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APRIL 9, 2021
A Publication of WWD
Shroom BoomMove over CBD — mushrooms are emerging as beauty’s new wonder ingredient
in everything from products to packaging. For more, see pages 5 to 6. PLUS: Tapping Hollywood’s next gen and the hot skin care category that's really cleaning up.
ILLUSTRATION BY AMBER DAY
ISSUE#49
Beauty Bulletin
Tk Caption
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APRIL 9, 2021
THE BUZZ
By the Numbers: Spring Cleaning New data from Label Insight shows what Amazon shoppers are looking for in cleansers. BY JAMES MANSO
CONSUMERS ARE searching for new ways to come clean.
According to 2020 data from Label Insight, which aggregates search data from Amazon, cleansing has kept up momentum with beauty shoppers.
Format-wise, foam cleansers remain popular, garnering almost 100,000 searches for the third quarter (a change in volume of more than 36,000 from the previous quarter). The category remains smaller than cleansers for acne, which had just over 60,000 searches for the same period. Other top attributes included ingredients, including silicone, aloe or tea tree oil.
The data also revealed consumers’ skin types. Combination skin, for example, grew more than 15,000 percent from the previous quarter. Glycolic acid outranked other emerging trends in terms of search volume, despite only 150 cleansers meeting the criteria. Here, top cleanser search attributes and emerging trends, ranked by volume.
1. foam
2. acne prone
3. contains tea tree oil
4. aloe ingredients
5. contains silicone
TOP ATTRIBUTE SEARCH TRENDS, RANKED BY
SEARCH VOLUME:
1. contains glycolic acid
2. pineapple ingredients
3. combination
4. alcohol-free
5. no rinse
TOP EMERGING SEARCH TRENDS, RANKED BY
SEARCH VOLUME:
Source: Label Insight
¬ U.K.-based skin care brand Elemis has promoted Marc Gallagher to the role of chief brand and digital officer. Gallagher previously held the title of senior vice president, global brand and digital. He will be based in the brand’s New York headquarters.
The brand has also named two new general managers for the U.S. and U.K., respectively. The U.K. general manager will be Kerry Evans, who held various roles at MAC Cosmetics and La Mer at the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc., based in first South African and then London.
Suzanne Pengelly is filling the role of U.S. general manager. She most recently served as senior vice president, omnichannel for BareMinerals and Buxom, but has also worked for Peter Thomas Roth and heading direct-to-consumer at Philosophy.
Marc Rey, the former chief executive officer of Shiseido Americas, has joined the board of brand incubator Maesa as a non-executive director. According to a
statement from the company, he will focus on “digitalization and internationalization, as well as focus on M&A and innovation.”
Sakara Life has announced a chairman of the board following a $15 million series B fundraising round. John Replogle is joining the company, who formerly served as the chief executive officer of Seventh Generation and Burt’s Bees. Replogle, who led the funding round along with Silas Capital and Annox Capital. According to a statement from the brand, he will help expand Sakara Life into new product categories.
Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc. has tapped Kim McIntosh for the roles of group vice president, controller and chief accounting officer. McIntosh most recently served as chief accounting officer of Tailored Brands, until December 2020.
Market data firm IRI has chosen P&G veteran Kirk Perry as its new president and chief executive officer. Perry will start his new role May 17. His most recent role
was as president of global client and agency solutions at Google, although he served myriad roles at P&G over 20 years, including as president of P&G Global Family Care.
Maria Maciejowski has joined the freshly relaunched Jaclyn Cosmetics as the vice president of brand. Maciejowski most recently served as the vice president of marketing at NuFACE, which also gained a new chief executive officer last year.
