Recipe for confusion: changing the name of your beauty brand just as consumers were becoming aware of the fact that you even had a beauty brand to begin with. But then again, when you have aspirations of becoming a billion-dollar entity, as Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Whitney Rose has boldly proclaimed, shifting from the head-scratching, no-one-knows-what-it-means Iris + Beau to Wild Rose Beauty actually makes some semblance of sense. After all, there are only roughly a gazillion new skincare brands launched every day; better to trade …
A Disconnect with Americans’ Fascination with Wellbeing
It isn’t only Belinda, the beleaguered spa manager in HBO’s smash summer hit The White Lotus, who’s finding it exceedingly challenging to cater to the whims of stressed-out guests right now. According to findings of the 2021 ISPA U.S. Spa Industry Study, a recent survey of more than 2000 American spa owners, the total number of U.S. employees fell by more than 20 percent last year. While it would be easy to attribute that fall-off to an overall decline in revenues and spa visits during Covid – each of those two vectors plummeted by a hefty …
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Big Beauty Walks the Enviro-Talk. What About You?
As much as I love my “beat” – and I seriously, unequivocally love my beat – it’s pretty challenging to write about the beauty category and the environment without getting at least a little cynical. It’s also not always easy to predict when the cause du jour will morph into a truly meaningful, not-going-anywhere, full-on movement. Past as Prelude Tina Hedges was about to launch LOLI Beauty back in 2014. We were discussing brand positioning, and how to stand out in the dense forest that is the American skincare market. She kept circling back …
Is Makeup Dead?
Recently I received an email about Becca Cosmetics’ upcoming makeup launches, and I immediately emailed the brand publicist back: “I’m confused,” I wrote. “I thought Estée Lauder was shutting Becca down?” Covid Casualty After assuring me that that was in fact the case – that EL Companies had indeed pulled the plug on the 20-year-old brand, which it acquired in 2016 and was best-known for its Champagne Pop liquid highlighter - the publicist said that it’s business as usual until September, when Becca officially goes bye-bye. Why shutter a …
The Second (Celebrity) Coming
For her gyration-filled performance on New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest, a medley of tunes that included a decidedly off-brand riff on Aerosmith's "Dream On," Jennifer Lopez of course looked flawless, with a face full of artfully applied makeup and enough eyeshadow to fill a slew of multi-pan palettes. JLo au Naturel But it was during Lopez's #WashAway2020 virtual after-party that the true magic happened. In the opening bits of the half-hour bash, which was attended by a handful of gushing VIP fans and is available for replay on …
Classing Up the Joint
Although "nimble" and "agile" aren't two attributes I typically ascribe to the beauty industry, there's something that feels decidedly "fast on their feet" about the way Ulta Beauty and Sephora announced alliances with Target and Kohl's, respectively, just as the pandemic has upended American life as we know it. Surely those plans were percolating well before Covid struck, and we've got several months yet to go before either of these buzzed-about retail ventures actually gets unveiled to the beauty-besotted public. But for this generally …
Beauty’s Shifting M&A Landscape
As a beauty journalist who came of age in the 1990s, I was shocked and a little sad to see that Perricone MD, a proto "doctor brand" that made its debut during that era, recently changed hands for a mere $60M. When unicorns and "near-unicorns" (my very unofficial term for brands approaching the billion-dollar mark) like Morphe, Charlotte Tilbury and Drunk Elephant are fetching $2.2B, $1B and $845M, respectively, it's easy to feel like any majority stake or outright acquisition that doesn't reach at least the $100M mark has fallen …
DTC High Tech Beauty Solutions
You gotta hand it to L'Oréal for sheer transparency. In the wake of its mid-July announcement that it was pulling the plug on Clarisonic, it immediately began a digital fire sale, offloading all the iterations of the once-untouchable sonic cleansing brush on its website at a deep discount, along with the replacement heads and companion skincare. By August, the cyber shelves were wiped clean. "We are completely sold out on Clarisonic.com and the sale has now ended," reads a notice on the brand's home page. "Our sale continues in stores, so …