Who would even buy that?

Is beauty a free market?

This is a question I find looming in my head very often as I scroll through TikTok Shop, Instagram, Sephora, Ulta, and basically any other platform meant to sell “beauty” products, but instead selling vanity fillers. With the recent Patrick Ta launch, which was criticized not only for allegedly ripping the idea off of a minority makeup artist’s popularized technique, although one which has existed in the industry in a dialed-down fashion for a while, but furthermore, facing criticism for its completely unnecessary and untimely nature, the question feels even more relevant.

While popular beauty content creators keep pushing out reviews, criticisms, comparisons, and any form of content they can basically make on the newest “jelly blush” or the new flavor of an already existing product, companies start controlling the narrative, and this poses the ultimate question: “is beauty a free market?”; Flowery marketing campaigns and extensive influencer partnerships ensure that a product will sell, and thus there must be a “natural market” of people consuming these products. And yet, it is hard for me to believe that anybody is reaching for their Grinch-themed eyeshadow palette on the daily. McKinsey reported that the global beauty market generated about $430 billion in revenue in 2022, and when a market that large continues to rely on the same cycle of viral novelty, limited drops, influencer reviews, and hyper-specific product “needs,” it becomes hard to separate consumer demand from consumer training.

It is clear that persuading people has taken a bigger part in the research and development process of a product than finding a need, made obvious by the lowest-performing product needing the highest social cachet in its marketing strategy in order to get the product to sell. The new “transition concealers” by Patrick Ta, as an example, are simply just concealer and blush blended together, two products which every beauty consumer probably has in their collection already, and sold in the luxury category inherently because of their $30 plus price. They are furthermore marked up when looking at the products that are meant to be bought alongside the transition concealer in order to “complete the look” and deplete your bank account.

This is especially clear in the Patrick Ta and Painted by Esther situation, where the conversation was not simply about whether blush blending existed before, because it did, but about how a technique popularized online by a smaller Black makeup artist can become packaged, named, and sold back to the same audience that helped make it desirable.

So, what is our solution? While many consumers look to popular makeup artist collections in order to get a better understanding of exactly what product works and what does not, it is the same big makeup artists who have now taken the initiative to start their own makeup brands, adding or disqualifying credibility in the process of only marketing their own product depending upon the audience. It is true, oftentimes makeup products produced by credited makeup artists are better formulated naturally due to the higher budget and inherent presence of “the makeup artist” in the modern day as a brand and a marketing channel, not just a career. This is also why Painted by Esther’s response to the controversy felt so sharp when she said, “what you will not belittle is my influence,” because in the current beauty economy, influence is not just attention. It is labor, taste-making, and sometimes even the product brief before a product officially exists.

As a personal longtime consumer of beauty, I am fatigued from the amount of filters on Sephora when looking for a product, or every single makeup review video being in some form monetized. Even that fatigue is not imagined. The Federal Trade Commission says influencers should clearly disclose material relationships with brands, while a Princeton-led study on affiliate marketing disclosures found that only about 10 percent of affiliate content on YouTube and Pinterest contained any disclosure at all. That means the consumer is often watching a review, a recommendation, and a sales channel collapse into the same piece of content without always being told which is which.

My personal solution to this problem is looking to personalities for whom applying and reviewing makeup, which is a product of our oversaturated market, is like a game. Trixie Mattel, the drag queen and business conglomerate, is one of my favorite sources for honest makeup advice. Despite owning her own brand, which has been accredited by normal consumers and heavy makeup wearers such as drag queens alike, Trixie Mattel does not fail to highlight the wins of actually relevant beauty products, and the absolute humor behind another one’s existence. In the modern consumerist digital beauty culture, we must look for pillars within this community who understand consumer needs rather than try to appeal to our minor “wants.”

This is all to say, you will never use that “Grinch-themed makeup palette,” and you will forget about the “transition blush” in your makeup bag. Neither of these is making you any more “beautiful” than you already are. It is only by understanding oneself as a consumer, and auditing one’s sources of inspiration, that one can interact with the market as it is intended to be.

- Anurag Ghosh

---

Sources

• McKinsey & Company, “The beauty market in 2023: A special State of Fashion report”

  
  

• Allure, “What’s All This Blush Drama Between Patrick Ta and Painted by Esther?”

  
  

• The Cut, “Unpacking the Patrick Ta Transition-Blush Drama”

  
  

• Federal Trade Commission, “Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers”

  
  

• Arunesh Mathur, Arvind Narayanan, and Marshini Chetty, “Endorsements on Social Media: An Empirical Study of Affiliate Marketing Disclosures on YouTube and Pinterest”