Case Title: Renee Cosmetics Private Limited Vs. Ms. Rupali Sharma & Anr.
Case Number: C.O. (COMM.IPD-TM) 107/2025
Date of Judgment: 05 June 2026
Neutral Citation: 2026:DHC:5075
Court: High Court of Delhi at New Delhi
Hon'ble Judge: Tushar Rao Gedela, H.J.
In a significant trademark rectification matter, the Delhi High Court allowed a petition filed by Renee Cosmetics Private Limited seeking cancellation of the trademark registration for “GLASS SKIN” held by Ms. Rupali Sharma in Class 3 for cosmetic products. The dispute arose after the respondent asserted exclusive rights over the mark and objected to the petitioner’s use of the expression “GLASS SKIN” in relation to its skincare products.
Court held that the term “GLASS SKIN” is descriptive of a well-known beauty trend originating from the Korean skincare industry and directly conveys the intended purpose and end result of cosmetic products, namely achieving clear, luminous, glass-like skin. The Court noted that the expression was widely used across the cosmetics industry by several manufacturers and was also employed descriptively by the respondent herself. The Court further observed that the respondent failed to establish that the mark had acquired any secondary meaning or distinctiveness capable of warranting trademark protection.
Holding that the registration was wrongly remaining on the Trade Marks Register and attracted the bar under Section 9(1)(b) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, the Court directed the Registrar of Trade Marks to cancel and remove the registration of the mark “GLASS SKIN” from the Register within four weeks. The petition was accordingly allowed without any order as to costs.
[Disclaimer: Readers are advised not treat this as a substitute for legal advise as it may contain errors in perception,interpretation and presentation of facts and law.]
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GLASS SKIN Cannot Be Anyone's Exclusive Property: Delhi High Court Cancels Trademark Registration of a Global Beauty Trend Term
Introduction
In the rapidly expanding world of beauty and cosmetics, trends travel fast — from Korean skincare studios to Instagram feeds in India, and from fashion articles in 2017 to product labels in every pharmacy and e-commerce platform by 2020. When a term that describes a worldwide beauty phenomenon is registered as a trademark by a single individual, and that registration is then used to force a major cosmetics company off an e-commerce platform, a fundamental question of trademark law arises: can anyone claim exclusive ownership of a word that belongs to the entire industry?
This is precisely the question that arose in the case decided by the High Court of Delhi on 5 June 2026, in which Renee Cosmetics Private Limited — a well-known Indian cosmetics brand — challenged the trademark registration of the phrase GLASS SKIN in Class-03, which covers non-medicated cosmetics and toiletry preparations. The respondent, an individual who had registered the mark in May 2019 on a "proposed to be used" basis, had used that registration to get the petitioner's products delisted from Amazon and to assert monopoly over a term that was already a globally recognised beauty trend well before the registration was even filed. The case goes to the heart of what makes a mark registrable — and why descriptive words that everyone in an industry uses to describe the nature and purpose of their goods cannot be privatised.
Factual and Procedural Background
Renee Cosmetics Private Limited was incorporated on 18 October 2019 and launched its brand RENEE Cosmetics. At some point, the company began selling cosmetic products including a sunscreen product marketed under the name RENEE GLASS SKIN SPF 50. The company applied for registration of this composite mark on 28 January 2025 in Class-03.
Before examining the petitioner's story further, it is necessary to understand what had happened in 2019. An individual, Ms. Rupali Sharma, the respondent no. 1 in this case, had filed a trademark application bearing number 4164051 seeking registration of the mark GLASS SKIN in Class-03 on 2 May 2019 on a "proposed to be used" basis — meaning she had not actually been using the mark in commerce when she applied for it. Remarkably, the Trade Marks Registry granted her a registration certificate bearing number 2825917 in respect of the mark GLASS SKIN in Class-03 on the very same date, 2 May 2019. The registration covered a wide range of goods including non-medicated cosmetics and toiletry preparations, non-medicated dentifrices, perfumery, essential oils, bleaching preparations and substances for laundry use, and cleaning, polishing, scouring and abrasive preparations.
On 20 March 2025, the respondent issued a legal notice to the petitioner alleging that the petitioner was infringing her registered trademark GLASS SKIN. The petitioner replied on 7 April 2025, denying all allegations of infringement and simultaneously contesting the registration by asserting that the term GLASS SKIN is descriptive of the goods and therefore incapable of registration. The dispute then escalated in a practical and commercially damaging way: on 3 October 2025, the petitioner received a communication from Amazon — the e-commerce platform — informing it that its product listing had been removed from the platform on account of the respondent's trademark registration in the mark GLASS SKIN.
