The soft pink hues inside the Besame Cosmetics store in Burbank, California, hint at the elegance of a past era. Inside the glass display cases around the store are examples of make-up from older generations, such as a small arrangement of items from the 1920s, just one of the decades up to the ’70s from which the vintage make-up company derives inspiration for their own products.
Company founder, Gabriela Hernandez, 52, certainly belongs in her store, with her hair in pin curls and her make-up, of course, done to perfection with a light red lipstick to tie it all together. Even her clothes hearken back to the 40s and 50s, a style she chooses because her dresses from those eras complement her figure best and she likes the way they were designed.
‘The fabrics are really pretty… They were made better. I have dresses that are 50 years old that are in better shape than something that I bought last season. And I can keep wearing it,’ she chuckles. ‘Where the other one probably already fell apart and I have to throw it away because the fabric just wears out or falls apart after a few washes. So that’s one of the reasons I like vintage clothing.’
Ms Hernandez has been running Besame Cosmetics, with her husband and the help of their two children, for the last 14 years. The company bases all their products closely on actual historic cosmetics, matching exact colors and textures of make-up from the past to their modern products with all-natural formulas.
The brand has even been seen on television and in movies, such as the award-winning 2011 film, The Artist, and the drama series Mad Men. The company has even partnered with Disney and Marvel to create lines based on the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the television show Agent Carter.
Besame Cosmetics was founded in 2004 by California-based Gabriela Hernandez. When she started the company 14 years ago, she had been working with cosmetics companies as a freelance designer, helping them with product development. She realized she probably wouldn’t wear the products she was working with, so she decided to make her own lines that hearkened back to a more romantic time for cosmetics. The interior of Besame’s Burbank, California, store is pictured
All of Besame’s products are based closely on products from past eras, between the 1910s to the 1960s. Though Besame’s formulas are different than the vintage formulas they are based on, the vintage company works hard to make their products feel like historic make-up would have felt and matches their colors to actual shades from the past. Several products from the 1920s are pictured on display inside Besame’s store
Besame, which means ‘kiss me’ in Spanish, was launched in 2004. Ms Hernandez’s love for make-up and beauty products began much earlier when she was a young girl in Buenos Aires, seeing her mother and grandmother do their make-up and hair. Though she didn’t join in with the routines or styles at the time, she says she was still enamored with the beauty of it all.
‘I didn’t consider myself very glamorous or anything when I was little,’ she tells DailyMail.com. ‘I was kind of tom-boyish looking because I had really curly hair so my mom chopped it off because it was so hard to style. So I kind of looked like a boy and people confused me for a boy a lot of times… So I kind of saw myself as kind of outside of that whole feminine allure thing.
Ms Hernandez, 52, (pictured) found her love for make-up when she was a young girl growing up in Buenos Aires. She would watch her mother and grandmother’s beauty routines and says she ‘thought they were like princesses’
‘But I thought they were like princesses, that they would go to the hair salon and do their hair and put these things in it and make it poofy and all this eye make-up and things that were going on in the 60s and I was just mesmerized by the whole thing. Just watching them, I thought they were the most beautiful women in the world. To me they were, anyways.’
When she was 12, Ms Hernandez and her parents moved from Argentina to the US. Ms Hernandez, an only child, continued to keep make-up at a distance while she was in high school and even in her early college years at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where she got her fine art degree in photography.
‘I think I developed late into what you do as a woman to groom yourself and to do all these things, because I was so into my studies and things when I was younger that I really didn’t pay a lot of attention to what I looked like at all, really. It wasn’t on my radar.
‘But as I got older, those things start to make sense because you see how other people react to you if you’re dressed a certain way. Depending on how you dress and how you style yourself, you get different reactions from people. So that kind of sparked me to figure out what kind of look I wanted to portray and to start to experiment with that.’
She says one of the most helpful things was ‘finding things that actually are simple, but do the job. Because a lot of the things were too complicated for me, too many steps’.
