Clarion Calling 📯

2026 -

In late September this year, my half-completed Amiga game got a mention on the pre-eminent retro adventure gaming podcast, The Retro Adventurers. That was a delightful surprise! It's lovely to hear something I've done appear on a show I listen to, when I hadn't asked - especially when the hosts are such respected experts. I was really pleased.

Something else got a mention on that same episode, and I can't really explain why it piqued my interest, but it did. A few minutes later, Nick Moffat talks about Sean Haas's plans to write a text adventure for the LGP-30. Then Nick says "if Sean manages to get a game working there, then we need to get off our backsides and find a working Clarion make-up computer, and quickly!"

Me: what on earth is a 'Clarion make-up computer'??

Here's Jason Compton.

'Someone (on an Amiga BBS, I think, to help anchor just how long ago we're talking about) made some reference to not being impressed by a port of a program "until it runs on a Clarion Beauty Computer", anticipating the it runs DOOM gag by a fair number of years. And it's always stuck with me.'

So, this is a recurring joke on The Retro Adventurers, based on an older joke, that had somehow passed me by until now. I did a little research. I checked an older episode which goes into much more depth about it (highly recommended listen for context), and learned that it was a single-purpose computer from the late 1980s. That single purpose: seasonal colour analysis! It was a little electronic point-of-sale device, designed to help sell make-up in drugstores. It would ask customers a few questions about their hair colour, eye colour, and complexion, and it would recommend shades from the range right next to it. It would have been found clamped to a shelf in your local drugstore in the US and Canada, as part of the Clarion bay, right next to rows and rows of mascara, lipstick and foundation.

Here it is.

Why hadn't I heard of this? Well, Clarion was a North American brand, and a pretty short-lived one too. It was launched in the autumn of 1986 (two years before I was launched) and was phased out in 1994. I won't go into the full history of the brand here, but, it was a creation of the Noxell Corporation - the same people who originated CoverGirl cosmetics and Noxzema. It was intended to target women over 30. Noxell became part of Procter & Gamble in 1989.

Wanna watch some old ads? Of course you do. This is how I spend a lot of my Friday nights.

Now, I should explain at this point, that finding this out was enough to make my mission very clear to me.

There are a few things here I find irresistible.

I love nothing more than to take something extremely niche and forgotten from the past and to dig deep, archiving and preserving and uncovering secrets, bringing it all back into the present. The more unnecessary and ridiculous the Thing is, the better. It has all the features of the kind of research that would form the basis of a new artistic idea, for me. It fell into place very fast.

The Clarion call (sorry):

I must be the person to respond to that decades-old joke and take it seriously.
I must make an adventure game that runs on the Clarion Beauty Computer (or try to port an existing one, which is the 'impressive' goal, and much harder).
If I can't find one, then I must find out enough about it to rebuild the closest approximation I can manage. I can do that - figure out the innards, 3D print the enclosure. Create something physical, a 1/1. The perfect project to distract me from all my other unfinished ones, which have suddenly become boring chores. Shiny new idea!

And I thought too, in a secondary way, that it was good to be a woman doing this. The basis of the joke, running a game on this thing, is mostly to do with it being a very simple, single-purpose, idiosyncratic machine - one that was never meant to run games or even leave the drugstore. There is, of course, a whole history to people adapting games for ridiculous machines and hacking devices to make them do unintended things. You may have heard about DOOM on a credit card reader or Tetris on a soldering iron. It is a fun challenge for programmers and engineers. But... could there be a little more to it than that? Is the reason it was such a laugh to suggest it, all those years ago on that Amiga BBS*, maybe, a little bit, to do with the fact this is a girly computer? Were they hinting at the idea that make-up is frivolous, not worth taking seriously?

If I were still at art school, or writing a statement for some lame 2010s girlboss gallery show, I'd justify this project by saying it's a challenge to some of gaming and tech's misogynist roots. In 2026, I don't know, but I do know that running a game on a make-up computer as a female nerd is very appealing. I like make-up and I know my colour season. Make-up is a medium. It can be just as creative as it is a social pressure. This machine would have been for me, had I been born elsewhere, earlier. I think if I had seen something like it in Boots as a child, I'd have been completely fascinated.

*the podcast episodes actually attribute it to a running gag on rec.arts.int-fiction, but I've found nothing in any available archives. It is sad so much of this is lost to time.

