The Intimate Experience of Luxury Beauty

The luxury beauty industry seems stuck in the past. While spendings keep growing nicely, luxury beauty brands are still using strategies from the 1950s to sell their products:

• Advertising with outrageous claims.

• Photoshopped pictures where models have 3 centimeters long lashes and fifty-year-old actresses have the smoothest skin ever...

• No owned stores, but a long list of traditional distributors.

Since Sephora, not much happened in the high-end beauty Industry. And Sephora as we know it was created in 1993... Luxury beauty has every sign of a commoditizing industry:

• Advertising-led sales

• Please-all strategy: no core customer niche or targeted individuals

• no control over distribution and retail experience

So where do consumers go for a real Beauty Experience? YouTube!

Yes, Chanel has some beauty stores, yes Sephora is putting up grandiose events in flagship stores, yes department stores are displaying nice little booths in which brands can put products on shiny shelves. But the real thing is not happening in stores, it happens online. I am not talking about the expensive films that brands are creating for important product launches, although these gain a lot of views (so far the latest Chanel n°5 film starring Gisele Bündchen has more than ten million). I am talking about the Vloggers and YouTubers who post product reviews, how-tos, and all sorts of content every day. Michelle Phan, a beauty blogger and YouTuber has such a following she was a face for Lancôme and has developed her own beauty brand (em cosmetics). She currently has 7 565 188 subscribers and a total of 1 090 532 490 views on YouTube.

What consumers like in YouTube are authenticity and engagement. Someone they can actually relate to is talking about products they consider buying in a way that speaks to them because it addresses their concerns. It is the individual connexion the viewers like.

Cosmetics are peculiar products because they enter the intimate sphere. It's something we put on our skin, and also something we put faith into to be more beautiful/young/desirable... Buying luxury cosmetics isn't a trivial matter. Emotions play a very high role in the buying decision. And brands can't get intimate with individuals with just airbrushed models and shiny bottles. Dreams are not emotions, and it seems that is all luxury beauty brands are willing to give for now.