When you open the scarlet red box set from nailcare 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, co-founder 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 co-founder 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.
