Principles of Beauty Design #6: Colour

Why Colour Matters in Beauty

Colour is often the first impression a beauty product makes—and one of the most enduring. Long before a customer picks up a bottle or reads a label, colour is already communicating. It suggests category, signals emotional tone, and influences how the product is perceived—luxurious or clinical, gentle or powerful, modern or nostalgic.

In beauty packaging, colour is never just decorative. It’s a critical tool for expressing brand identity, organizing product lines, and creating clarity across collections. It has to work at every level: on the shelf, in the hand, and on the screen.

In this chapter, we’ll break down how colour functions as a visual language. We'll look at how to describe colour using foundational terminology, explore the types of palettes most often used in the beauty industry, and examine how real-world brands apply colour strategically to build recognition and tell their stories. Whether your brand leans minimalist or expressive, understanding how colour works—and how to make it work for you—is essential to mastering beauty design.

Understanding the Basics of Colour

To make it easier for us to discuss colour in more detail it’s important to establish the meaning of some basic terms used to describe colour.

• Hue – the base colour (e.g., blue, pink, green).

• Saturation – how vivid or muted the colour is.

• Brightness (or value) – how light or dark a colour is.

• Temperature – warm vs. cool tones and their emotional impact.

• Tints, Shades, and Tones – adding white, black, or grey to change intensity.

Types of Colour Palettes

There are many different types of colours used in beauty packaging, and the way a brand approaches its colour palette can significantly influence how cohesive or dynamic the range feels. Sticking to one type of colour creates visual unity and a clear, recognizable aesthetic. On the other hand, mixing different types of colours—such as pairing pastels with brights or combining neutrals with saturated tones—can add contrast, energy, and visual interest. The key is to be intentional with these choices so that the palette supports the brand's tone and product strategy.

Neutrals

Neutral palettes include shades like off-white, cream, beige, stone, and other tones drawn from natural materials like untreated wood or soft grey paper. These colours are often used to create a sense of calm, restraint, and understated luxury. In beauty, neutrals are frequently found in brands that emphasize clean ingredients, simplicity, and a natural or skin-focused ethos. The effect is often soft and elegant—design that doesn’t shout, but signals quality and care through subtlety. Brands like Ilia, Merit, and Westman Atelier use neutral palettes to reinforce a grounded, thoughtful, and modern identity that feels sophisticated without being flashy.

Pastel

Pastel colours are soft, light, and airy—examples include pastel pink, baby blue, mint green, and lavender purple. These hues are often associated with gentleness, sensitivity, and approachability, making them especially popular among brands that formulate for sensitive skin or lean into a calming, comforting brand tone. Pastels are widely used in the beauty industry because they appeal to a broad audience and photograph well, especially in digital-first branding. When paired with simple layouts and generous white space, pastels can feel polished and refined; when used with round shapes or playful typography, they can feel sweet and whimsical. Brands like Gisou, Lanolips, and Dr. Loretta make strong use of pastel palettes to communicate care, softness, and subtle luxury.

Bright

Bright colours are vivid, saturated, and high-energy. These palettes tend to stand out immediately, which makes them especially appealing for brands targeting younger consumers or aiming to differentiate themselves in a crowded category. Bright colours can feel fun, playful, and bold—but when overused or poorly combined, they can easily tip into chaos. Successful use of brights often comes down to balancing bold colour choices with clear structure and minimal typography. Contrasting brights can be used strategically to highlight different product lines, scents, or functions while maintaining brand consistency. Examples like Byoma, Bubble, and Daise show how bright colours can inject excitement and visual punch into beauty packaging while still feeling curated and intentional.

Jewel Tones

Jewel tones are rich, deep hues like navy blue, burgundy, emerald green, and aubergine. These colours are often used to create a sense of depth, richness, and timeless sophistication. In beauty, jewel tones are commonly associated with brands that want to evoke tradition, ritual, or heritage—often overlapping with apothecary-style, holistic, or more masculine-leaning aesthetics. The intensity and saturation of jewel tones can create a feeling of seriousness or mystique, especially when paired with gold foil, textured labels, or dark glass packaging. Brands like Ranavat, Officine Universelle Buly, and Oribe use jewel tones to great effect, creating packaging that feels luxurious, storied, and refined.

Black & White

Black and white is a classic and versatile palette that remains incredibly popular in the cosmetics industry. Depending on how it’s used, it can feel clinical, luxurious, or high-fashion. Some brands lean into the minimalism of black and white to convey a sense of order and control, while others use it as a stark backdrop for highlighting texture, typography, or finishes. The appeal lies in its simplicity and contrast—it’s visually striking, easy to read, and works well across multiple product formats. Brands like Verso, Lolavie, Makeup by Mario, Crown Affair, Medik8, and Dr. Barbara Sturm demonstrate how black and white can serve as a strong foundation for brand identity, offering clarity and cohesion even in visually competitive spaces.