To create a product, the team at Besame does extensive research into the formulas, colors and textures of different cosmetics and how they felt and worked back in the day. They replace the old, harmful ingredients with all-natural ingredients that work and feel the same way as the vintage products. Pictured are some vintage products on display in the Besame store
Besame’s store location (the interior is pictured) even hosts make-up classes, where they teach women about the history of make-up and beauty routines from certain time periods as well as the step-by-step processes for applying different products. For people who can’t attend their classes, Besame also has a YouTube channel where they answer questions, give tips and brief instructional videos and promote new products
Ms Hernandez went on to run her own design studio where she did some design work with cosmetic companies as a freelancer. She was helping with product development, but realized she probably wouldn’t wear the products she was working with.
‘What I was doing, it was okay, but it wasn’t anything that I thought was really pretty or I would purchase personally, you know?’
Because she had a lot of the antique make-ups her grandmother had used, Ms Hernandez decided that she wanted to use those as inspiration for more beautiful, elegant cosmetics.
‘I wanted to bring back things that I thought were beautiful,’ she says. ‘I started to see what I could do to bring back more romantic-looking products, products that I thought captured the essence of that time and were things that you can not only wear, but display as well. So it wasn’t things that were so disposable and masculine-looking. They were definitely made for women and very feminine-feeling.’
Another important part of Besame’s product development involved creating cosmetics that were less complicated in the midst of a market where many other cosmetics involve a lengthy process and too many steps.
‘If you look back into the 30s, 40s, even 20s, they really didn’t have that many products and they managed to look pretty good. So it’s like why do we need so many steps to look even decent, you know? The idea was to go back to that and find products that are really effective, but you don’t need that many. So that you can look nice and groomed and pretty, but you don’t need to spend two hours to get ready. Who has that kind of time?’
Ms Hernandez (pictured) says about starting Besame 14 years ago: ‘I wanted to bring back things that I thought were beautiful. I started to see what I could do to bring back more romantic-looking products, products that I thought captured the essence of that time and were things that you can not only wear, but display as well. So it wasn’t things that were so disposable and masculine-looking. They were definitely made for women and very feminine-feeling’
Ms Hernandez says: ‘If you look back into the 30s, 40s, even 20s, they really didn’t have that many products and they managed to look pretty good. So it’s like why do we need so many steps to look even decent, you know? The idea was to go back to that and find products that are really effective, but you don’t need that many. So that you can look nice and groomed and pretty, but you don’t need to spend two hours to get ready. Who has that kind of time?’ Pictured are some vintage rouges
Ms Hernandez exudes grace when she speaks and clearly knows about all different aspects of fashion and beauty. Her goal is to make Besame’s products accessible to every woman, whether they know anything about make-up or not. She has done so much extensive research into the subject that she wrote a book called Classic Beauty: The History of Make-up, which was published in May last year.
Besame’s Burbank store location also hosts make-up classes. They have historical classes that detail the styles of different time periods and technique classes where they teach people how to apply different products in a step-by-step process.
‘[The classes are] totally non-judgmental. We have people of all age groups in there doing this,’ she says. ‘The girls are super patient. It’s a very, very friendly environment and they just get to play and find out how to do it. We get a lot of people that don’t wear make-up, that have never worn and it and they just don’t know anything about it or how to even put it on… Our classes fill up almost instantly every time we have classes down there, but they’re fun. The classes are really, really fun.’
She adds: ‘[The history is] a very important part of what we’re doing. It is very important for people to know why we did it and how we’re doing it. It has to be in there because then it doesn’t make sense what we did if we don’t explain where we’re coming from. So we have to teach them where this came from and what was in it and why they even made this stuff. It’s all very historical. We talk about the time period, the fashion and the make-up as well.’
For people who can’t attend their classes, Besame also has a YouTube channel where they answer questions, give tips and brief instructional videos and promote new products, which are all rooted in history.
Ms Hernandez says: ‘[The classes are] totally non-judgmental. We have people of all age groups in there doing this,’ she says. ‘The girls are super patient. It’s a very, very friendly environment and they just get to play and find out how to do it. We get a lot of people that don’t wear make-up, that have never worn and it and they just don’t know anything about it or how to even put it on’
To create a product, the team at Besame does extensive research into the formulas, colors and textures of different cosmetics and how they felt and worked back in the day.
