One minute I'm on TikTok watching a Hailey Bieber GRWM video. Seconds later, an Instagram post pops up on my phone about much-loved sustainable beauty brand Ren closing down.
Cries of “what will I do without the Ready Steady Glow Daily AHA Toner?” echoed around the GLAMOUR office as the team heard the news.
Personally, I'll mourn the loss of the Atlantic Kelp And Microalgae Anti-Fatigue Bath Oil with its heavenly scent of rosemary, geranium and cypress that came in the first-ever bottle made from reclaimed ocean plastic. It made ripples when it first launched in 2017.
But maybe in today's beauty climate, ripples aren't enough. You need a million social followers, waiting with baited breath for your next launch, which got me thinking… Although a viral celebrity video and the loss of a 25 year-old sustainable brand aren't directly related, is the all-consuming impact of celebrity beauty brands starting to feel very Black Mirror?
Celebrity beauty brands are catnip for Gen Z
Kylie Jenner set the stage for a celebrity beauty boom with her lip kits in 2015. Now every drop from Hailey's Rhode range reaches fever pitch. The same can be said about Cécred by Beyoncé, Fenty by Rihanna, Selena Gomez's brand Rare, or our current obsession – SZA Beauty.
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And it's not hard to see why. “Celebrity beauty brands are commanding more attention in the mainstream beauty space than heritage brands,” says Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trend forecaster Stylus, adding that sustainable brands like REN “can't keep up with the trends in the way that Rhode or Rare Beauty have.”
Celebrity beauty brands are also like catnip for Gen Z. This is a generation seeking community – and fan culture automatically gives you membership to a like-minded, ready-made beauty tribe. “Celebrity brands come with built-in buzz, social proof and emotional pull,” says Chelsea Mtada, a senior strategist at global PR firm the SEEN Group. “They speak to identity, trend, belonging and cultural relevance. In comparison, many sustainable brands are still leading with values, which just isn’t enough anymore.”
The singer’s Not Beauty joins a long list of celebrity beauty brands to try.
Better still, these celebrities create content around their own products on Instagram and TikTok. You're no longer just engaging with Rihanna from the back row of a stadium - you're centre stage as she promises that if you can't find a match to your skin tone among her 50 shades of Fenty foundation, she'll create one. Just. For. You.
The message when you buy into a celebrity's products? “We share this cute little beauty secret” - they even use the same low-fi camera footage as you and invite your feedback on products. “Always listening to all of you and your feedback and am working on a new Bitten Lip Tint!!!”, posts Victoria Beckham.
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So where does sustainable beauty fit in?
That's the million dollar question. It's not that we don't care about creating positive change for both people and planet anymore. But celebrity beauty has become the new status symbol and the It lip balm has replaced the It bag.
“When money is tight, people want something that makes them feel excited or seen," says Chelsea. "Gen Z is more drawn to celebrity beauty than sustainability because it feels more fun and emotionally rewarding. Sustainable brands can sometimes feel too serious or stuck in the past.”
They also lack beauty's new hype culture. When Rhode opened a pop-up in London last year, people queued around the block. The buzz on the day? Taking selfies with your branded Rhode water bottle, free food and the new friends you just made. It's the beauty equivalent of the Swifties phenomenon, where an influential fan base has an impact on popular culture and the economy (the UK economy alone was boosted by almost £1 billion during the Eras tour).
That's something sustainable brands aren't tapping into enough – but it's vital in a saturated beauty market where trends and innovation launch at breakneck speed. “Only a small handful of dedicated environmentalists and eco warriors will remain loyal to brands when sustainability is the main draw to the product,” says Lisa.
“Consumer demand and expectation is so high that products must perform, tick a trend box, and feature Instagram-worthy packaging to make it," she continues. "Even for celebrity brands like Rhode or Rare, the products have to perform, and they do. They wouldn’t have come this far with kudos alone.”
That said, with two billion tonnes of waste generated by the beauty industry every year, I feel like it's still a missed opportunity for many celebrity beauty brands not to be more vocal about sustainability.
To their credit, some are already quietly doing the 3R's – reduce, reuse, recycle. Fenty Beauty, for example, is partly made from recycled post-consumer materials; Victoria Beckham Beauty uses post-consumer or recycled materials and minimal plastic wherever possible, while in the US Rhode offers a complementary shipping label for you to ship back at least three empty products for recycling.
But with a celebrity's social capital and financial resources more can surely be done, especially to lead the way with new innovations that reduce our carbon foot print.
So can sustainable beauty brands fight back? According to Chelsea, they need to shift away from just talking about the merits of eco-friendly packaging and using wooly words like “clean”, which means different things to different people. Instead, the focus should be on building community and “creating joyful, sensory rituals”, especially in the body care category.
In other words, sustainable brands need to be more like Swifties in the beauty space – and we're here for it.
For more from Fiona Embleton, GLAMOUR's Associate Beauty Director, follow her on @fiembleton.
