Beauty : Tommy’s Blue, and 158 Other Hues

Blame it on Madonna and her chameleon-like changes from the ‘80s to now.

Blame it on those outrageously fake colors emanating from the computer screen or the flat, two-dimensional animated shows coming from Japan.

Blame it on anything you want, but the under-30 generation is into change. One minute, they want to wear outrageously bold colors, the next minute they want to look like Ava Gardner in classic, subdued shades.

“Trends come and go day to day. You like it one day, you hate it the next. We’ve come to expect so much change,” says Stephanie Scannell, the 24-year-old assistant manager of product development at Tommy Hilfiger Color. The designer is making his first foray into the makeup world.

The goal of Tommy Color is to give the young customer everything--159 different lip, eye, nail and cheek colors.

Taking Wide Aim: “The plan in our minds was quite simple,” says Matthew Teri, executive director for product development at Aramis Inc., licensee of the Hilfiger makeup line.

“It had to be fresh and new, and it had to be absolutely different from anything else that was out there.” Hilfiger wanted the color selection to be vast enough to appeal to a broad cross-section of this young market.

The core Tommy customer, he says, is 18 to 29. She’s moved beyond the teen lines of Hard Candy and Tony & Tina but is a little intimidated by the cost and presentation of department store lines. The Hilfiger cosmetics, priced from $5 to $15, are less expensive than most prestige department brands.

“The whole premise,” Teri says, “was to make a shimmering beautiful palette--everything that was dreamlike and about the millennium.”

Each generation gets its cues from different points, Teri says. A baby boomer, for example, might feel inspired to look classic by the recent HBO movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.” The last few years have seen nostalgia revivals of looks from the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and now the ‘80s. But now the focus is on the next century, Scannell says.

“The millennium has been talked about for our entire lives,” says Scannell of her age group. “To look back is almost like, it’s just not as fun. You want to change and start again.”

And a big part of the future, both Scannell and Teri say, is in the color blue, which is a major part of the Hilfiger line.

“Blue will be the color of the millennium, on the eye, on the lip,” Teri says. “It’s very soft, it’s very ethereal.”

Or, they both say, it’s brazen and obvious on the lips.

In the next few months, the Hilfiger line will also include a foundation, but once again, there will be many color choices. Says Teri, “We can’t just come out with seven shades of foundation; we have to come out with 18.”

E-mail Barbara Thomas at barbara.thomas@latimes.com.