So, with that goal in mind, let's try to find out everything there is to know.

Looking great. And knowing it!

Keen-eyed you will have noticed that the computer featured in these YouTube commercials seemed to look different every year. I noticed that too. I think it went through three versions. It started life in stores in late '86 as the 'Personalized ColorSystem' - a pale machine, like the one seen in the images above. By '88, it was pretty much the same thing, but now we see a purple box around the keypad, and an adjusted name - the 'Personalized Beauty System'. By 1990, the housing was different, the mirror was removed, and it became the Clarion Beauty Computer, in resplendent purple - not unlike Cadbury. I recognise the logo font - Palatino. I'll call it the Clarion Beauty Computer when I'm referring to all of these versions.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to find real, more detailed and recent photographs. I found evidence of two surviving machines. The first was a completed eBay sale from 2022. I was able to recover the photos from that listing, giving me a lovely view from all sides, as well as the particularly useful appearance of some measuring tape, so I can estimate dimensions and LCD sizing. The seller is still active, but understandably could not tell me who the machine was sold to four years ago.

I found a second surviving computer buried in the Smithsonian's archives. I am still waiting to hear from them to see what they might be able to show me.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History holds records of a 1990 project - the Cover Girl Advertising Oral History and Documentation Project. Something caught my eye on that page, under the heading "Separated Materials".

"The Division of Home and Community Life, Costume Collection (now Division of Cultural and Community Life) holds eighty-six cosmetic items and one computer that were also donated by the Noxell Corporation in 1990 in conjunction with the oral history project. These artifacts include lipstick, manicure sets, brushes, make-up, eye shadow, blush, powder puffs, eyelash curler, nail polish, and mascara. See accession number 1990.0193."

The computer itself is object 1990.0193.001. I have made my requests from here in the UK. These things take time. If there's no response by November, I'll contact Christopher W. Wilson through his staff contact form.*

The page does not explicitly say that this donated Noxell computer is a Clarion Beauty Computer, but I was able to confirm that anyway, thanks to an exhibition that ran between 1997 and 1998 - About Faces - The Postwar Boom in Craniofacial Knowledge.

"This virtual exhibition is based on an exhibit produced jointly by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research which appears at the National Museum of American History from September 1997 through January 1998."

This exhibition, archived on the Wayback Machine, identifies the object supplied by the Smithsonian as "Clarion Beauty Computer, 1980s". It says it was a gift of the Noxell Corporation. There’s even a visible picture. I have ordered some materials related to the exhibition, on the off chance the machine was photographed more extensively at this point. The curators were Ramunas Kondratas and Katherine Ott, and the project managers were Eleanor Boyne and Steve Turner.*

*Sometimes while I'm writing this, I'll make notes like that - they are for me, in case I need to pursue a lead later.

I have also found a number of other contemporary pictures and plates in old books. If I look closely, some of these can provide hidden, useful information. This one, from William L Wilkie's Consumer Behavior, is particularly great because I can see exactly how many characters the LCDs could show, and what the intro text said. This is how I worked out the display modules I need are a 2x40 and 4x40, and that lines up with the measurements in the eBay photos.

INTRODUCING CLARION
ULTRAPURE COSMETICS AND SKIN CARE

SO PURE EVEN WOMEN WITH SENSITIVE SKIN
CAN USE THEM. PERFORMANCE SO BEAUTIFUL-
EVERY WOMAN WILL WANT TO.

Another ad shows me exactly how one of the questions was formatted. I can tell enough to know that the questions and opening wording changed and grew as the brand developed (and more on that later), especially when skincare was introduced to the range, on top of make-up.

So, I can use photographs and ads to understand what it looked like on the outside and a little bit about the kind of questions it asked. What about how it actually worked as a computer? What's inside??

Innards

Well, luckily, the Retro Adventurers did a lot of the preliminary work for me. In their lovely first anniversary chatisode, Nick lays out his own research into the machine. Nick spotted that Robert E. Glaser of IC Engineering, Maryland, mentioned reviewing the Clarion on his website, so he emailed him. Robert - who is "an absolute pack rat" according to Nick - dug out his 1986 engineering report, and it's now on his website as a PDF. Incredible!

