Lost and Found

Recalling a beloved Chanel lipstick, Chloe Schama searches color databases, high-tech matching tools, and the complexities of memory.

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We’ve all had the experience: A lifetime of trial and error finally leads you to the perfect shade, and then the lipstick is discontinued (lost to time) or goes missing (lost in the handbag). For me, it was an almost-maroon Chanel that I plucked from the beauty closet at the office and then wore to my sister-in-law’s wedding at an outdoor railway museum in Monticello, Illinois. The color was somewhere between plum and a brick path after it’s rained; putting it on was like becoming another person, a woman with something crisp to say, even when her lips weren’t moving. It was an old-timey wedding, with pin curls, tea-length dresses, and a Paper Moon–style photo setup. We rode a rattling antique car to the ceremony site, and I felt, in my sepia shade, like I had been lifted from a silent film. The color was perfect, and so were the pictures. This was lucky from one vantage point (the color was immortalized by professional photography), unfortunate from another (the photos taunted me: Would I ever find it again?). The tube was not even one-quarter used when it vanished. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

While the intersection of scent and taste with memory has prompted scientific examinations and literary ruminations (Proust with his madeleines, etc.), the connection between color perception and memory seems a more elusive target for inquiry, perhaps because it is so subjective. “I am only too aware—having faced customers across the shop counter for many years—that we tend to see color in different ways,” writes