Color e.l.f.nalysis
Client: e.l.f. Cosmetics
Role: Creative Director
Agency: Movement Strategy
For years, e.l.f. had earned itself a reputation as a dominant force in forward-thinking social media marketing. By early 2025, one frontier remained un-conquered: Pinterest.
Our team was tasked with launching the global beauty brand’s presence on the Pinterest platform in a highly visible way, with a focus on attracting new, Gen Z consumers. A campaign that could shout: “we’ve arrived.”
The more headlines, the better.
To win big on Pinterest, we began by observing Gen Z behaviors there. The platform had been around for over 15 years, but was seeing an incredible amount of insurgent energy from this audience.
We found that over half of Gen Z users were using Pinterest for beauty-related searching habits before Google.
In the past year alone, there were over 1.6 billion makeup-related searches on the platform, but more importantly, within e.l.f.’s own audience, a 22x increase in interest around topics like "color season analysis."
With e.l.f.’s vast armada of shades, colors, and personalized choices, we realized they could perfectly solve a problem many beauty consumers were facing: costly color analysis consultations.
Color analysis is the professional process of assessing which colors best complement an individual’s natural features, at which point the individual then finds their natural "color season."
This is usually derived from three areas in particular: skin tone, hair color, and eye color. Many people go to great lengths to get this right.
So, we developed a new tool.
Color e.l.f.nalysis: an easy-to-use, AI-powered web-app that could expertly assign a user’s color season. For free!
To prime our audience and get color on the brain, the first thing we did was subtract it. In the days leading up to the Color e.l.f.nalysis launch, we posted seemingly normal evergreen content, only desaturated. People noticed soon enough!
Launch Day
Staying on theme with seasons, we launched June 20, the first day of Summer.
A carousel jam-packed with Pinterest aesthetics introduced the looks and messaging for e.l.f.’s newest offering. The color analysis tool was now live, and ready for everyone to use.
Our tool's user-journey was designed to be simple as can be:
1
Take a selfie, or choose a fitting image from your camera roll to upload (the tool would guide you on best lighting/framing practices for best results)
2
Once the user has their photo selected, they are prompted to select their eye color from a given range of shades.
3
After uploading, the photo takes a short moment to process and analyze, during which the user gets helpful tidbits on what color analysis is all about.
4
Voila! You now have your color season. Paired with the results are a description explaining your season as well as a curated Pinterest board of perfectly-matched e.l.f. product to peruse!
These custom Pinterest boards made use of the newest tools on the platform, like the collage format, and shoppable pins, linking users directly to makeup shades that harmonize with their own features.
By looking at user search, save, and shop behavior on Pinterest (for example: a 23% increase in “true summer makeup” and a 30% increase in "spring color palette analysis”), we were able to position the campaign exactly where folks were actively searching already.
We then partnered with professional color experts to demonstrate the tool, along with Pinterest creators to develop season-specific boards and content through the platform's new creator partnership packages.
Color e.l.f.nalysis had its public debut at the Cannes Lions, and was soon covered by dozens of top beauty and editorial outlets, delivering our team and the client a big win for the campaign’s primary goal.