‘We analyze them [the formulas from the past] to see if there’s anything in them that is something that makes sense,’ Ms Hernandez says. ‘We obviously replace all the components that are not allowed anymore or dangerous or all of those things with things that are not, but basically will retain the feel of the product in the way that the product felt and looked so the colors are reproduced to what they were back then.’
She says make-up from older eras tend to be a little heavier and longer-lasting, so Besame’s products aren’t as moist or shiny as modern cosmetics. However, with their products, the formulas tend to be simpler, with fewer ingredients – and the ingredients they do use are all-natural. All their products are gluten-free and the powders and rouges are vegan, while the lipsticks and mascaras use ‘properly sourced’ beeswax, according to Besame’s website.
Once they’ve researched the products they want to create from a specific era, Ms Hernandez says she and her team will hand-make samples and then bring them to the local FDA-approved manufacturing plants where their products are made.
‘[The history is] a very important part of what we’re doing,’ Ms Hernandez says. ‘It is very important for people to know why we did it and how we’re doing it. It has to be in there because then it doesn’t make sense what we did if we don’t explain where we’re coming from. So we have to teach them where this came from and what was in it and why they even made this stuff. It’s all very historical. We talk about the time period, the fashion and the make-up as well.’ Vintage lipstick is pictured on display in Besame’s store
Besame is a family-run business. Ms Hernandez does most of the product development and creative design while her husband Fergus, who she met while in college, takes care of the finances and invoicing. Their son is in charge of production coordination and their daughter, who is still in high school, interns for them and helps out with graphic design. Pictured is the exterior of Besame’s Burbank store location
Developing a new product can take anywhere from six months to more than a year, Ms Hernandez says, depending on the type of product.
‘It’s a process and a lot of times it’s trial and error to figure out what we can use to emulate those same textures and feels,’ she says.
‘Our cake mascara, for example, we had to kind of redesign that because the original cake mascara was made with a base that was soap, basically. It was a hard soap base and then it had just carbon black in it,’ she chuckles.
‘That was basically it. We weren’t going to make it like that, so it took a while to get the right base. We ended up using vegetable waxes to make ours because they were flexible, they work well on the eye and they actually perform better than the product that was available in the 1900s. But it took us a while to come up with that because a lot of the times, it just didn’t work. It was either too runny, too watery, it didn’t stick to the lash or didn’t give enough body or it cracked – all kinds of things.’
She adds: ‘It seems very simplistic when you think about it, but when you start working on it, it gets very complicated to actually make it do what you want. It takes quite a bit of experimentation to get it correct, but now we sell quite a bit of that product because it’s a really good product. It functions very well and it’s easy to take off when you want to take it off, but if you don’t want to take it off, it stays on and it’s flexible, so it bends with your eye. It doesn’t crease or flake. And it’s multi-purpose because you can use it on eyes, on brows, anywhere, really.’
Ms Hernandez says she considered herself more of a tomboy when she was young because of her short hair and small frame. However, when she got older and started noticing how people responded when she dressed nice or did her make-up, she started to develop her own style, which today relies on vintage outfits and neutral tones
Besame is a family-run business, with Ms Hernandez focusing on product development and creative design while her husband Fergus, who she met in college, takes care of the finances and invoicing. Their son is in charge of production coordination and their daughter, who is still in high school, interns for them and helps out with graphic design. Even Ms Hernandez’s father, who is in his 80s – but doesn’t want to stop working – does some work in Besame’s warehouse, where he helps with order fulfillment.
‘It’s a very personal thing for us,’ Ms Hernandez says about the company. ‘And all the products are very personal. We make things that we wear and our family wears… If we can’t wear it, we won’t sell it. It’s very important to us that it’s a product that we can stand behind. We only make things that we’re really passionate about and we want to make.
