Why are celebrities so obsessed with launching beauty brands?
Nowadays, it seems like a different celebrity is launching a beauty line every day.
We’re besieged by ads for celebrity-branded products that flaunt their A-list credentials. And with the latest announcement of Brad Pitt’s luxury skincare line, Le Domaine, the trend shows no sign of slowing down.
“Do we really need to be offered hundreds of celebrities’ night-time moisturizers that are all basically the same product?
While the phenomenon largely started with Kylie Jenner and Rhianna, seemingly everyone—well, everyone with more money and time than they know what to do with—is developing their own beauty brand. That’s leading to an incredibly oversaturated market dominated by celebrities, who are all pitching products that contain pretty similar ingredients.
Do we really need to be offered hundreds of celebrities’ night-time moisturizers that are all basically the same product? Oftentimes, the only difference is whose face is on the packaging. And what about the impact on the environment from all that product redundancy?
This also begs the question: what’s in it for the celebrities? Don’t these people already have a copious amount of wealth and resources? And is all that elite branding matched by elite science in product development?
Genuine intentions or vanity project?
In a society that prioritizes wealth and stature, it appears many celebrities are in pursuit of the latter. They don’t want to be only celebrities; they want to be budding entrepreneurs, too. They’re in pursuit of aalllll the accolades. The projects often seem pretty self-serving.
Yet some celebrities seemingly do enter the beauty game with good intentions: take Rhianna, who launched Fenty to overcome the lack of diversity in beauty products and to develop concealers that impeccably matched skin tones for people of all shades.
“Yet some celebrities seemingly do enter the beauty game with good intentions: take Rhianna,Or world-class tennis champion Naomi OSaka.”
Or take world-class tennis champion Naomi OSaka, who launched her own sun-focused beauty brand KINLÒ. She developed an SPF-focused skincare line targeted at people of color, aiming to promote the message that darker-skinned people must still be wary of skin cancer and be mindful of their sun exposure. (We love you, Naomi).
But a multitude of celebrities only attach the proverbial buzzwords to their products—sustainable, diverse, inclusive—as a marketing ploy. They know the younger generations are seeking out ethical products, and celebrities leverage these keywords to separate their brand from all those other unethical, late-capitalist brands that are like, killing the environment or using child labor or whatever.
Ultrawealthy celebrities are thereby co-opting the language of social justice and equality while doing little to promote it: Brad Pitt’s line is under fire, for instance, for touting its credentials as genderless skincare, while charging $380 for a grape-based face serum. Great, so now only the ultrawealthy can supersede the gender binary, apparently.
No one’s buying your false claims of inclusivity, Brad.
Not another brand
After the release of Pitt’s line, a group of well-known beauty industry professionals publicized an open letter pleading for “not another celebrity brand.”
The letter, in part, reads:
"Over the past few years, it seems that every celebrity feels like they can waltz into the industry that we have worked in our whole careers and gain awareness overnight.
You, dear celebrities, have no experience in this industry. You never interned in this industry or started as a low-level employee. You will never have to haul your day’s orders to the post office or learn to code your own site. But you will get recognition because you are a celebrity.
We would prefer to continue enjoying your movies without thinking of you as yet ‘another buzzy but ineffectual celebrity beauty brand.”
Oof. Harsh, but honest. These workers raise valid points: celebrities have no experience in the industry, and they’re displacing people who’ve worked their whole lives in it. The celebrities likely know nothing about formulating ingredients or the science of skin. Maybe they pay people who do. But then why not tack your product onto an existing brand?
“the carbon footprint of launching an international beauty brand can’t be insignificant, to say the least.”
Yet these celebrities often choose to launch brands from scratch as opposed to partnering with established brands. And well, the carbon footprint of launching an international beauty brand can’t be insignificant, to say the least. You have to source products, develop supply chains, create marketing materials, design and launch advertising campaigns, build infrastructure, etc. and all of this must be done on a massive scale!
That’s why it’s hard to believe celebrities have genuine intentions when claiming an interest in developing sustainable products; it seems an awful lot like greenwashing, which involves falsely promoting your environmental credentials to get good publicity.
Take Hailey Bieber’s Rhode brand, which touts: "Minimal skincare, minimal footprint.” But this connects back to the underlying question of the impact of launching such brands in the first place—that footprint is definitely not minimal. If Bieber’s sustainability ideals were really genuine, would she bother launching the brand at all? That recyclable packaging is not a panacea for sustainability. (She probably wouldn’t have ripped off the name, either).
The underlying idea of sustainable beauty is that less is more. We don’t need more of the same products or brands; we need to reduce our consumption and work with what we already have. That applies to all industries, not just skincare.
It seems like we’re always in pursuit of the latest new product, and therein lies the problem. Can’t we be happy with the 719 other retinol serums available that all have the same active ingredients? Why must there always be one more?
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