It’s unusual for a cosmetics brand, especially a high end one like Clarins, to get involved in the branded game space. But the brand that brought the world the ’12 hours sleep in a tube’ that is Beauty Flash Balm has recently launched Spa Life to give Facebookers the chance to indulge their inner beautician.

Customers arrive at your shop for beauty treatments, and as owner of the shop it’s down to you to spend the money they pay you on new equipment and product supplies. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. If customers are kept waiting too long they get grumpy, and storm out of the spa and damage your reputation, which affects the number of future customers coming through the door. 

How does the brand fit? The branding here is subtle to the point of non-existence. Apart from the presence of Claire, a character dressed in a Clarins-red t-shirt who guides novice players through the early stages of the game there aren’t any visual references alluding to the brand. It isn’t until a few levels into the game that Clarins products become available to buy for the salon.

Grumpy customers leave the shop if you don't look after them

Is it any good? Compared to the similar Dirty Dancing fiasco, Spa Life’s slick game-play and clean flash-animation graphics could separate the games by a decade. It’s complicated, but not overwhelmingly so, and the difficulty rating increases quickly enough to hold your interest. Just when we thought we had everything under control, we were faced with a mass walk-out of unhappy customers who decided that they had waited too long for a pedicure. If you’re taking the game really seriously, you can purchase extra money with credit or debit card.

As your salon expands, you can recruit more staff.

Verdict: Brand fit: 6/10. Game-play 7/10. At the end of the day this just another Farmville clone, but given the success of the management genre in social gaming, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Clarins was obviously keen to keep the branding understated, but perhaps it has been a little too shy. A 2010 ISG survey revealed that the average social game player is a 43 year old woman, and Spa Life has been developed as a brand awareness and engagement tool, as opposed to a sales driver. As a pioneer in the cosmetics space, Clarins deserves recognition for embracing the brand game phenomenon.  As usual, it’s a shame that the potential audience for the game is limited to Facebook users. To date Spa Life records more than 128,000 monthly users.

Play Spa Life here.