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Culture
Beauty at a Crossroads
Beauty is at a fascinating and conflicted moment in its evolution. We are living in an industry that is expanding at extraordinary speed—projected to surpass USD 650 billion by 2025, fueled by scientific breakthroughs, new-founder energy, sophisticated consumers, and a global appetite for prevention, longevity and personalised care, yet the landscape has never felt more visually uniform.
Across packaging, campaigns, retail environments, and online spaces, many brands appear to have converged on the same visual language: soft minimalism, neutral tones, refined serif typography, elegant still lifes, and clean formulations with familiar claims. The industry has innovated dramatically in science and formulation, but aesthetically and narratively, it has entered a period of extreme predictability.
SAMENESS ISN'T A CREATIVE ISSUE BUT AN ENVIRONMENTAL ONE
This isn’t due to a lack of creativity. It’s a consequence of the systems in which brands operate. Digital platforms reward content that is instantly legible, soothing and familiar. Retailers prefer clarity and consistency. Investors feel safer when a brand resembles the codes they have seen succeed before. Consumers, overwhelmed by choice, gravitate toward visuals that feel calm and credible. When every structural force points toward optimisation and efficiency, it’s not surprising that many brands begin to look remarkably similar. The industry hasn’t become creatively stagnant; it has simply become environmentally constrained.
Yet the consumer has changed. People are no longer satisfied by functionality alone, nor by a brand that feels assembled from the same visual templates circulating across social media. They want dimensionality: richer stories, more sensory depth, more emotional resonance, and an identity that feels specific rather than interchangeable. They want brands that offer clarity without sterility, scientific intelligence without coldness, and aesthetic refinement without predictability. They want to feel that a brand has been built thoughtfully from the inside out, philosophically, visually and emotionally.
“The future of beauty won’t be defined by how it looks, but by how deeply it’s built — scientifically, emotionally, and aesthetically. Distinction now comes from the interior architecture of a brand, not its surface design."
A SHIFT TOWARDS DEPTH
The most compelling innovation in beauty today is happening in the quieter spaces of the industry, where brands are drawing from cultural heritage, regional rituals, diasporic creativity, texture-led storytelling, and deeply considered formulation philosophies. These brands aren’t loud or disruptive; instead, they build worlds that feel layered, contextual, and emotionally grounded. They treat beauty as something that is shaped by place, memory, behaviour and personal ritual, rather than simply by utility. When a brand approaches its identity as a world, rather than as a visual style, it immediately becomes harder to imitate.
This movement is already visible in a handful of thoughtful founder-led brands—those who weave their identities from texture, ritual, formulation philosophy and sensory intelligence rather than from the dominant visual codes of the moment. Their worlds feel lived-in and internally coherent, guided by belief rather than algorithmic aesthetics. It’s the reason brands such as Lore, Reome or Monastery linger in the mind; they’re not louder, just more deeply built.
Depth is also being driven by consumer perception. The line between digital and physical identity is dissolving, and people increasingly view their faces, routines and self-presentation through the lens of highly mediated images. This has created a strange tension: on one hand, people want products that offer genuine efficacy and scientific credibility; on the other, they're looking for a sense of orientation, reassurance and self-connection in a landscape that constantly pulls them away from themselves. Beauty is no longer simply about improvement—it is about grounding, clarity and emotional stability.
For brands, this means the opportunity is no longer in trying to out-minimalise or out-clinical the next competitor. The opportunity lies in building an identity that feels genuinely lived-in and multidimensional, one that can hold scientific rigour and warmth at the same time; one that balances clarity with atmosphere; one that treats sensoriality, language, materiality and narrative as part of the same ecosystem. Beauty brands today cannot rely on a single aesthetic gesture or hero ingredient. They need to articulate a point of view that is felt in everything they create, from the naming of a serum to the weight of a cap to the tone of the clinical language they use.
DESIGNING THE NEXT ERA OF BEAUTY
This doesn’t mean abandoning simplicity. It means evolving it. There is a difference between minimalism and emptiness, between refinement and sameness. The brands that will define the next decade are the ones that understand that distinction and build identities with substance beneath the surface. A brand can be quiet and still feel unmistakably itself; it can be scientific without feeling cold; it can be clean without feeling generic; it can be modern without feeling algorithmically assembled. The task is not to avoid the codes of contemporary beauty, but to reinterpret them with more intentionality.
Ultimately, the brands that succeed will be those that design from a place of depth rather than default. They will invest in narrative architecture, sensorial storytelling, cultural awareness and visual identity systems that feel flexible rather than formulaic. They will build products that are not just effective, but emotionally and aesthetically meaningful. They will understand that beauty today is less about transformation and more about coherence, less about creating a new self and more about helping people feel more connected to the one they already inhabit.
Beauty does not need to become louder to evolve. It needs to become deeper, more intelligent and more attuned to the emotional and perceptual realities of the people it serves. And for the founders and creatives building the next wave of beauty brands, the opportunity is wide open: to create identities that stand apart not because they shout, but because they are built with a level of intentionality and dimension that sameness simply cannot replicate.
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AUTHOR
Thea Hyde
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