This commercial harm — being delisted from Amazon on the basis of a registration that the petitioner considered legally invalid — prompted the filing of two proceedings simultaneously: a trademark rectification petition C.O.(COMM.IPD-TM) 107/2025 under Sections 47 and 57 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, seeking cancellation of the GLASS SKIN registration, and a civil suit CS(COMM) 888/2025 for other reliefs. The judgment was reserved on 20 May 2026 and delivered on 5 June 2026.
The Dispute
The legal and commercial dispute in this case revolves entirely around one question: is GLASS SKIN a descriptive term that describes the kind and intended purpose of cosmetic goods, or is it a suggestive term that requires some degree of consumer imagination to connect with the product's purpose, thereby making it distinctive and registrable?
The petitioner's position was categorical: GLASS SKIN is a globally recognised Korean beauty trend term that originated around 2017, has been in widespread use by manufacturers and the trade across the world since that time, and directly and immediately conveys to any consumer of cosmetic products the intended purpose and end result of using such a product — namely, skin that looks luminous, clear, and transparent like glass. Industry giants including Lakme, Nivea, Garnier, Vaseline, L'Oreal, Body Shop, Nykaa, Mamaearth, and others all use the term descriptively in their marketing, product descriptions, and articles. Given this universal descriptive usage, the term cannot be monopolised by any one party and its registration is contrary to Sections 9(1)(a) and 9(1)(b) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, which prohibit registration of marks that are devoid of distinctive character or that describe the kind or intended purpose of the goods.
The respondent's position was equally firm in the opposite direction: the mark GLASS SKIN is not descriptive but suggestive, because a consumer confronted with this phrase on a cosmetic product would need to exercise imagination to understand what the product does — it does not state any ingredient, formulation, method, or essential characteristic of the product. The respondent also argued that the petitioner could not challenge the mark as descriptive since the petitioner itself had applied for registration of RENEE GLASS SKIN SPF 50, which incorporates the very phrase. Additionally, the respondent had built its own business under the mark since 2019, with invoices from that year onwards, and had achieved a degree of market recognition, which the petitioner had ignored for six years before filing the petition.
Reasoning and Analysis of the Court
The court began its analysis by setting out the hierarchy of trademark protection. At the top are arbitrary or invented marks — words with no connection to the goods they represent — which receive the strongest protection. Next come suggestive marks — words that hint at the qualities of the goods but require some imagination to make the connection. Below these are descriptive marks — words that directly describe the characteristics, purpose, or end result of the goods — which receive very limited protection and cannot be registered unless they have acquired a "secondary meaning" through long and intensive use. At the very bottom are generic marks, which receive no trademark protection at all.
To determine which category GLASS SKIN falls into, the court drew extensively from McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition, the leading treatise on the subject internationally. From paragraph 11.16 of McCarthy, the court extracted the definition of a descriptive mark as one that directly and immediately conveys knowledge of the characteristics of a product or service. Crucially, a mark is descriptive if it describes the intended purpose, function or use of the goods, or the end effect upon the user. It is also relevant that a term need only describe a single significant quality or feature of the goods to be classified as descriptive. From paragraph 11.69 of McCarthy, the court drew the principle that one of the most useful tests for distinguishing descriptive from suggestive marks is to look at whether other sellers in the same industry are in fact using the term to describe their goods or services. If they are, an inference of descriptiveness can be drawn. The proliferation of a term's use across an industry tends to diminish its ability to identify any single source, confirming its descriptive character.
Applying these principles to the facts, the court found the evidence against registrability to be overwhelming. Articles published as far back as 24 September 2017 in the Hindustan Times described glass skin as the idea of transparent and translucent skin — a Korean beauty goal centred on a radiant, flawless complexion. Articles in Allure magazine from October 2017 described it as the "fancy name for clear, luminous, seemingly transparent skin." Major global brands — Nykaa, Garnier, Nivea, Lakme, L'Oreal, and Mamaearth — all used the term in marketing materials and product descriptions in a purely descriptive manner, conveying to consumers that use of the product would result in skin like glass. The court placed specific emphasis on the fact that the respondent no. 1's own website from 2019 described Glass Skin as "the most popular Korean beauty technique to get illuminating, flawless and transparent skin like glass" — a description that uses the term in precisely the descriptive sense that McCarthy identifies as the hallmark of a non-distinctive mark.
