Female beauty brand left with no other option than to pick a pastel brand colour

Blush with a hint of sage. A Sydney skincare startup has reportedly exhausted every conceivable creative direction before bravely settling on "a soft sage green” for its brand.

Founder Olivia Hart, 33, began the branding process adamant her business would avoid the increasingly familiar tropes in women’s beauty products.

"We really wanted to disrupt the category. To properly stand out and be a bold new entrant on Mecca shelves,” Hart explained. "We explored navy. We looked at burgundy. There was even a brief moment where black and white felt right... until we remembered we weren't launching a luxury fashion label."

After several weeks of exploration, the team eventually arrived back where industry experts say nearly every female beauty brand inevitably does: somewhere between blush, oat, eucalyptus and whatever colour Pantone has decided to call "calm".

The wordmark underwent seventeen revisions before settling on a lowercase geometric sans serif with approximately enough letter spacing to fit another company name between each character. "It just felt more premium," Hart said.

Brand designer Emma Wallace, revealed the pattern has become almost impossible to avoid. "Every founder wants to look different," she explained. "They just also want to communicate natural, clean, premium, minimalist, sophisticated, female, approachable, luxurious, sustainable and science-backed... which unfortunately all seem to end up looking exactly the same."

At the time of publication, Hart was enthusiastically approving the latest batch of product photography featuring a sage-green tube resting on a block of travertine beside eucalyptus leaves. Convinced the brand had achieved complete distinctiveness after changing the background from warm beige to slightly cooler beige.

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