The report is dated April 14th, 1986. At this point, Noxell had been offered a finished prototype design from... somewhere. The designer is only ever called "the manufacturer" - more on that later though - and Noxell paid a third-party engineer - Robert - to look it over before committing to it. Robert does not suggest extensive changes are necessary in his report, although, several changes were planned before rollout, and FCC radiation testing still needed to be done. Clarion make-up was launched in September of 1986 and the computers appeared in stores by December, so all of this happened fairly quickly.

I haven't spoken to Robert myself, since Nick asked the right questions, but, per that episode, Robert confirms to Nick:

"the Clarion Beauty Computer is based on a CMOS version of the Z80."
"It was a custom layout with an EPROM, including an empty socket for a second ROM, should later software require it."
He doesn't have any schematics

Without going into tedious detail here, the evaluation document basically describes a little battery-powered computer, with a low-power processor, and no way to plug anything in from outside. From that document, alone, I know this much.

It had a CMOS Z80 processor, but the speed isn't mentioned
It had a 6116 (2KB) RAM chip which held the working data and the stack.
The program chip was a single 27C64 EPROM (8KB), and that had a socket so it could be swapped easily. That's a 28-pin DIP socket.
There was an empty socket left open for a second 27C64
There were sockets for the processor and RAM in early units, 40-pin and 24-pin DIP, but the later plan was to solder them.
There were two trimmer potentiometers for the LCD voltage, one per display
It had two long LCD screens and a keypad (well, I knew that already)
It had a battery pack
It had a watchdog timer, which is a little circuit that restarts the machine if the program ever hangs.

My favourite detail in the report is that Robert felt the keypad needed strengthening against the fierce power of the acrylic nail.

The program itself was written in Z80 assembly, and that filled three quarters of the chip. 6KB.

Robert wasn't terribly impressed with the code because it wasn't table driven. Instead of one routine reading the questions from a list, "separate code exists for every question and response."

But it worked, so whatever. Robert told Noxell they needn't bother having it rewritten. If they wanted to change the questions later, someone would just need to unplug the battery, pull out the program chip and push in a new one.

And that did happen. I spoke earlier about being able to tell from ads that the questions and text changed. Old articles confirm that, like this 1988 Advertising Age.

"This fall, an ad campaign from Clarion's new agency, Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, should be well in place along with a complementary skincare line, a souped-up program for the Clarion in-store color-analysis computer and refinements in Clarion's color selection."

The same article notes that "The Clarion Color System computer can add programs, such as speaking Spanish to Hispanic consumers."

So that was enough for me to buy some parts.

I figured I'd keep going, design my own approximation of the PCB, send it to China for manufacturing and push my chips into the sockets when it got here. But... would that be a Clarion Beauty Computer, truly? I wasn't satisfied it would be. I really wanted to know, not guess, what the board looked like. In the absence of a schematic, I had to go deeper. I needed to find who designed it.

Who was the mysterious "manufacturer"?

Intermark / The Howard Marlboro Group

Noxell may have failed to mention who built the computer, but the trade papers didn't! They name a firm called Intermark, which was part of the Howard Marlboro group. Hooray. There's more, too.

"While the computer created by New York-based Intermark originally acted as a basic guide to introduce consumers to the line, it has the capability of adding on more advanced programs. For instance, in areas with a high number of Spanish-speaking consumers, the computer will be bilingual in the manner of many bank automatic teller machines. In Canada, the Clarion computer will speak French in addition to English. Its program also will be expanded to incorporate the skincare introduction and may eventually have other uses, too. Sources say the computer could easily be adapted to distribute coupons, or even show consumers how to apply makeup. Michael Wahl, chairman-CEO of the Howard Marlboro Group, Intermark's parent company says, "We even have retailers calling who want to buy the computer themselves. Computers can create multiple purchases far and above what the normal purchase might be.”" - Advertising Age, March 1988

"Intermark Corp., a New York-based consulting unit of Howard Marlboro Group, worked closely with Clairol in developing Color Visions and Christy, a touchscreen salon computer. Intermark also devised computers for Pantene and Clarion, Noxell's new line of makeup." - Advertising Age, March 1987 (remember Clairol for later!)

