As an 87-year-old brand, Revlon needed to do more than just reintroduce itself to a new generation of beauty consumers.
“We needed to reintroduce ourselves to not just a next generation of consumers, but we had to reintroduce ourselves to our existing consumers. We had been quiet,” said Dana Medema, Revlon’s president of North America, while speaking at the 2026 Advertising Week conference.
To do so, Revlon looked to fresh talent. In April, Revlon named musician and actress Teyana Taylor and country music star Megan Moroney as the faces of its “Revlon Be Unforgettable” campaign. The work is an update of a previous Revlon campaign from the 1980s and ‘90s that featured major names of the day like supermodel Cindy Crawford and Oprah.
The brand wanted to remind consumers about its heritage while updating aspects of its strategy for the 21st century.
“We wanted to bring women of substance to the table, women who were more than just beautiful,” said Jessica Henrichs, CEO at DonerColle Partners, the agency behind the campaign. “[Some of the original ads] had a male voiceover, and I think we can all see now that was probably not the best call.”
In the new campaign, Taylor and Moroney narrate their own ad spots. But the tagline also had to get a makeover for modern audiences.
“We thought about the tagline, ‘The most unforgettable women in the world wear Revlon,’” said Henrichs. “We live in the era of the six-second ad, and so even that sentence wasn’t going to make the cut for today.” The new tagline was trimmed to “Revlon: Be unforgettable.”
Revlon was founded in 1939 and created many defining makeup products of the 20th century, like the bright red Fire & Ice lipstick. But the company has struggled in recent years as beauty has grown into a competitive category defined by disruptive brands found largely outside the drugstore. Revlon Inc. filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022 and reemerged as a privately held company in 2023 under new ownership. Michelle Peluso was announced as CEO in 2024.
Fellow long-running brands have also tapped into contemporary talent to make a splash in a saturated beauty market. Maybelline named Miley Cyrus as a brand ambassador in 2025, while Bath & Body Works worked with Hilary Duff to launch its new body-care line in July.
Medema said that Revlon wanted to be careful not to totally shed its existing image, however.
“Heritage means you have history. There’s nothing wrong with being a heritage brand,” she said. “There’s something wrong with standing still, but you have really rich history and just going back into those archives, not being afraid to kind of pull out things from the past and say, ‘Hey man, that’s still relevant today.’”
Many heritage brands have attempted to target particular generations, from Gen Z newcomers to long-term Gen X consumers. But Medema said Revlon wanted to focus not on generations but on beauty routines when defining its core consumer.
“We’ve been experts in color. We have 72 shades of Super Lustrous [lipstick], so we are experts in color. But we’re not probably for the woman who is really trying to be involved in the category to the very, very extreme,” said Medema. “We call our target ‘e glam.’ And guess what? You can find efficient glam across ages, from the 20s all the way up to the 60s.”
