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“Does anyone think Brad Pitt cares about skin care?”
That was Charlotte Palermino’s reaction to the actor’s announcement last month that, like many of his fellow celebrities (Idris and Sabrina Elba, Ciara, Scarlett Johansson, just to name a few), he had launched his own skin care line. the skin, Le Domaine. The “genderless” collection includes an $80 cleanser, $320 cream and $385 serum.
Palermino, a New York City esthetician and co-founder of skincare company Dieux, was still in shock over the announcement less than 24 hours before Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker also unveiled a line of “expensive” skincare, Barker. Wellness.
“It was a double whammy. The timing was very unfortunate for both of them. [Pitt and Barker]”, said Claire McCormack, editor of Beauty Independent. “It really took a nosedive for me and a lot of people I know.”
The back-to-back launches seem to have sparked an outright rebellion within the beauty industry: brand founders, skincare content creators, and their devoted followers have made it clear that they’re fed up with the beauty brands of the celebrities.
Winnie Awa, founder of personalized hair advice platform Carra, joined five other London-based beauty brand founders to issue “An Open Letter to Brad Pitt” in the hope that others would join them. “In recent years, it seems like every celebrity feels like they can enter the industry we’ve worked in for our entire career and gain overnight awareness of what we’re fighting for,” the letter reads, in part. “If this industry is an industry you really want to be a part of, then…invest in early-stage founders who are already in the arena, creating innovative solutions to make the industry more inclusive, sustainable and environmentally friendly.” ambient”.
“We’ve had so many new celebrity brands in such a short amount of time that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Awa, who wants celebrities to stop creating beauty brands just because they can. “Why not collaborate with the people who are doing the work? Why not invest in some of these innovative independent brands that can’t get financing?
Skin care is big business. US sales revenue for prestige skincare was $6.3 billion in 2021, according to market research firm NPD. But while famous brands enjoy instant notoriety and a head start in capturing that first sale, the products must work to keep consumers coming back, said Larissa Jensen, beauty industry adviser at NPD. “Creating a loyal consumer is what will drive long-term success.”
Skincare became huge during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, Palermino said, because people were looking at themselves on Zoom calls all day and watching skincare content on TikTok and Instagram. “I think [celebrities’] business advisors came to them with offers, showing them the skin care market’s explosive growth and potential revenue,” and subsequently capitalized on the increased interest, Palermino said. Now, stars like former talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and “Stranger Things” teen Millie Bobby Brown are among an expanding class of big names who have their own skincare lines.
Launched in 2017, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty may not have been the first celebrity-led beauty brand, McCormack said, but it may have started the recent “tsunami.” “Fenty was very well executed and [Rihanna] he was so involved in being the face of the brand that he did very well.” That partly laid the groundwork for other stars to think they could do it, too, he added.
But for Kevin James Bennett, a cosmetics developer and makeup artist, there’s only one way to describe the proliferation: “a money grab.” Bennett made headlines in August when he called out Kylie Jenner over a photo she shared on Instagram with her 370 million followers of her posing in a busy manufacturing lab with her hair down and no gloves or mask. (Jenner responded to her claims, saying the photos weren’t actually taken in a manufacturing plant; Bennett countered that she was standing on a platform looking at a homogenizing kettle of skincare products in one of the images.)
Bennett said he believes celebrities like Jenner often get away with skirting industry regulations, including making unsubstantiated marketing claims: “Check out Kate Moss’ new line. Her brand says her signature extract can turn back the clock 20 years in four weeks. Really? Where are the clinics?
The actual differences between some of these famous skincare brands can be nearly indistinguishable, according to Lalita Iyer, a cosmetic chemist and product formulator. They’re made by the same contract manufacturers who “take one of their stock formulations and tweak it slightly, like adding point one percent fairy dust [marketing ingredients] and call it a new brand,” he said.
There are also concerns about many of these brands’ sustainability claims, said Ann Oh, a beauty critic and content creator known as Minsooky on social media. Kim Kardashian’s brand SKKN, for example, boasts of “sustainability” and “eco-friendly materials” in its initial press release. But “if you compare the actual products to the refills, it’s literally just an extra container that surrounds the refill, which creates more plastic waste, in my opinion, not less,” Oh said. “Brad Pitt’s Le Domaine brand sells refills, but they are literally the same product sold without a cap.”
Press materials from Le Domaine, which is co-owned by winemaker Marc Perrin, who shares ownership of Pitt’s Château Miraval, a French estate and vineyard, also state that the brand has found ways to “recycle” grape pomace, the final product of the winemaking process. However, Jason Ruppert, vigneron for Ardure Wines in California, said the pomace usually goes to a compost management facility where it is turned into soil, or used for chicken feed or the vineyard’s own compost, which helps with regeneration the following year. In other words, the pomace does not need to be “recycled”.
Vi Lai, a skincare content creator known on TikTok as @whatsonvisface, believes many celebrity founders underestimate today’s beauty consumer. “They’re so out of touch because they don’t take into account how much more educated and knowledgeable the average consumer of skin care products is these days,” she said. “They think they can put their name on a product line and everyone will buy it.”
A bigger problem, according to Lai, is the lack of transparency about cosmetic surgeries and other treatments that celebrities who sell skin care products may have undergone. She said it’s “harmful” if celebrities “deny they’ve had Botox and plastic surgery” and then sell products that suggest fans will get similar results, all while her own Instagram pages are littered with “heavily edited photos.” “.
Tiara Willis, esthetician and content creator, believes that these brands have a specific audience. “Celebrity skincare is more about creating products for their fans than trying to innovate,” she said. “I just don’t see their intention as adding anything of value to the skincare community.”
However, there are outliers: Willis, Palermino and Lai all mentioned that model Hailey Bieber’s Rhode skincare line seemed a cut above the rest. Bieber, who launched her brand in June, reached out to Lai and other skincare creators (including Palermino) two years ago for advice. “She came off as very well researched and the skincare line was a real passion project,” said Lai, who also praised Bieber for the diversity and knowledge base of her team.
Lai and Palermino also cited Pharrell Williams’ Humanrace skincare line, which he launched with his longtime dermatologist Elena Jones in 2020, as an exception. of the skin,” Palermino said. “It’s just that when you’re a celebrity coming out of nowhere with a skincare line, there seems to be little respect for people’s intelligence.”
Although Pitt did an interview with British Vogue about Le Domaine and appears in promotional photos, co-owner Perrin said they don’t see their new venture “as a celebrity brand”. “I know it might seem strange when you have a celebrity on board, but we’ve been working together for over 10 years and we’re willing to build something for the long haul,” he said.
Perrin said he was “confused” by the negative reactions he saw on social media and in the press. “These are people who have never tried the products or seen them,” he noted. Still, the negative attention doesn’t seem to be affecting Le Domaine’s results. “We were very impressed to have done in two days what we had planned for three months,” Perrin said. They have plans to launch a collection of essentials next year, which will be “more accessible in price.”
Janna Mandell is a journalist from San Francisco who covers the beauty industry.
Source: news.google.com