When you open the scarlet red box set from nail-care brand Celisse, you’ll not only find a pristine flat lay of their whole collection, but also a delightful relic: a print manual. “Simple Steps to Beautiful, Healthy Nails” it promises, along with step-by-step instructions on shaping, buffing, and painting your own nails with accompanying visuals. The little booklet is a tactile respite in the age of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it video tutorials made more to serve the algorithm than actually educate. It’s part of a larger trend of new-guard beauty brands embracing old-school print.
“We’re so inundated by digital content,” Jessica Blumenthal, cofounder and CEO of Celisse, says. “Doing your nails at home is an offline moment where you can just sit down with your manual. You don’t have to pick up your phone.” Blumenthal found inspiration from 1920s and 1930s beauty packaging while developing the manual with designer Kat Jones. “These Cutex manuals kept popping up on eBay, and I bought one called ‘How to Have Lovely Nails.’ It’s more of a catalog, but on the other side, it does show some technique,” she added, noting it was a key reference in developing their “modern heirloom” brand identity.
“As a 12-year-old, I was reading a magazine or looking at Klutz [books],” adds Celisse’s other cofounder Holly Falcone, whose experiences as a professional nail artist inform the manual’s friendly, straight-talking tips and tricks. “There was no YouTube.” Manuals like Celisse’s harken back to a time before social media, when you learned about technique from books like Kevyn Aucoin’s Making Faces. Instead of 15-second “how-tos” with rapidly cut clips, a print manual offers thoughtfully designed two-dimensional tutorials that counteract the overwhelming stream of videos on your feed and encourage you to slow down.
“I love designing physical ephemera; doing things digitally all the time is soul-sucking,” says Annie Kreighbaum, founder and president of Kraum, a newly launched brand of micro brushes designed for detailing (think, applying product into the inner corners of your eyes or achieving a razor-sharp wing). “When you’re watching a tutorial online, you’re going at the pace of the person you’re watching. It’s one of the most frustrating things about trying to learn digitally—information is all bite-sized, and if you can’t keep up, you have to actively press buttons and engage with your device to go at your own pace.”
Kreighbaum collaborated with designer Adriana Deleo, with whom she had previously worked on early packaging at Glossier, to create Kraum’s 40-page manual. The detailed instructions and accompanying illustrations were all written and drawn, impressively, by Kreighbaum herself. “Half of what Kraum offers to customers is education,” she adds. Like Blumenthal, she found inspiration from beauty packaging of yesteryear—particularly Chanel makeup from the ’90s and 2000s, which would include diagrams for applying lipstick and eyeshadow. “I always thought their style of line drawing was chic,” she says, also citing Bob Ross as “a huge inspiration for educating on different brush types and hand tools.”
Print manuals are not only an opportunity to tap into a collective desire for more analog escapism, but also a key tool for bringing a customer closer to a brand’s story. For example, Heretic Parfum debuted a holiday collaboration with the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust that celebrates the late illustrator and author’s “mischief and magic” with both fragrance gifts and an 80-page A Misfits Manual. It’s less of a traditional guide offering follow-along instructions and more a visual feast of photos, illustrations, character stories (starring the likes of Dita Von Teese), and “advice for surviving the holidays when your temperament leans toward Gothic,” as described by Douglas Little, master perfumer and founder of Heretic.
“Our philosophy is to create worlds as much as we create perfumes, and the Gorey manual is a natural extension of that world-building,” Little says of the DEA/Studio-designed material. Like Blumenthal, he found inspiration in beauty-world ephemera, such as instructional booklets in vintage perfume sets or 1930s grooming manuals. “There is something fascinating about how beauty once required a guide, a shared language of ritual. The manual borrows from those traditions; I wanted to resurrect that sense of theatricality, but with a wink,” he says.
All of the vintage references from Little, Kreighbaum, and Falcone prove that beauty instruction manuals are not new—Smashbox’s Step-by-Step contour kit has included a face map indicating where to apply bronzer and highlighter since 2007—but the digital-first world they are being created in is incredibly different. Every detail in our short-attention economy is pointed and intentional, but also because creating print materials isn’t without pitfalls. “Giving the customer this elevated experience comes at a significant cost to us,” Blumenthal says, noting that the Celisse manual costs $2 a unit and is included in every first purchase, regardless of amount. “In the beginning, I was like, we’ll see what the reaction is, and maybe we’ll discontinue it or move it to digital. It’s a pretty big hit for us, but the engagement around it has been so strong that we’ll continue to produce it.”
Kreighbaum also notes that creating the Kraum manual was a steep learning curve. “I’ve done a lot of custom products, but the design and engineering involved with printing a book is very complicated!” she says, explaining how she went through multiple rounds to get the manual size just right to lift out of the Kraum set box. “That ended up being very expensive.”
Despite the added hurdle of creating a physical object, the founders we spoke to all agreed it was well worth the effort. There are some thoughtful details you just can’t replicate on digital. For example, the Celisse booklet has a “this book belongs to”-style section in the front for writing in your name. Kraum’s imprint of different brush strokes on the page is a helpful reference for understanding how to use the tools. The Heretic manual has double-page spreads that don’t have the same heft on a 5-inch screen.
These manuals scratch the nostalgia itch, sure, but also exemplify a greater desire for offline, focused activities that can serve as a salve for our dwindling attention spans. In the same way that more and more people try to build morning routines without social media, seek daily activities that lower cortisol, and travel to digital detox resorts, we’re all craving more analog moments in our beauty routines, too.
“Doing anything on IG and TikTok is such a distraction. I’m glad to try to find ways for people to disengage from their phones, but still learn something,” Kreighbaum says.
“People are longing for something they can hold, smell, dog-ear, and keep on a coffee table like a small talisman,” Little adds. “The manual is a deliberate slowdown…it asks the reader to pause, to explore a world that does not vanish with a swipe. The manual gives beauty a soul again.”
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