美妆行业“眼膜门”事件引发对品牌创新能力的质疑

Last week, Fenty, Glow Recipe, and Huda Beauty announced near-identical product launches within days of one another: undereye masks presented in the same container with a novel packaging mechanism that slices a fresh eye patch when dispensed. The coincidence sparked an uproar on social media, quickly dubbed “Eye Patch Gate”.

While the brands poked fun at the coincidence on social media, it seemed to confirm what many suspected happened behind the scenes of the beauty industry: that brands touting product innovation order packaging, ingredients and even formulas from the same manufacturers but put their label over it.

Consumers today are savvier and more knowledgeable than ever before, and they are increasingly demanding. They want to see meaningful results, and they understand value. Unstable geopolitical conditions and unceasing inflation has them sharper, more on edge, more likely to turn on a brand they feel isn’t acting authentically or in their best interests. Consumers are becoming more attuned to, and fatigued by, the frenetic pace of new product launches. Terms like “deinfluencing” and “underconsumption core” are trending on TikTok.

It’s not as bleak as it sounds. McKinsey’s latest data says the beauty industry is still on track to grow 5% year-on-year through 2030. But in order to stay competitive in a more discerning consumer landscape, brands will need to get serious about their approach to innovation.

“There is a group of beauty consumers now who really understand how the industry works,” says Sam Cheow, CEO of Stealth Advisory & Brands, who previously helped lead product development and innovation at L’Oreal and Estée Lauder. “They know about contract manufacturing, they follow Korean launches, they recognize packaging suppliers, and that group tends to drive the conversation for everyone else.”

“Words like ‘first’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘proprietary’ carry a lot more risk now,” Cheow says. “You may have a consumer sitting at home who knows what launched in Seoul before someone on your marketing team does.”

With Eye Patch Gate, “people had their spidey senses up”, says Charlotte Palermino, chief brand officer and co-founder of Dieux Skin. “I’m not seeing any differentiated science in the products, and I don’t know how [the single-dispenser system] is better than what is currently on the market, which is already using less waste.”

The beauty industry has long relied on marketing for growth — spending less on research and development (R&D) than they do celebrity ambassadors, flashy packaging and expensive fragrances. But, as Eye Patch Gate demonstrated, the old way of doing things doesn’t seem to be as effective anymore.

“Consumers are super knowledgeable. They know how to read ingredient and concentration levels, and they know how to evaluate technology,” says Eran Rosman, co-founder and CEO of Noon Aesthetics, a skincare brand that uses patented technology to develop non-irritating formulas at clinical concentrations for the consumer market. “You can’t survive, let alone succeed, if you aren’t innovative.”

Standing out in a crowded market

Noon, which launched in the US in 2020, spent four years in R&D before releasing its first product. The brand holds three patents, including its signature DermShield technology that allows skincare brands to increase the concentration of active ingredients in a product without typical side effects like irritation and redness. Noon’s Lacto product line, for instance, uses a 15% concentration of lactic acid — a level of potency that typically can only be accessed in a doctor’s office or medspa. Rosman says all those years in the lab allowed them to bring a truly unique product to market.

It’s too easy for brands to get duped these days, says Palermino, who stresses the importance of hiring in-house cosmetic chemists who can create tailored proprietary formulas. “If you don’t have that at your company, you don’t own your R&D,” she adds.

Dr. Joshua Britton, founder and CEO of Debut, a biotech company that harnesses AI to develop novel skincare ingredients, predicts that brands will need to hire more PhD-level scientists in the coming years in order to stay competitive — whether that’s in-house or by hiring a contract manufacturer.

“Brands are just reusing the same old ingredients and just changing the marketing language, which is not sitting well with the consumer,” Britton says. “There’s been no innovation in beauty since Vitamin C. It’s ridiculous, especially with all this innate understanding of what the consumer needs.”

Debut acts as a high-tech contract manufacturer for beauty brands, partnering with them to develop novel patented ingredients backed by the latest scientific innovations. This year, Image Skincare released its first product formulated with EDL, a patented bioactive skin-tightening ingredient developed in-house. Debut leveraged the latest breakthroughs in AI-powered genomic mapping to develop EDL, which delivered a 100% fine-line improvement rate in a 12-week clinical study.

While it’s much easier for a big company to spend money on R&D than a bootstrapped startup, smaller companies do have other advantages.

“They move quickly. They pick up cultural shifts faster. They’re often closer to the community and less afraid to respond to a behavior before they have five years of data proving it exists,” says Cheow.

Palermino says that some of the most innovative brands on the market today are indies led by professional makeup artists, such as Lisa Eldridge Beauty, Violette, and Kjh.brand.

“It’s because they’re relentless about solving a problem they had while they were working,” she says, citing a new tubing mascara from makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes’s Kjh.brand as an example. Tubing mascaras aren’t necessarily new, but the specific product was born out of Hughes’s frustration with other formulas.

“At the end of the day, even if that tubing technology can be duped — like, my Forever Eye Masks were duped over and over — she’s still going to be first to market with it, and she’s going to market it the best,” Hughes says. “She’s going to capture more market share.”