I wanted to bring back things that I thought were beautiful. I started to see what I could do to bring back more romantic-looking products, products that I thought captured the essence of that time and were things that you can not only wear, but display as well.
‘All of the things are very personal to us because of all the care and the time that we spend designing them and putting stories around all our products so that it’s not just a product, but basically it’s kind of an experience for our customers. And that’s especially true when we do branded collections or collaborations with brands. We want it to be very story-driven. We want the customer to be the character. So the things that we make are kind of things that belong to the character. So when you buy them, you will become that character, basically. It’s important for us to give the fans all of this other stuff that they can kind of be involved with. Not just the product, but the games and all other kinds of things that we make up.’
Today, Besame produces anywhere from five to ten thousand items of a shade in a collection, Ms Hernandez estimates. The cosmetics company currently has 16 shades of ‘Classic Color’ lipstick, replicated shades from years between 1920 and 1970, all chisel-tipped and set in elegant bullet cases. They have scented powders, a variety of rouges based on shades from years between 1915 and 1969, foundation sticks, perfumes influenced by scents from each decade from 1910 to 1960 as well as their ever-popular cake mascara – set in block-form in a tin – in both brown and black, among other vintage-inspired accessories and items.
Their products have been seen on television shows including Mad Men, Bonnie and Clyde and The Last Tycoon and on films such as The Artist and Kill Your Darlings. Celebrity make-up artists and Instagram stars love Besame’s products, which can be bought on vintage clothing website ModCloth and at make-up retailer Sephora.
Besame’s products have been seen in films including the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, which takes place in the 1940s and the award-winning 2011 film, The Artist, which takes place between 1927 and 1932. Besame’s products even got a cameo on the vanity of Peppy Miller (played by Bérénice Bejo, pictured)
Besame has also been seen on television shows including Mad Men, Bonnie and Clyde and The Last Tycoon (pictured), based on the book by F Scott Fitzgerald, which takes place in 1936 in Hollywood, starring Lily Collins and Kelsey Grammer (pictured) and Matt Bomer
Besame even has a Snow White line which they released last year in a collaboration with Disney to mark Snow White’s 80th anniversary. The 1937 Snow White Collection includes four shades of lipstick, a cream rouge and a powder, along with other Snow White-themed items. All the colors used for the line are based directly on the colors used to animate the film.
‘When we work with Disney, we actually go to the archive,’ Ms Hernandez says. ‘We research all the colors that were used, the inks that were used, so all the colors that we tell you are Snow White’s lipstick, they actually are. It’s not like we make up the color. It’s the actual color. We actually reproduced from the original ink from 1937.
‘[Disney loves] that because it really plays into their historical side and their characters and the kind of legacy of their characters and the longevity of them and what makes them so special.’
She adds: ‘They want that depth. They want that experience for the customer so it’s not just a superficial thing, but it’s something more.’
In April, Besame will release their new line based on the TV show Agent Carter, in collaboration with Marvel. The show takes place in 1946, so all the products will be inspired from that year. The show stars Hayley Atwell (pictured)
In April, Besame will be releasing a new line in partnership with Marvel based on the company’s television show Agent Carter, about secret agent Peggy Carter, who had previously been the love interest in the Marvel film Captain America. Carter, played by Hayley Atwell, is secretly recruited by Howard Stark to help clear his name after the Second World War.
‘That one is a very fun collection,’ Ms Hernandez says. ‘It’s from 1946 and so all the products feel like they’re part of the show… So you become Agent Carter. You become Peggy with these products.’
That is the ultimate goal with Besame, its products and the Burbank store, Ms Hernandez says.
‘I want [customers] to feel like they stepped outside of their reality for a little bit and went to kind of a wonderland of makeup, where you can get a glimpse of what people did before and then see what you can do now and get a 360 view of what women did to make themselves pretty. Not only now, but before. And then get a whole experience of the different time, different place.
‘I want them to feel like they found something that they can trust, that the company will be there for them and that the product will work for them. And if they have any problem with it, they know where to take it back and they know that we will be behind it.
She adds: ‘And basically have fun. Because it’s really just a fun environment.’