This was the conclusive point. The respondent herself, in her own promotional content, used GLASS SKIN not as a badge of origin — not as a signal telling consumers that this product comes from Ms. Rupali Sharma's business — but as a description of what the product would do and what result it would achieve. This is exactly the kind of self-defeating use that demonstrates a mark is not functioning as a trademark at all, but merely as a description. The court concluded that GLASS SKIN, assessed through both paragraphs 11.16 and 11.69 of McCarthy, is unambiguously a descriptive mark.
The court then addressed and rejected the respondent's "imagination test" argument. The respondent had argued that a consumer reading GLASS SKIN on a cosmetic product would need to use imagination to understand its purpose — since the mark does not name any ingredient, formulation, or method — and therefore the mark is suggestive rather than descriptive. The court found this argument attractive in the abstract but wholly unpersuasive in context. The products of both parties are cosmetics in Class-03, intended for skin care. In that context, when a consumer sees the words GLASS SKIN on a skin care product, there is absolutely no imagination required to understand the intended purpose and end result. The term immediately and directly conveys the outcome the product promises: skin that looks like glass. Given the worldwide popularity of the Korean beauty glass skin trend — which had been widely reported in Indian media from September 2017 — the imagination test has no room to operate. The question is not whether the mark is suggestive in the abstract, but whether it is descriptive in relation to the specific goods for which it is registered. Here, the connection is immediate and obvious.
On the approbate-reprobate argument — that the petitioner could not call GLASS SKIN descriptive while having itself applied for RENEE GLASS SKIN SPF 50 — the court disposed of this contention neatly. The petitioner was using GLASS SKIN not as a standalone distinctive mark but as part of a composite expression together with the distinctively registered brand name RENEE and the technical specification SPF 50. The court clarified that using a descriptive term as part of a composite mark does not amount to claiming exclusive rights in the descriptive component, nor does it prevent a party from contesting the registrability of that descriptive component when claimed as a standalone mark by someone else.
On the secondary meaning argument — the principle that even a descriptive mark can become registrable if it has been used so extensively and exclusively that consumers have come to associate it with a single source — the court found a complete absence of evidence on the part of the respondent. No sales figures of any significance, no advertising expenditure data, no consumer surveys, no evidence of the kind that would demonstrate that the public has come to associate GLASS SKIN specifically and exclusively with the respondent's products — nothing. The respondent had some invoices from 2019 onwards but nothing that came remotely close to establishing secondary meaning. Since a descriptive term can only survive as a trademark if secondary meaning is proved, and since no such proof existed, the registration could not be sustained.
On the applicable provision of law, the court found that Section 47 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 was not the right vehicle because the respondent had placed some invoices on record showing commercial use, which took care of the bona fide use and bona fide intention elements that Section 47 looks at. However, Section 57(2) of the Act — which allows the court to direct removal of a mark that was entered in the Register without sufficient cause or that wrongly remains on the Register — was found to be directly applicable. Since GLASS SKIN ought never to have been registered given its descriptive character and its prohibition under Section 9(1)(b) of the Act, its continued presence in the Register was without sufficient cause and constituted a wrongful entry. The court also applied Section 9(1)(b), which prohibits registration of marks that serve in trade to designate the kind, quality, intended purpose, or other characteristics of the goods, and found this prohibition to be clearly attracted by the term GLASS SKIN in the context of Class-03 cosmetic goods.
The judgments cited by the parties included the Supreme Court judgment in Pernod Ricard India Private Limited & Anr. v. Karanveer Singh Chhabra, (2025) SCC OnLine SC 1701, and the Division Bench of the Delhi High Court in Marico Limited v. Agro Tech Foods Limited, (2010) SCC OnLine Del 3806 — both cited by the petitioner on the point of descriptiveness and secondary meaning. The respondent relied on the Supreme Court in T.V. Venugopal v. Ushodaya Enterprises Ltd. & Anr., Civil Appeal Nos. 6314-15 of 2001, decided on 3 March 2011, as well as coordinate bench decisions in Descriptive Health Solutions Private Limited v. Registrar of Trade Marks, C.A.(COMM.IPD-TM) 133/2022 dated 8 July 2022, and Shivani Vig Kapoor and Rushi Tiwari Makker v. Registrar of Trademarks, C.A.(COMM.IPD-TM) 88/2022 dated 12 December 2023, and US Court of Appeals decisions in Xtreme Lashes, LLC v. Xtended Beauty, Inc (No. 08-20578) and OBX-Stock, Inc v. Bicast, Inc (Nos. 06-1769 and 06-1887). The court, however, found that since the outcome was determinable on the facts and the material on record by applying McCarthy's well-established principles, it was not necessary to go into the specific ratios of these case laws.
