Shiseido Eudermine

Eudermine is a skin lotion: a clear, deep-red liquid which is soaked into a cotton pad and smoothed over the face after washing, to soften and moisten the skin before anything else is applied. Today it comes in a tall cylinder of red plastic with a clear red cap. Its first bottle, in 1897, was a squat glass flask, its stopper wrapped in white paper and tied with a red ribbon and a gilt label garlanded with roses, the name written across it in copperplate.

It was the first cosmetic Shiseido ever made. The firm had been a pharmacy, opened in Ginza in 1872 by Arinobu Fukuhara, a former navy pharmacist, and Eudermine was a pharmacist's product: made, Shiseido says, by the Western pharmaceutical methods of the day and named from the Greek for good skin. It was sold as a 'high-grade lotion' at a price few could afford, and in time became known as Shiseido's red water.

Over the next century Shiseido revised the formula and redrew the bottle many times, with new designs it dates to 1918, 1935, 1954, 1968 and 1980. For its hundredth year Serge Lutens, the house's French designer, reworked it entire, from bottle to advertising; that design took the Japan Package Design Grand Prize in 1999. A plainer red wiping lotion, Eudermine (N), has been sold beside it in Japan since 1980.

The current version, renamed Eudermine Essence Lotion in 2023, holds hyaluronic acid, a form of vitamin C and an extract of rice fermented with kefir, and is sold in refills that use far less plastic than the bottle. None of that changes what it is for. It is still red, still poured onto cotton, and still the first step of the routine, as it was for the women who first paid 25 sen for it.