My search for a lost Chanel lipstick, lead me to explore complexities of memory, nostalgia and high tech beauty

We’ve all had the experience: a lifetime of trial and error finally leads you to , and then the lipstick is discontinued (lost to time) or goes missing (lost in the handbag). For me, it was an almost maroon Chanel lipstick that I plucked from the beauty closet at the office and then wore to my sister in law’s wedding at an outdoor railway museum in Monticello, Illinois.

The colour was somewhere between plum and a brick path after it’s rained; putting it on was like becoming another person, a woman with something crisp to say, even when her lips weren’t moving. It was an old timey wedding, with pin curls, tea length dresses and a Paper Moon–style photo set up.

We rode a rattling antique car to the ceremony site, and I felt, in my sepia shade, like I had been lifted from a silent film. The colour was perfect, and so were the pictures. This was lucky from one vantage point (the colour was immortalised by ), unfortunate from another (the photos taunted me: would I ever find it again?).

The tube was not even one quarter used when it vanished. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” While the intersection of scent and taste with has prompted scientific examinations and literary ruminations (Proust with his madeleines, etc.), the connection between colour perception and memory seems a more elusive target for inquiry, perhaps because it is so subjective.

“I am only too aware—having faced customers across the shop counter for many years—that we tend to see colour in different ways,” writes author Patrick Baty in an email to me from London, where he is also the proprietor of the masterfully encyclopedic paint shop Papers and Paints and a kind of visual detective–cum–mad scientist when it comes to pairing shades from the past with modern day materials.

(He recently, for example, restored the drawing rooms at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire to their precise 18th century glory.) Originally taught by his father to colour match by eye, Baty now uses a machine called a spectrophotometer to build up a giant database of colour profiles—perhaps the largest in existence.

But all the science in the world doesn’t make the way we experience colour less personal, he concedes. “Often, people’s responses are based on emotion or even on some of the ridiculous names given to them by paint companies. Some names discourage, while others encourage selection (for example, ‘Senior Citizen’ or ‘Elephant’s Breath’).” However individual our relationship with colour might be, it has an undeniable power to affect the way our neurons re.

Autistic patients read 35 per cent faster, according to one study, when a coloured overlay is put on the text. Some (yellows, reds and oranges) have been found to increase attention more effectively than cooler tones—not hard to clock if one has ever walked through a food court with screaming, flame coloured signage.

We remember vibrant images better than black and white ones. And then there is the infamous Drunk Tank Pink theory, popularised by social psychologist Adam Alter’s 2013 book of the same name: the idea that a bubble gum hue could pacify inebriated aggressors (or an opposing team—some college football coaches took to painting the visiting athletes’ locker rooms this Barbie adjacent shade).

The multimedia artist Madeline Hollander, whose serpentine dance Hydro Parade recently wound its way through The Metropolitan Museum, has a kind of synesthesia in which she experiences all language (and some sounds) in colour—for example, L is blue, H is white; do is yellow, re, maroon—and it’s been this way since she can remember.

“Having synesthesia,” she tells me, “is like having a window into the metaprocessing that goes on in the brain as it translates symbols, ideas and into thought.” In the years that followed my sister in law’s wedding, I did my own processing of what this colour might mean and how to find it, wandering department store aisles, painting the back of my hand a slice of the spectrum ranging from crimson to ochre.

I dipped my toes into the Pinterest colour matching world, a mood board gone off its hinges. I found myself on homely websites where you could order a (new) bespoke product based on a colour matched sample of an earlier offering. But all those services and subcultures were predicated on the idea that you knew exactly which (mostly discontinued) shade you were looking for.

In Sephora, I would attempt to describe the hue: “dark red, almost bordering on brown, a colour that belonged on Claire Danes’s quavering lips in ” and the Gen Z salesperson would bat her lashes. I might as well have been spouting algebra theorems. But who needs language when you have ? When I finally email Chanel with a similarly abstruse description, I am kindly referred to their virtual try on tool, a targeted filter that lets you test the colours by staring into your laptop screen, no in store stick sharing required— a practice that now seems a relic of a pre pandemic era, when we had less familiarity with germ theory.

A quick trip through the internet reveals that has a similar tool, and so do Revlon, L’Oréal, and many other companies. is summer, Fenty launched a shade matching filter for its foundation on TikTok, which, when you turn it on, suspends your face in a skin coloured cloud, Casper the Ghost–like.

It might not be a spectrophotometer, but it’s leaps beyond my mumblings at the store—Proustian remembrance replaced by the power of pixels. I get to work with the Chanel lipstick tool, pouting for the camera on my laptop while swiping through various shade options, jotting down names as I go. A few days later, they arrive.

Rouge Allure Caractère is more brown than red, as if I’ve forgotten to lick my lips while drinking syrupy hot chocolate; Rouge Allure Sensation is a dark blackberry colour, more like something that belongs on Wednesday Addams. I boldly line my lips, and then rub them clean in shock when I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom an hour later.

Not for me. Rouge Coco Baume in Fall For Me is a much more enjoyable wear but a different consistency than what I’d recalled. As the name implies, it’s somewhere between balm and lipstick and goes on smooth and slick. Somewhere along the line, I realise that Chanel actually offers a way to reverse engineer a solution with its Lipscanner app, which allows you to take a photo and then match the colour to its offerings.

It’s like some kind of digital age fairy tale: the answer was in the picture all along. I take myself to Saks and purchase a stick of Rouge Coco in Suzanne—there it is! A somewhat anticlimactic conclusion to my half decade long quest. Science, it seems, has its limits when entangled with sentiment.

Perhaps what I wanted was not so much the shade but the shadow of a former self, to return to a moment in time already washed in the warm tones of nostalgia. There’s another photo from that weekend that remains foremost in my memory. It’s an image of the nape of my then nine month old’s neck as I gave him a bath in the hotel sink, a perfect curl nestled in the crevice at the bottom of his skull, anatomy that was changing almost the instant I took the picture.

He would never be so small again. My sister in law would never again smile like it was the first day of the rest of her life. In the meantime, Chanel’s Fall For Me, that lighter shade with the slicker texture, has nestled itself comfortably in the bottom of my purse. I find myself reaching for it on the subway, at the , as I drop that now seven year old off for his first day of second grade.

It’s not a colour from my past, but one for the present..