"New York-based Intermark Corp. is a 3-year-old business built solely on what industry experts call "interactive retailing," using computers to sell products and services. An estimated 75% of its business is from the personal-care industry alone. It has built a small, inexpensive computer that helps consumers pick cosmetics--and has sold 21,000 of them to Noxell, a cosmetics maker that has installed the machines in drugstores across the country." - LA Times, June 1987

I thought if I can find out who was working for Intermark, it might help me answer some unanswered questions. That proved a little harder than it seemed at first glance. HMG's chairman, Michael Wahl, wrote a book in 1992 about in-store marketing called, er, In-store Marketing. In it, he says this:

What the hell is MarkitStar? Stop with the company names. Ugh! Short answer: it's basically the same thing. In 1986, Intermark reorganised under a new name, MarkitStar, but all the work was still done under the Intermark name as a subsidiary of MarkitStar. Why? I don't know or care. Business is boring.

From what I can tell from Wahl's book, HMG were used to designing and building instore displays, and knew that interactivity at point-of-sale was going to make them money, especially in places where there were no fancy sales consultants around to give advice (an unmanned drugstore display versus a department store concession) - but nobody there knew anything about computers, so Intermark was formed to close that gap and hire people who had, as Michael puts it, "the requisite technical skills".

I assumed HMG had found a convenient pool of people somewhere to form this new working group. I needed to know where they found their engineers.

I found another book - Cecil C. Hoge's Electronic Marketing Manual. This one has loads of great information about the project and how well it did, and went into more depth about the way it was organised, giving me a better name - Dr. Terry Countermine.

Dr. Countermine is retired from teaching at East Tennessee State and I couldn't reach him by email, but, I traced his career back to somewhere else in the 1980s - Auburn, Alabama. Then, Auburn kept coming up, again and again. I found:

Jim Buston. According to this slightly dodgy page, he was Intermark's vice president of software development until 1990. He studied at Auburn University and later worked for the City of Auburn as city manager.
The only Intermark engineer named on a patent from those years, Jack Figh, filed it for a battery tester in 1987 from Montgomery, Alabama. It's full of Z80 code and has a 2KB RAM - the same family of parts as the Clarion computer.
Jack Figh's CV says he'd worked from 1984 to 1986 as a design engineer at an Auburn electronics firm called EPOS. He went there straight after graduating from Auburn University.

Auburn, Alabama

EPOS was founded in 1982 by two Auburn University graduates, Fred Byrd and Tim Johnson. It seemed to me that many of Auburn University's bright young engineers went on to join EPOS in the 1980s. They worked on computer peripherals, electronic product development and amusement/arcade projects. The arcade arm was called Cardinal Amusements. They made a conversion kit for turning a Pac-Man cabinet into The Glob, as well as other Z80-based arcade titles. The Arcade Manual Archive identifies several, like Boardwalk Casino, Catapult, Eeekk!, IGMO, Revenger '84, The Dealer, and Street Heat. Forgive me for getting distracted by this, but it kind of brings the project (almost) full-circle. The IGMO manual has some particularly good stuff in it. Instructions: PLAYERS MUST UNDERSTAND GAME.

The point is, EPOS had the capability to develop and produce electronic products. Is this where Intermark found the missing expertise they needed? I was getting excited, because this was the first link I had from Intermark to PCBs. I tracked down Jim and Fred separately, and this is where it gets JUICY. Well, I mean, as juicy as this can get.

Jim confirmed that the engineers at EPOS designed the hardware and wrote the firmware for the Clarion computer. Jim put together the books Intermark provided to EPOS to help them write the code. He also remembered a bit of a sore point. EPOS had been told they'd get the manufacturing and assembly work as well, but when it came to it, the bosses at Intermark awarded the contract to a company in New Jersey instead. He couldn't remember the name of that company.

Fred confirmed that, too -

“The EPOS engineer that designed and programmed the board was Jack Figh. I recall that during the project he quit EPOS and started working for Intermark. We (EPOS) manufactured a few prototypes and were disappointed we didn't get the production manufacturing contract. We had no idea who did the manufacturing.”

So. I absolutely must tread carefully here, but, it seems that Jack designed the board while at EPOS, Intermark said 'yes please' to that, but didn't give EPOS the manufacturing contract as expected. Jack then showed up at Intermark to rejoin his designs less than a year later. I mean, whatever. I am not here to dig up old bad blood or anything. Get that bag, Jack. The important thing is he is my man. I suppose they only needed one man. He might still have his designs.

