish That Started a Vampy Beauty Revolution
Five years later, in 1995, Rouge Noir pushed that shift into full cultural view. Technically a deep, blackened red nail polish, it read on the body as something stranger and more magnetic: almost black under certain lights, winedark and bruised under others. It broke with the safe vocabulary of pillarbox reds and baby pinks, offering instead a gothic, romantic register that suggested desire, danger and a refusal to be “nice.” The shade travelled fast—from the runway to the hands of Carolyn BessetteKennedy and onto the big screen in Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman’s nearblack nails became shorthand for a new kind of femme fatale. Rouge Noir was more than a bestseller; it reset what was imaginable for nails and lips, and opened the way for the entire family of burnt reds, plums and vampy tones that still signal a certain stylish, selfpossessed rebellion. By 2000, the black square packaging was perfected: premium lacquered materials, iridescent glow formulas, moisturizing lipsticks. The square had become a universal logo, while early signals of sustainable consciousness hinted at a new era of responsible luxury.
Chanel Holiday 2025: Cosmic Beauty Rituals, Celestial Palettes & Gen Z Appeal
Since 2006, Rouge Allure has quietly transformed the act of applying lipstick into a ritual. The magnetic click of its case, subtle but deliberate, turns a fleeting gesture into a pause—a tactile moment in a day otherwise dominated by screens. By 2010, Chanel began fusing skincare and makeup, a philosophy crystallized in N°1 de Chanel (2021), a vegan, anti-aging skincare line that prioritizes ritual and sensory experience over instant gratification.
Holiday 2025 shifts attention skyward. Working with Cécile Paravina of the Cometes Collective, Chanel’s Makeup Creation Studio draws inspiration from the cosmos, offering a vision of beauty rooted in darkness, starlight, and the rhythms of the natural universe. Mademoiselle’s five talismans—the lion, the comet, the camellia, stalks of wheat, and pearls—reappear as symbolic orbits around each palette, a nod to heritage that simultaneously charts something new: a small, personal cosmos to navigate in a world saturated with artificial illumination.
The palettes themselves shimmer with an almost celestial logic. Les Signes de Chanel blush and highlighter duos—Rose Lumière and Pêche Lumière—blend soft pastels with pearlescent highlights, turning skin into a kind of constellation. Les 4 Ombres Nuit Astrale offers a nuanced take on color: medium-blue gray, shimmery purple, satin lavender, and sparkling aqua suggest movement across the eyelid, a fleeting mimicry of comet trails or deep night. Sociologically, Chanel’s resurgence among Gen Z is striking. After years dominated by fast beauty and ephemeral trends, younger audiences are drawn to heritage brands that offer narrative, ritual, and a sense of authenticity. The numbers speak for themselves: #chanelbeauty on TikTok has over 215,000 posts, demonstrating how Chanel’s blend of tactile luxury, visual storytelling, and symbolic richness translates perfectly into content that feels aspirational yet attainable. In an era of algorithm-driven feeds, these gestures—a swipe of highlighter, a flick of liner—become small acts of meaning.
Holiday 2025 is less about trend-chasing and more about perspective. Amid the glare of screens, Chanel turns to the cosmos and the physicality of touch. Makeup becomes a moment of observation and reflection, however brief. For a few minutes, applying color is a way to reclaim darkness, trace constellations across lids and cheeks, and remember that even small gestures can reconnect us with rhythm, ritual, and the natural world above.