Final Decision of the Court
The rectification petition was allowed. The Registrar of Trade Marks was directed to cancel the registration of the mark GLASS SKIN granted in favour of the respondent vide certificate number 2825917 dated 2 May 2019 under Class-03. The Registrar was further directed to remove and rectify the registration from the Register of Trade Marks within four weeks from the date of receipt of the order. No order as to costs was made. The civil suit CS(COMM) 888/2025 was directed to be listed before the Joint Registrar on the date already fixed, i.e. 13 October 2026, in view of the judgment passed in the cancellation petition.
Points of Law Settled in the Case
This judgment makes several significant contributions to Indian trademark law, particularly in the context of the beauty and cosmetics industry and in the broader realm of descriptive mark jurisprudence. It firmly holds that a globally recognised beauty trend term that directly describes the end result or intended purpose of cosmetic products is a descriptive mark incapable of registration under Section 9(1)(b) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, regardless of when it was applied for or by whom.
The judgment confirms that the correct test for distinguishing descriptive from suggestive marks is not merely the imagination test — whether the consumer needs some imagination to connect the mark with the product — but also, critically, how the term is actually used by other stakeholders in the same industry. If major players in an industry universally use a term to describe their goods, that widespread descriptive use is powerful evidence that the term is not a source identifier but a description. McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition, paragraphs 11.16 and 11.69, are adopted by the Delhi High Court as authoritative guidance on this point.
The judgment also establishes that where a mark owner uses its own registered mark in a descriptive manner on its own website and in its own product descriptions — explaining what the mark means and what it achieves — this constitutes strong evidence that the mark is not functioning as a trademark at all. A mark cannot simultaneously be used to describe a product's purpose and claim exclusivity as a source identifier.
On secondary meaning, the judgment reaffirms that a descriptive mark can only survive if the registrant proves that through extensive and continuous use over time, consumers have come to associate the mark specifically with a single commercial source. Mere possession of invoices and some commercial activity is not enough. In the absence of substantial evidence of secondary meaning — sales figures, advertising data, consumer recognition — a descriptive mark cannot be defended.
The judgment further clarifies the distinction between Section 47 and Section 57(2) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 in the context of cancellation petitions, holding that where a mark has been registered in violation of the absolute grounds for refusal under Section 9, Section 57(2) provides the appropriate remedy to remove such an entry as one made without sufficient cause.
Case Details
Title: Renee Cosmetics Private Limited v. Ms. Rupali Sharma & Anr.
Date of Judgment: 5 June 2026
Case Numbers: C.O.(COMM.IPD-TM) 107/2025 & I.A. 11431/2025 and CS(COMM) 888/2025, I.A. 20783/2025 & I.A. 7448/2026
Neutral Citation: 2026:DHC:5075
Name of Court: High Court of Delhi at New Delhi
Name of Hon'ble Judge: Hon'ble Mr. Justice Tushar Rao Gedela
Disclaimer: Readers are advised not to treat this as a substitute for legal advice as it may contain errors in perception, interpretation, and presentation.
Written By: Advocate Ajay Amitabh Suman, IP Adjutor [Patent and Trademark Attorney], High Court of Delhi
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Head Note
Facts: The respondent registered the mark GLASS SKIN in Class-03 for cosmetic goods in May 2019 on a "proposed to be used" basis. The petitioner, a cosmetics company using the term as part of its composite mark RENEE GLASS SKIN SPF 50, was delisted from Amazon on account of the respondent's registration, prompting it to file a rectification petition under Sections 47 and 57 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. The petitioner contended that GLASS SKIN is a globally recognised Korean beauty trend term used descriptively by all major cosmetics manufacturers including Lakme, Nivea, Garnier, L'Oreal, and Mamaearth, and is incapable of registration under Section 9(1)(b) of the Act. The respondent argued the mark is suggestive, not descriptive, requiring consumer imagination to connect it with the product.
Decision: The Delhi High Court allowed the petition under Section 57(2) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, holding that GLASS SKIN is a descriptive mark that directly describes the kind and intended purpose of cosmetic goods, that the respondent herself used it descriptively on her own website, that major industry players universally use it descriptively, that no secondary meaning was established, and that the registration was entered without sufficient cause in violation of Section 9(1)(b). The Registrar of Trade Marks was directed to cancel and remove the registration within four weeks.
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