Of course, Jack hasn't replied to me yet. I am on it though.

Digging

I've used all of my research skills for this. I'm a little rusty. I haven't had to do this kind of thing this intensely since I was at university, and right now, I have no handy academic library pass. The Internet is so full of things when you know how to look, but, with older subjects, most of the time, what you are looking for sits in a box in an archive, listed online only by some vague name. Those things cost money to retrieve. You might spend out on a guess and end up with something useless.

Example: A 2012 patent about car-sales software I found lists about 400 older documents as references. One of them was a 1986 Howard Marlboro Group brochure called The New Smart Boxes, which sounded promising to me. I paid the US Patent Office $27 for a certified copy, which was posted to me across the Atlantic. It turned out to be ten pages of starry-eyed sales talk, with no Clarion Beauty Computer in it at all. It did vaguely describe something interesting - the Intermark 'Hair Care Consultant' - an electronic 'shelf talker (with a one-year battery life!)'. Hold that thought.

Patents can be useful. I figured they're the closest I might come to a schematic, since companies do need to describe their inventions in enough detail for someone else to build them.

As I mentioned, in October 1987, eight months after he joined Intermark, Jack Figh filed a patent for a battery tester - US4827220A. It does not say it's anything to do with the Clarion computer. It never mentions a keypad or a display. It only says it connects to "a microcomputer of conventional construction". It's just a way for a battery-powered computer to check its own batteries. But to explain it, Jack had to show some of the circuit and some of the program, and that's the closest I've got to seeing inside an Intermark machine.

The program is Z80 assembly with 2KB of RAM (sound familiar?). The circuit passes the battery readings to the computer through a 74HC244 chip, and switches the test on with a 74HC374. It even gives the addresses.

INPUT = $FFF0
OUTPUT = $FFF4
RAMSTART = $4000
RAMSIZE = $0800
STACKTOP = $4800

I can't say for certain what computer this is, especially as it has a loudspeaker and I don't think the Clarion beeped, but we've got the same engineer, the same processor, the same amount of memory, and it's battery-powered - just eighteen months after Robert looked at the Clarion computer.

If I have to guess how my rebuilt board should be wired, Jack's habits are the best place to start.

Then, there's Frank Trotta's 1989 patent for Intermark, for a "versatile assembly for housing an interactive computer". It says that in-store computers, generally, are "individually designed for each particular product or manufacturer", so "the tooling and design costs are quite high". Frank designed one adaptable housing to cover them all - a plastic case that opens on a hinge, with separate mounts for the circuit board, keypad, battery and screens, plus a bracket to clamp it to a display.

This one is useful if only because in it, Frank confirms he designed this around various manufacturers' 2x40 and 4x40 LCDs. I already know the Clarion's lines are 40 characters, so I can infer it likely used the same kind of off-the-shelf screens. Just as well, because that's what I already bought.

The mystery manufacturing set-up

If Jim remembered it correctly, and Hoge's figures are correct, somebody in New Jersey had a hand in manufacturing 37000 make-up computers. They would have been doing it under Intermark's direction and not credited anywhere in public. I haven’t been able to pin it all down.

By the mid-1990s, Intermark was part of 'HMG Worldwide' and this 1995 annual report to the SEC says:

“the Company operates three assembly facilities, of which two facilities are located in Kearny, New Jersey and the third facility is located in Reading, Pennsylvania.”

The Kearny facilities were leased. The Reading one was owned by HMG. It came from the acquisition of Pennsylvania Optical from Benson Eyecare in the same year. The report also says the company “outsourced its production requirements to third parties” before 1993. Nevertheless, 1980s Kearny is where I started looking, trying to figure out what those buildings were and who occupied them over time - but South Kearny is a huge industrial area and it proved very difficult to trace. I also found a very shaky link to Crestron, a big electronics company that originated in Cresskill, NJ and still exists today. In 1990, Crestron's founder, George Feldstein, appears with Frank Trotta on an Intermark patent. That alone proves nothing about Crestron being linked to the Clarion computer, but it pointed me to look at Frank’s background.