Vicky Tsai, founder and CEO of Tatcha, has been tapped for the global board of directors of nonprofit organization Room to Read. The news comes weeks after her reappointment to CEO of Tatcha. Room to Read provides education to young women internationally. Since 2014, proceeds from Tatcha purchases have gone to the nonprofit through the brand's Beautiful Faces, Beautiful Futures program, and has provided more than 5 million school days to girls in Asia and Africa.—James Manso
The Latest Beauty Executive Moves
Marc Gallagher
Maria Maciejowski Vicky TsaiMarc Rey
Kerry Evans Suzanne Pengelly
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APRIL 9, 2021
NEWS FEED
THE FRAGRANCE CATEGORY has a new fashion designer coming to play in the space — Pamella Roland.
Simply christened Pamella Roland Fragrance, the fashion designer’s first push into beauty features top notes of sparkling bergamot, blackcurrant buds and pink peppercorn; heart notes of Provence and Persian roses, and base notes of green moss, tonka bean and velvet and amber woods.
Each bottle is priced at $165 for 100-ml. Although the fragrance is launching on the fashion house’s website this month, it is gearing up for larger distribution ahead of the holiday season in the fall. Industry sources estimate the fragrance to reach $1 million in retail sales for its first year on the market with limited distribution.
Roland sees limitless opportunities in fragrance. “It’s the last thing you put on before you go out, and people
are wearing perfume more than they’re wearing cocktail dresses,” the designer said. She is, however, waiting to see how the scent fares on the market before planning more expansions, but is planning to launch a complementary body lotion and candle.
Roland had been eyeing fragrance since the mid-Aughts, she said, but production obstacles kept preventing her from pursuing the project seriously. “We’ve been in business since 2002, and I started thinking about it in 2005,” she said. “Each year, I started looking into it. Then, there'd be something else we had to do. Finally, I just said, ‘Let’s do this.’”
Given that fragrance was new territory for both the brand and the designer herself, “It has just been a real experience. We’ve developed dresses from the ground up, but a
perfume is so different. But we sell gowns and cocktail dresses, and it just goes together with perfume,” Roland said.
“The bottle itself, I always thought I wanted the shape of a dress because we make gowns. The shape came in, and it was too hard to hold,” Roland continued, noting it took several more bottles to find an option that was both practical and suited the fragrance.
Developing the scent itself was a family affair, starting with its inspiration. “We got down to two scents, one was more rose and the other was more masculine and sexy,” she said. “My grandmother grew roses, and my mother grew roses,
every there's a lot of history with roses in our family. So I knew that, but it was kind of old fashioned. So, we put them together, and it was a lot of back-and-forth.”
Two of the juice’s main consultants were Roland’s daughters, based in London and Australia at the time. “I was shipping these samples over to them, asking what they thought. They were very involved,” Roland said.
Although Roland had to alter her launch timeline as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the brand’s timing is serendipitous. Earlier this season, other fashion houses, such as MCM and Oscar de la Renta, debuted new fragrance pillars.
Pamella Roland Unveils First FragranceThe scent, named Pamella Roland Fragrance, took more than a decade for the brand to conceptualize and produce. BY JAMES MANSO
HAIR CARE BUSINESS Mielle Organics has signed a major investment deal with Berkshire Partners, which is buying a minority stake in the business.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Berkshire generally invests between $100 million and $1 billion per deal.
Mielle was founded in 2014, and makes hair care and skin care products that are sold at major mass retailers, including Walmart, Target and CVS. Bestsellers include Rosemary Mint Scalp & Hair Strengthening Oil, $9.99, and Pomegranate & Honey Moisturizing and Detangling Shampoo, $12.99.
Founders and husband-and-wife team Monique and Melvin Rodriguez will remain majority owners and continue running day-to-day operations. Richelieu Dennis' New Voices Fund invested in Mielle in March 2020, and remains invested in the business.
For Rodriguez, the funding is about more than globally scaling her beauty company — it's also about
opening the door for more Black, female entrepreneurs to gain access to capital. Women of color receive less than 1 percent of venture capital funding, and Black women receive .0006 percent, according to Arian Simon, cofounder of Fearless Fund, a venture fund built by women of color for women of color.
