Myths can be a big part of a beauty brand’s DNA. Some of the most iconic beauty products are linked to an epic origin story. Take Benefit Cosmetics Benetint Lip & Cheek Stain, initially made as a nipple tint for exotic dancers, or how La Mer was invented after its founder suffered burns in a lab accident. (He also consulted astrology and played a specific soundtrack for each batch.) Then there’s Chanel’s Vamp, aka Rouge Noir, a whole other ballgame. The dark, blood-red, almost-black shade was everything in the mid-90s and hard to come by as it was constantly selling out. (Thankfully, there were tons of dupes for teens like me who didn’t have a Chanel-friendly budget.) Almost 30 years later, Vamp remains one of Chanel’s best-selling nail polish shades.
Vamp first debuted in March 1994 at Chanel’s Fall 1994 ready-to-wear show in Paris (an iconic collection that featured gold-chain, cell phone, and water bottle holders, which would later inspire Mona May’s costume design in Clueless). Vamp’s legacy includes a Chanel makeup artist coloring over a red nail with a Sharpie; another has Uma Thurman wearing the shade in Pulp Fiction. Though, neither seems to be true.
Two days before the Chanel show, the company’s director of the house’s makeup-creation studio, Heidi Morawetz, and Dominique Moncourtois, the international director of makeup creation, mixed red and black pigments in Chanel’s studio kitchen until they came up with the color. Morawetz told Interview magazine in 2011 that she was inspired by how eyes and nails look black in black-and-white photos. When editors peeped at the models’ gothic nails, it became an instant hit. “The journalists saw it in the show, and they thought it was incredible, “What’s this color?” The Americans did it right away because they could just put it on the counter. So it came out in America before it did here in Paris,” recalled Morawetz.
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