Category: CVS

April 2005: What’s New in Beauty – Boots No 7

Cold Cream 'n' Roses

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Boots puts £5m to promote No 7 range overhaul – Boots is the UK’s major drugstore chain and is everywhere as pervasive in the UK as Walgreen’s and CVS are in the US. Boots has even established stores overseas (I spotted Boots in Bangkok). Lucky magazine’s editor-in-chief, Kim France, is quoted as saying “I could find an excuse to go into this drugstore every day” in the article on shopping in London from the April 2005 issue of Lucky. I putzed around at Boots everyday while I was in London and Oxford – it’s probably the novelty of seeing products you don’t find in the US. The referenced article is about Boots’s overhaul of its No7 cosmetics line, which is marking its 70th anniversary.

Walgreen’s IsaDora, CVS’s Lumene

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I live in the Mid-Atlantic States, where the dominant drugstore chain is CVS. I visited Walgreen’s while I was in St. Louis, and checked out the IsaDora cosmetics line, which is carried exclusively at Walgreen’s. There’s a growing trend for chain stores to carry lines exclusive to that chain. While IsaDora, a cosmetics line from Sweden, is exclusive to Walgreen’s, Lumene, a cosmetics line from Finland, is exclusive to CVS. (Interestingly, I found eyeliner pencils from CVS’s Essence of Beauty line at Big Lots!)

I found IsaDora unappealing and dated in its displays featuring overly made-up models and its packaging. Lumene, on the other hand, strives for an image of Nordic freshness and coolness through its use of cool blonde Nordic models and dark blue packaging (think Noxzema or Nivea).

The Style Page has tried Lumene’s Vitamin+ Energy Cocktail serum, a two-phase formula that needs to be shaken for application, and it does impart a nice glow to the skin. It also likes Lumene’s Delight Solo eyeshadow in Never Alone (a subdued pink) from its Skin Couture collection.