“Black women, we don't have access to [the same] funding as other people in the business world. And so for us, to be able to accomplish something so great and so significant
and so historic is really a win for our community,” Rodriguez said. “If I've been able to break this glass ceiling, that means that the women that come after me should be able to shatter it. It's not just about my story but about the women that come after me.”
Of the Berkshire investment, $1 million will go toward Mielle's More Than a Strand program, which invests in community recovery efforts in North America, the Caribbean and Africa to help get Black, women-owned beauty and barber shops back up and running. The initiative also invests in entrepreneurs and is funding 60 scholarships for women to go to Rutgers University's NBH Professional Online Global Entrepreneurship Certificate Program.
Rodriguez said she aligned with Berkshire because they supported the company's philanthropic efforts.
Mielle has been growing quickly,
even during the pandemic, Rodriguez said. Industry sources estimate 2020 net sales at more than $40 million.
With money from the new investment, Mielle plans to ramp up new product launches, marketing and enter new geographic markets.
“My whole goal for Mielle is to become a global beauty brand and to be accessible to every textured, curly haired girl across the world,” Rodriguez said. “Textured hair varies and has so many different needs and such a variety. I want to be able to meet all consumers needs by giving them new innovation, a better product assortment and being able to innovate and go to market faster.”
Rodriguez said her vision is to “grow and scale to be not only the number-one Black-owned brand, but be the number one beauty brand.”
William Blair advised Mielle on the deal.
Pamella Roland Fragrance
Mielle Organics' new Rice Water and Aloe collection.Textured Hair Brand Mielle Organics
Inks Major Investment Deal “If I've been able to break this glass ceiling, that means that the women that come after me should be able to shatter it.” BY ALLISON COLLINS
Monique Rodriguez
5
APRIL 9, 2021
DEEP DIVE
MUSHROOMS ARE HAVING a moment.
Mushroom ingredients are finding their way into skin care and supplements as the consumer quest for wellness endures. Beauty and wellness companies are increasingly tapping different types of mushrooms, including reishi, lion’s mane, turkey tail, chaga and others, for what experts say are their immunity, anti-inflammatory and energy-boosting benefits.
According to Google search analytics firm Spate, consumer interest in mushrooms is growing — especially on the supplements side of the equation, where mushroom supplements make up a small but increasing number of searches. Interest increased 22.4 percent since last year, according to Spate. Searches for reishi mushroom supplements are up 55.5 percent since last year, and searches for turkey tail mushroom supplements are up nearly 53 percent, according to Spate.
In skin care, search interest is concentrated around a few products. Origins Mega Mushroom line is the
most searched, followed by Volition’s Snow Water Mushroom Serum and Tony Moly’s Golden Mushroom Sleeping Mask, according to Spate.
“Mushroom supplements are predicted to continue growing strongly in search interest in the next 12 months, and this will likely impact interest in skin care,” said Yarden Horwitz, cofounder of Spate.
Data firm Trendalytics has tracked increased interest in snow and tremella mushrooms, which are both seeing double-digit increases as topical beauty ingredients in searches from last year. General searches for snow mushrooms have grown 141 percent, according to Trendalytics.
“With wellness in general, people are being a lot more holistic about the way that they think about mental health as aligned with your physical health,” said Cece Lee Arnold, chief executive officer of Trendalytics.
In the U.S. market, mushrooms have not always been of interest to consumers. But lately, more and more people are recognizing their health benefits, which have been harnessed by other cultures, including in Chinese medicine, for generations, experts said.
Dr. Andrew Weil, an integrative medicine practitioner who collaborated with Origins on the Mega Mushroom line, said he’s seen a massive shift in U.S. attitudes. When he became interested in mushrooms in the ‘70s, most Americans didn’t recognize their health value.
“There was no research on them at all, and I had begun to learn about traditional Chinese medicine, and was very struck by the fact that in East Asia, mushrooms are so highly valued,” he said.