Frank sadly passed away in 2019, but I can see his old LinkedIn profile. From 1981 to ‘86, prior to working for Intermark, Frank ran his own business out of Maplewood, NJ, called Trotta Industrial Design. That’s a half-hour drive from Kearny, on the other side of Newark. Before that, he was working for ADC Interactive. His LinkedIn says ADC “was the first POP computer interactive display company”. Across both jobs, Frank listed his role as design, development and, crucially, ‘production coordination’ for clients needing point-of-purchase displays and electronic equipment. Frank joined Intermark in 1987 as Director of Design. That’s the same year Jack started working for them. Maybe Intermark brought both these men in-house at the same time. Maybe Frank’s company was already coordinating production for Intermark.

I spoke to another executive for Intermark who was with them in 1987, and he remembers that “the computers themselves were manufactured and assembled in our New Jersey and PA plants” but... I can’t quite figure out the timeline. Frank’s CV mentions establishing facilities for HMG in Newark and Kearny, but he didn’t start that role until 1991. I’ve also been told, now, that the “actual circuit boards were assembled to our specifications at our co-man site in Mexico.”

Mexico. Of course. The PCB manufacturing was done in one place with the rest assembled in another. That’s what production coordination entails, probably making the most of cheap wages in the maquiladoras. Makes business sense. I don’t think EPOS could have competed with that. Noxell placed a lot of orders - I imagine more than anyone expected to begin with - and costing would have been everything to do with these decisions. I don’t think I will ever know anything more about this, nor do I need to. I’m at risk of drifting quite seriously away from my actual goals. This is just my curiosity getting to me.

...that said, I have some routes left open. When MarkitStar sold shares to the public in 1987, it had to file a prospectus with the SEC. That document might (hopefully) detail the manufacturing relationships, so I've asked the US National Archives and Records Administration for a copy of it. I'm waiting to hear back.

I am also waiting to hear back from a university library in - of all places - Kobe, Japan. They have Intermark's and MarkitStar's annual reports from 1985 to 1988 on microfiche. I also asked about another document held at the Library of Congress, but, that one will cost me $107 to read, and... well. My money was better spent elsewhere, as you'll see.

The (bottle blonde) bombshell

Tired of looking at company records, because it is very boring, I was hunting around on eBay, looking for anything to do with vintage electronic shop displays and the beauty industry, and I found... this.

The Clairol Haircolor Shade Selector is a long, slim, dusty-blue electronic unit which appears to clamp onto a shelf. What can we see? Two LCDs. A keypad, laid out 1 2 3 START / 4 5 6 REPEAT / 7 8 9 NEXT, exactly like the Clarion computer. More than that, the written instructions next to the keypad are almost exactly the same, with an extra 'your'. It's from 1988, the year I was born, right in the middle of the Clarion's run.

OwO
what's this?

Now, it's not as narratively fun but I'll be honest. I asked for those extra photos. We get a glimpse of the board through the back. The seller didn't want to take it apart, which is totally understandable, but she very kindly confirmed what it looks like it says:

INTERMARK CORPORATION INTERACTIVE COMPUTER, VERSION 1.9.

The program chip says CLAIROL 4.0 ©INTERMARK.

And that seems a lot like we are looking at a standard Intermark board with a client-specific program, does it not? And, a version 1.9 means there were earlier versions. I'd bet one of them is in the Clarion computer.

I bought it on 13th October. It's on its way to me. How could I not?

What can I find out about the Clairol machine? Remember those trade papers? Let's go back to those.

"The Clarion computer marks the first, but not last appearance of computers in chain stores. Retailers say Clairol is testing a computer for hair colors." - Advertising Age, March 1988

"With the installation of Clairol's Shade Selector Computer in certain retail outlets, women can enter basic information and get a personalized brand and shade "prescription" to meet individual needs. This computerized aid to shoppers helps Clairol reinforce its category leadership." - Drug Store News, December 1989

Cool, but... that was pretty much ALL I could find online about it. Just those two sentences in old papers. Beyond that, I couldn't find any other mention of this Clairol computer anywhere at all. Unlike the Clarion computer, there were no YouTube ads, no memories on Threads or questions on Metafilter. No comments like this on nostalgia Instagram posts. It was like it never existed.

(Good info for me there, thank you blackhairedlady73nyc)

I couldn't even find another photo of it online beyond the eBay listing itself. At least, not for a while. It was a ghost. What exactly had I bought?

