Plenty of skincare is shy, but Lion Pose isn’t interested in being a wallflower in the bathroom cabinet. Rare Eye’s punchy, eye-catching packaging uses a bright, sunny orange as a love letter to deeper skin tones that pops on a vanity. Gold adds extra shine and character to this charismatic tube, while ergonomic ridges and a refillable design add accessible, sustainable appeal.
At the heart of our packaging design lies a story of a little girl, a banana leaf, and a fight to shift the dynamics of power in a worldwide industry.
When Madhu Punjabi was ten years old, her aunt brought her to a salon in India. They lay her down naked on a banana leaf, dipped a brush in white foam, and proceeded to bleach her entire body. Madhu didn’t know what they were doing at the time, but she had been introduced to a practice that seemed very normal in that part of the world. She was told that this lightening of her skin would make her more beautiful, and she believed it. Madhu adopted the practice and continued to bleach her skin for years. As an adult, Madhu learned that bleach had severely damaged her skin, and she suffered from hyperpigmentation and acne. But no skincare products on the market worked, because they were all made for lighter skin and not tested on her darker skin tone.
When our strategy, editorial, and design team started working with Lion Pose, Madhu told us this story. She also told us what the name Lion Pose represents to her: It is a yoga movement designed to remove restrictions from your vocal cords and bring out your voice. Madhu does this yoga pose with her daughter every morning. She and her cofounder Nisha Phatak chose this name for the new beauty brand they were creating because their brand would push against restrictions in the skincare industry and give voice to skin tones that have been historically underrepresented in areas like clinical testing. Inspired by the emotional power Madhu’s childhood story, the unrestricted power of the Lion Pose, and the clinical power of the products they were developing—we set out to design the beauty world’s most powerful packaging.
The brand launched with a single hero product: Unspotted 4X Hyper-Active Acid Jelly Serum. Like all of the products currently in development for the brand, Unspotted is a treatment-focused formula clinically tested on diverse skin tones. Lion Pose is the only brand developed with Harvard-educated dermatologists who have specifically studied and treated the full range of skin tones—the doctors advocating for change in their field and pushing scientific research forward.
As part of the brand strategy, we created a Nemesis for our brand: Neutrality. As the counterpoint to neutrality, we are bright and colorful—showing off our shades and embracing our differences. We choose a side and support it. We are not afraid to go on the offensive. We have strong opinions. We take action. We ask for what we want and deserve. This Nemesis drove the brand’s distinctive approach to both color and design.
We chose a vibrant orange color for our components as well as our outer cartons that represents the brand’s bold personality and strong values. This particular shade of orange is both stimulating and lively, warm and inviting, and optimistic and positive. It bursts from the shelf, pops out in a shelfie, and gives a confident boost to anyone who opens their bathroom cabinet and sees it. We accented this vibrant orange with gold elements that introduced a sense of luxury, balancing out the brightness and giving the packaging a special quality that evokes a piece of fine jewelry—a reminder to our customers that they are appreciated, elevated, and deserving of products that see and celebrate their skin tones.
The ridges on the bottle add an iconic tactile element to the brand. As it relates to structural design, our ridges symbolize strength and stability. They direct the eye and create a sense of movement, giving the bottle a sense of flow and dynamism. In our design, we took notes from contemporary architecture, where the use of ridges can symbolize innovation and modernity. Similar to an architect, we used our ridges in creative ways to push the boundaries of traditional beauty packaging design. Our ridges also give the package a sense of depth that is inherent to the brand. And functionally, they make the bottle easier to grip —especially when your hands may be wet from washing your face prior to applying the product.
The rounded shape of the bottle nestles easily in the palm of your hand. We carefully assessed the ergonomic details, shape, and size to make the packaging a delight to hold and use. We constructed the bottle outer of PET, the inner of PP, and the cap of PP with a gold matte spray—and our airless pump keeps the product stable as long as possible. As the brand grows, our bottles were designed to be refillable and reusable. They are recyclable when taken apart and easy to disassemble, with an outer bottle made Our color palette is expanding to include more strong and distinctive bright and jewel tones. And our iconic ridges will be used as a distinctive code across packaging for all products.
Both our brand strategy and design embodied diverse, powerful, and colorful personalities —people who express themselves boldly and reveal themselves proudly, people who pulsate with life and energy, and people who are unapologetic about advocating for what they deserve. Like the underrepresented skin tones that the brand elevates in its clinical studies, we sought to elevate the consumer through our packaging design. Holding the striking bottle in your hand makes you feel like your most powerful, fierce, and iconic self.
In the conclusion of our packaging design story, that little girl lying on the banana leaf went on to graduate from Harvard Business School. Today, she and her cofounder are leading the charge for change in the skincare industry. Their brand Lion Pose is unapologetically scientific, fiercely representative, and audaciously transformative. And like the brand and its mission, our packaging refuses to be ignored.
