Farewell Revlon

Revlon, one-time titan of the beauty-industrial complex, filed for bankruptcy yesterday and while its demise will trigger a trillion think pieces, nostalgia for legacy cosmetic products and hot financial analysis takes, this is the astrological scenario.

My initial response was to imagine Aerin Lauder – the triple Taurus Estee Lauder heiress – ceremonially applying some Youth Dew and Night Repair before gliding down to her grandmother’s sanctuary/altar to burn some Cinnabar incense and share the news.

You see, Estee Lauder had a raging rivalry with Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon. They weren’t mere commercial competitors – they were deeply in hate. I read the Revson biography Fire & Ice – a lurid, compulsive read, they don’t write ’em like that anymore – and recall it saying that events organizers knew never to let their paths cross for even a split-second.

Lauder, a sextuple-Cancerian, wrote of his ‘duplicity’ in her autobiography and referred to the double Libra as her “arch and implacable enemy” while he routinely snarked off at her and made public vows to destroy or buy out her business.

Interestingly, a colleague of Revson said that despite the mogul’s retinue of wives, lovers and mistresses, Estee Lauder was the most important woman in his life. “She was the one competitor he set out to beat but couldn’t.”

He was widely loathed by many of the people he dealt with or, as the business media put it, “unafraid to express his opinion on a wide range of subjects.” One former employee noted that meetings with him “usually involved a lot of cursing and remarks like ‘you used to have talent but you’re washed up.'”

Even when Revlon was literally the world’s biggest spender on advertising, ad-agencies voted them the number one worst to deal with and most of that was because of Revson himself.  But he was also a business genius, driven by an ultra-psyched, permanently over-clocked Mars in Virgo square Pluto in Gemini and, for visionary zeal, Jupiter conjunct Neptune in Cancer.

You can see it in the vintage Revlon ads, a hugely influential genre unto themselves. As market research was in the top ten of his lengthy s***t list, he went purely off vibe and his core hunch – the one that rocketed Revlon to numero uno – was that the post-war woman craved surrealism, fantasy, fun, pleasure and an ‘independent aura.’

He was right. Leigh – a quadruple Taurus with a hothead Mars Rising in Aries – was an instant hit with the female target audience and she became a household name. Her private life and outspokeness fuelled sales, along with Kay Daly’s Fire & Ice ‘temperament’ quiz.

It had questions like Do you secretly hope that the next man you meet will be a psychiatrist?, Have you ever danced with your shoes off? and Do sables excite you, even on other women? The skeevy by today’s standards Fire & Ice concept – a pet hypothesis of Revson’s – nonetheless sparked a million conversations about the Madonna-Whore complex and practically everyone did the quiz.

The last major biz decision the cosmetics mogul made was to go all-out ‘feminist’ with Charlie, “a scent for the working woman.” It was, naturally, named after him but still, it was the first fragrance ad campaign to show women wearing pants – really – and not only that, taking gigantic strides in them.

Charlie was also the first major perfume campaign to feature an African-American model – the dazzling Naomi Sims – and was cited as an early inspiration by none other than Oprah.

Although Revson released it in Feb 1973 to try and stymie the debut of a more sedate scent launch from his long-time rival, his Jupiter-Neptunian vibe was uncanny: two weeks before the launch, the Roe Vs Wade decision affirmed women’s reproductive rights, a seismic shift. From the marketers point of view, it suddenly made feminism ‘cool.’

The astro of the time was pushy and provocative, a Zap Zone for sure. Jupiter in Capricorn was square Uranus in Libra, a catalyst for mass change. January 1973 was a cultural flashpoint for multiple reasons and Revson was at the end of a Uranus-Sun transit.

He’d spent years unsuccessfully trying to oust Estee Lauder out of her ‘prestige’ niche – opening a foo-foo spa, cultivating people he saw as high society, launching Ultima – an upmarket skincare range – and blowing ridiculous amounts of money  – even by billionaire standards – on Ultima II, a mega-yacht.

But while he Mars in Virgoed out on monogrammed hankerchiefs, his arch-rival retained her hold on the market – and social status – he wanted. People would resign rather than deal with his rage over – say – Estee Lauder in the newspaper describing Princess Grace of Monaco as a dear friend. Finally, Revson pivoted back into character and sprung a new scent: Charlie.

There will be many suspects in the Revlon demise: corporate raiders, influencers, grunge, social media, the decision to downsize Flex shampoo, feminism, the debt, analogue thinking, non-with-itness, neo-liberalism, supply chains, whatever.

But maybe the real factor is that the high-Qi manic gusto of its founder kept the vibe going for ages even after Revson left the realm but it finally spluttered to a halt.

Estee Lauder continued to bag him out – elegantly of course – for his vulgarity and stunts such as apparently purchasing an enormously expensive atomic absorption spectroscope to examine the colors in her eyeshadow.

She also admitted to having ‘taught him a lesson’ via some stealthy espionage of her own. But then one day she softened, saying “I must admit when he died, something was lost in our business, some subtle enjoyment, some jolting of complacency. It’s irritating to have competitors hot on your heels but it’s also flattering and stimulating.”

He’d been her Jupiter – too much, garish and overblown – but essentially his Jupiter conjunct her Sun and Mercury made him an expansive influence. And Lauder’s Jupiter in Leo was on Charles Revson’s North Node – she was his Muse, albeit one that this irascible man reviled, even as he sought it.

Perhaps Estee Lauder – the woman, not the company – was the Fire and Ice that Revson idolized?