I'd been busy trying to get information from ex-Intermark and EPOS employees via LinkedIn - I had to get a free Premium trial to message them, gross (I hate LinkedIn). Most of them, including Jack Figh, sadly have not answered me... but one did - the fabulous Lili Mahlab, who is co-founder of Mercury Marketing Capital now, but ran sales and marketing at Intermark from the 1980s until 2001. I asked her about the Clarion computer and, almost as an afterthought, about my Clairol machine.

Lili:

The Clairol one never rolled out. Some prototypes were made and a small test was executed in a handful of stores. The capex costs, even with the reduced size and LCD screen wouldn't have paid out as the sales increases were marginal. I recall that matched panel testing was done… probably 17 test vs 17 control stores. I don't recall if the test was statistically significant or if it was too low to warrant a test expansion.

The company, Intermark, was on the right track at the time by creating a unit that could be made for $200 all in vs a touchscreen system which cost 8K at that time. This is actually how they started… with large touchscreen systems.

So that explains why I couldn't find anything, and, while the Clairol Haircolor Shade Selector isn't exactly in high demand on the secondary market (it had been sitting on eBay for at least six months), I do feel lucky to have found a test unit, in apparently decent condition, just waiting on eBay after 38 years. I went looking for the Clarion Beauty Computer and I found something much rarer.

I'm pleased to be the owner of such a unique thing - a niche, forgotten piece of beauty marketing history. For that reason, I am dubious about using this one to run an adventure game (remember that? I'd almost forgotten the goal). What it will tell me is exactly how to build something of my own, just like Intermark did back then. I'm so excited to see it.

A year ago, I decided to stop colouring my hair at all and to grow out my natural grey, so this feels like it has come at a funny time for me. I wonder if it can tempt me back. I rather like my crone era.

About photos - it's true I couldn't find one at all, until a search on Google Books for "Haircolor Shade Selector" showed me one scrap of scanned text in... ffs, Michael Wahl's In-store Marketing, the book I'd already borrowed once from archive.org!

Turns out, archive.org didn't pick up that text because THE PAGE IS SIDEWAYS, and I just never flipped to the back to see this fuzzy, black-and-white machine, surrounded by Ultress, Loving Care, Born Blonde and friends.

Curiously, even though this picture is shown in the back, Wahl makes absolutely NO mention of the Clairol computer trial in the main text, presumably because it failed. It's a nice picture though, and Clairol is a big name. I can see why he wanted it in there.

As for Lili's mention of the $8000 touchscreens Intermark started out with, I can back that up, too. Look at this photo of a Pantene machine, from Robert Konikow's Point of Purchase Design 2 -

Later

When the Clairol machine arrives, I'll take the program chip out and read it. The label says 134F, which looks like a checksum. If I add up every byte on the chip and get 134F, I'll know it's as Intermark left it in 1988. Somewhere in there, I should find all the questions it asked about hair and all the answers you could pick. I'll be able to run the program on my PC and play it like a game, which really excites me. I know, I'm strange.

It'll also tell me how an Intermark board is actually wired. Remember Jack's battery patent, those addresses? If this program uses the same addresses as Jack's patent, then the two were almost certainly built the same way, and the Clarion very probably was too. That's the closest I can get to the Clarion computer without owning one (you best believe the searches are saved, though).

I'll also be checking the board itself for any maker's marks or date codes. Somebody made it, after all. Maybe in New Jersey. Let's see.

In terms of running a game on it, that is going to be much harder. Rebuilding the computer is one challenge, but figuring out how to port something to it is going to be worse. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I do really like the idea of making my own original story, something like a make-up consultation gone weird. The Clarion Beauty Computer sorted customers into four colour groups. What if there was a fifth? A kind of Colour Out of Space scenario?

But then, while I'd have a lot of fun, that doesn't quite fit the brief. The impressive goal would be to take something recognisable - to squeeze a larger, existing classic onto this tiny thing. I like the idea of assigning a number to verbs, nouns and directions. You could create commands by making one or two selections on the keypad. Something like:

1	LOOK	5	OPEN
2	GO	6	CLOSE
3	TAKE	7	READ
4	DROP	8	EXAMINE

1	MAILBOX
2	FRONT DOOR

1	NORTH	5	NORTHEAST
2	SOUTH	6	NORTHWEST
3	EAST	7	SOUTHEAST
4	WEST	8	SOUTHWEST

Oh no, this is going to take me all year, isn't it?