Two days before its 1994-95 “Fall Winter Ready-to-Wear” show in Paris, the fashion house Chanel was missing a small but crucial element for the collection: the nail color for the models. That was when Heidi Morawetz, director of the house’s makeup-creation studio at the time and an expert on color, stepped in.

In Chanel’s studio kitchen, Ms. Morawetz and Dominique Moncourtois, the company’s international director of makeup creation, set about mixing red and black pigments until they came up with Rouge Noir, a blood-red varnish that would become a sensation throughout Europe (it sold out in Britain) and the United States.

“Rouge Noir became this ridiculous global phenomenon,” Anna-Marie Solowij, a British beauty journalist and co-founder of the online shopping site BeautyMART, said in an interview. “It was such an outrageous color.”

Known as Vamp in the United States, the nail polish was said by Peter Philips, who worked with Ms. Morawetz at Chanel, as well by as others in the makeup industry, to have been worn by Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Pulp Fiction” in 1994 — although others say that the shade Ms. Thurman wore, while similar, was created for the movie and was not the color Ms. Morawetz helped create.