Colour as Brand Expression

Colour is one of the most immediate and memorable ways a brand can express its identity. Whether used consistently across an entire range or varied strategically between products or lines, colour choices shape how a brand is recognized, understood, and emotionally received. There are several different approaches to using colour at the brand level, each with distinct benefits and considerations. I've also previously written about how brands can use colour.

Monochrome Brand

A monochrome brand palette is built around a single signature colour applied across all products. This strategy can be extremely effective for creating brand recognition—when done well, one glance at the colour is enough to identify the brand. However, for this to work in beauty packaging, it’s essential to ensure that each product remains distinguishable within the lineup.

This is typically achieved by using distinct packaging formats for different SKUs. Shape, size, and material all play key roles in reinforcing product differentiation when the colour remains the same. Monochrome palettes are especially well-suited to curated product lines—brands with one hero product per category—where visual simplicity supports a focused, elevated brand story.

However, this approach becomes less practical for brands with larger, more complex assortments, especially those with multiple products in the same category. If five serums are all in identical, similarly shaped packaging and share the same colour, they can become difficult to tell apart—undermining clarity, usability, and shelf appeal.

It’s also important to consider brand colour ownership. Choosing a monochrome palette means committing to a colour as a core part of your visual identity. If that colour is already strongly associated with a direct competitor, your packaging may struggle to stand out. Market research is essential to avoid palette collisions—especially in highly saturated categories.

Example: Rhode

Rhode uses a muted grey as their signature brand colour. Despite the uniform colour scheme, their products remain easy to distinguish thanks to distinctive packaging shapes. For their peptide lip treatment, where there are multiple scent variations within the same category, they originally used colour-coded text to differentiate SKUs. Later, they shifted to fully coloured packaging for each variation—an update that significantly improved clarity and visual separation while retaining brand cohesion.

Example: Then I Met You

Then I Met You is known for its signature periwinkle blue, which is consistently applied across the product line. The brand avoids monotony by giving each product a distinctive structure and, in some cases, using transparent gradients toward the base of the packaging. These design decisions help differentiate the SKUs without compromising the strong visual identity created by the unified colour.

Example: BB Skin

When Bali Body launched their BB Skin line, they opted for a deep burgundy monochrome palette. While visually striking, the choice became problematic when applied to a full line of skincare products, many of which shared identical or near-identical packaging formats. Even products in slightly different sizes or container types became difficult to distinguish due to the overwhelming visual similarity, leading to a confusing consumer experience.

Monochrome Product

An alternative strategy is to apply a monochrome colour palette at the product level, assigning a unique colour to each SKU or product line while keeping other design elements consistent. This approach maintains a cohesive brand identity through layout, typography, or structural design, while using colour to visually separate products.

This is a common approach when:

• A brand wants to communicate product function or ingredient focus.

• The same product is offered in multiple scent or flavour variants.

• Colour is used as a shortcut for routine-building or system-based navigation.

For small product ranges, each product can have its own distinct colour. In larger lines, it's more common to see colour systems grouped by function or collection.

Example: Abib

Abib uses a different monochrome colour for each of their ingredient-led lines. Their Heartleaf line is packaged in soft green, while the Yuja line features bright yellow. The rest of the design remains restrained and consistent, allowing the colour to do the work of differentiating and communicating the key ingredient focus.

Example: Sundae

Sundae assigns a colour to each of its fragrance variations. Each tube is a single colour, but the brand uses a clever twist—the text is printed in a more saturated version of the same hue. This tone-on-tone effect creates a fun, candy-like look that still feels unified, despite the wide variety of shades across the range.

Multicolour

Some brands embrace variety and design their visual identity around a diverse palette rather than a single signature colour. This strategy is inherently more complex, but when done well, it allows for greater flexibility, seasonal extensions, and category expansion—all while maintaining brand recognition.

The key to making a multicolour approach work is consistency elsewhere: typography, layout, structure, or graphic language must provide the visual glue. Multicolour doesn’t mean random—it means a controlled, expressive range.

Example: Kiramoon

Kiramoon uses a palette that includes two shades of pink and red for all their products. Both the shape of the packaging and the styling of the typography and graphic elements on each product is completely different but they fit perfectly into the same style making the brand feel very cohesive.

Example: Daise

Daise uses a lot of different colours in their palette yet still looks very cohesive, the key to this is that all the colours they use are bright bold colours and they use the same bright yellow colour for the text on all products. They use different colours for different scents.

Designing with Colour Intent

Colour is one of the most powerful tools a beauty brand has to shape perception, signal purpose, and build emotional resonance. Whether it’s a calming pastel, a bold neon, or a restrained monochrome palette, the colours you choose are doing as much communication as your logo or your copy—often more.

What matters isn’t following a trend or choosing what looks good in isolation but using colour with purpose. Good colour strategy considers your brand values, your product architecture, and your customer’s expectations. It’s about creating consistency without redundancy, flexibility without chaos.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore Contrast—a closely related principle that determines how clearly your colours, typography, and layout work together to create hierarchy, legibility, and visual impact.