How the name of your lipstick reflects society’s notion of who you are: A linguistic analysis of cosmetic colour names

The topic for this paper was inspired from frequent visits to cosmetic retail outlets which prompted an inquiry about colour names driven by two primary observations. The first was that the colour names displayed for the products rarely described their ascribed colour. The second was that these colour names were often abstract in nature, indexing an abstract concept rather than anything directly related to the properties of colour. This pattern varied some between brands and products, but the general observations remained the same. The question arises, if most colour names can have no descriptive qualities, then what is their intended purpose? Thus, this paper focuses on the themes and entities that colour names index, why brands choose to index these themes, how these colour naming conventions relate to the linguistic anthropologic discussions of colour terms, and how this affects the scope of linguistic landscapes.