Beauty Might Not Be Blind, but the Casting Call Was

ARE you just another pretty face? Or are you truly beautiful? A new campaign from the mineral cosmetics company Bare Escentuals hopes women will realize that the former is not enough.

“Pretty,” says an actress in a commercial for the campaign, “is what you are. Beauty is what you do with it.” The theme for the campaign is “Be a Force of Beauty.”

“We can all be pretty, but beauty is an action,” said Leslie Blodgett, the executive chairman of Bare Escentuals. “Hopefully it’s a rally cry for ‘Don’t just be pretty and sit there and get your picture taken and do nothing.’ ”

Simon Cowell, the chief marketing officer of Bare Escentuals, said the company realized there was an audience it had not yet reached through its boutiques, wholesale partners or the use of home shopping networks like QVC. “We need to talk to them about our brand before they show up at one of our counters,” Mr. Cowell said.

To do that, the company hired an advertising agency of record — TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles, part of TBWA Worldwide, a unit of the Omnicom Group — to create its first traditional ad campaign, which will appear in print, television and digital ads. “Its been a scary process for me personally,” said Ms. Blodgett. “Its really hard to get your message across with a one-liner.”

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To find models that represented the elusive notion of beauty, the company held a blind casting call for women ages 20 to 60. Representatives from Bare Escentuals did not see the women who applied until they were selected for the campaign. Instead, they asked more than 270 women to complete a questionnaire about who they were and what they were like.

“My agent wouldn’t even tell me who the company was,” said Keri Shahidi, 42, one of the women chosen for the campaign, because the agent did not want the knowledge to affect her answers. The list was then whittled to 78 women, who were chosen based on their answers to the survey and brought in for interviews with casting agents. That list was reduced to 26 women, and after an a additional round of interviews, five women made the final cut.

Not seeing the women before they were chosen, Ms. Blodgett said, was a bit nerve-racking. “Do you know what a huge risk that is? What if all five of them were blonde, blue-eyed and 30?”

Xanthe Hohalek, a creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles who worked on the campaign, said the company was looking for the women to embody qualities like inspiration, humility and humor. “We were looking for something that was much more personality-driven,” Ms. Hohalek said. The goal was to capture women who had compelling and interesting stories to tell.

One finalist is a volunteer firefighter and another is an environmental scientist. Ms. Shahidi, an actor and mother of three, says she has undergone multiple knee surgeries because of playing basketball, has an “irrational fear of dog poop” and used to ride a motorcycle in college. “They really got to know us,” Ms. Shahidi said. “It had nothing to do with the makeup.”

Ms. Blodgett said that with the exception of basic color correction, the company took pains not to retouch or airbrush photographs of the women. “We’re leaving in everything that they came with on their face. Every line, wrinkle, puffy bloodshot eye,” she said. “We have a responsibility as a beauty company to start changing the images that women see.”

Ms. Shahidi confirmed that notion: “Trust me. I saw my picture, they did not retouch me.”

The photographs, which were taken by John Rankin Waddell, were meant to show “women that had soul in their eye versus what you see in magazines, that blank dilated pupil stare,” said Ms. Hohalek of TBWA. “There was a sense of a self there.”

Bare Escentuals, which was acquired by the Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido in 2010, sells about $1 billion in cosmetic products globally each year, according to a company spokeswoman. The campaign, which is estimated to cost $16 million to $20 million, will be introduced in three phases over the next few months.

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The first phase, which begins Tuesday , will focus on what the company is calling its “anthem” for women to be a force of beauty. Quick Response or Q.R. codes, a new type of bar code that can be read by smartphones, will be called “beauty marks” and will take consumers from print ads to biographical Web videos about the women.

The second phase will focus on the company’s signature foundation product, bareMinerals Original Foundation , with television commercials saying how “they’ll notice you, not your makeup.” The third phase will announce a new product for the brand called “Ready,” the first portable solid eye shadow product from Bare Escentuals.

Print ads will run in magazines like Allure, Elle, Health, Glamour, Lucky and Self. Fifteen- and 30-second television spots will run on cable and broadcast channels like the CW, ABC, MTV, Bravo and Oxygen. Other elements to the campaign include ads that can be seen on Android, iPhone and other smartphones. Search ads will run on sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

A Facebook application called “Share the Force” will let users post a message on a friend’s Facebook page saying the friend is a force of beauty. Those who use the app will then be invited to a complementary “make-under” at one of the company’s boutiques and given some foundation. A mobile site will let users watch videos, learn more about the makeup products and buy them.

Bare Escentuals is not the only company that sells mineral makeup. Companies like Everyday Minerals, Iredale Mineral Cosmetics and even traditional cosmetics brands like L’Oréal carry similar products. But Mr. Cowell said the competition was not a factor in choosing to go with an advertising campaign.

“We knew there was an audience out there that we weren’t talking to,” Mr. Cowell said. “We feel like we’ve got something to say.”