“Now, this is such a hot topic. There’s been an explosion of research…and a profusion of products on the market and consumer demand for them is tremendous,” Weil said.
The Origins’ Mega Mushroom line is a global bestseller. A bottle of Mega Mushroom Relief & Resilience Toner is sold globally every seven seconds, the brand said, and the line has grown about 35 percent over the past three years. A new product, Mega-Mushroom Weightless Hydrating Moisturizer, made with reishi mushroom, fermented chaga mushroom and hyaluronic acid, will launch this April for $34.
Origins and Weil have collaborated for more than a decade, since the brand approached him to help create skin care products. “I said that I really knew nothing about skin care products, but I can probably think of some novel ingredients,” he said. “My first suggestion was to look at mushrooms for anti-inflammatory effects.”
Those types of potential benefits are top of mind for consumers, and today’s mushroom wellness brands often clearly spell out benefits on product packaging.
When functional food brand Four Sigmatic launched in 2012, X
Mushrooms Are Becoming a Beauty And Wellness Ingredient Darling “We are entering the new frontier, and we can just see from the numbers that the interest is growing. It's no longer a trendy, New York, L.A., metropolitan thing.” BY ALLISON COLLINS AND JAMES MANSO ILLUSTRATION B Y AMBER DAY
6
APRIL 9, 2021
DEEP DIVE
people did not quite understand the brand’s offering, said founder Tero Isokauppila, a 13th generation Finnish mushroom farmer.
“As time went on, we figured out easier ways of communicating the benefits. Earlier on, we were very focused on the ingredients. People are busy and they just want to get a taste of ‘what do I get from using this,’” he said.
Four Sigmatic makes both ingestible and beauty products, including coffee with Lion’s Mane, Cacao Mix with Reishi, Adaptogen Immune Support shots with Chaga and Golden Lattes with Turkey Tail. The brand also makes completely edible skin care products, including Superfood Serum that can double as a stress supplement, and a Superfood Face Mask that doubles as hot chocolate.
Isokauppila combines research and historical use in order to determine which mushrooms to use in formulations. “If a culture has used an ingredient generation after generation and that’s tested as a sacred ingredient, either for beauty or ingestible, that probably means there’s something there,” he said.
Isokauppila said he uses different types of mushrooms to aim to provide different benefits in the products, including Tremella for hydration and Chaga for antioxidants. “One cup of Chaga would equal like, 40 pounds of blueberries,” Isokauppila said.
Four Sigmatic is now a “high-growth company,” Isokauppila said, due in part to shifting attitudes around wellness.
“There’s more awareness of mushrooms in general and mushrooms in beauty,” Isokauppila said. “Health and wellness is a big focus area across the board with consumer groups, and COVID-19 has not slowed it down, it’s accelerated it.”
At Goop, Four Sigmatic and other mushroom-forward offerings have resonated with wellness-oriented shoppers. There, customers are both looking for pre-blended entry points to the space, as well as individual mushroom powders and supplements, said executive beauty director Jean Godfrey-June.
“There’s a person that knows exactly what they want and would go to [individual ingredients], who make their own concoctions. Then, there's also the person who's dabbling in it, and is interested,” Godfrey-June said. “We have always done really well with Four Sigmatic, and now, the new Kora Organics [Milky Mushroom Oil] cleanser.”
Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of Moon Juice and self-described “wacky mushroom girl,” said she’s seen consumer understanding around mushrooms increase dramatically since the company’s 2011 founding.
Mushrooms run across the brand’s stock keeping units, ranging from skin care to ingestibles. Bacon uses silver
ear mushroom, which is said to share similar moisturizing capacities to hyaluronic acid, in the brand’s skin care, and Lion’s Mane in supplement powders meant for neuroprotection, she said.
When she first founded Moon Juice, Bacon said customers were mainly “radical with really open boundaries,” but today, the base has broadened.
“People are really paying attention to education in a new way, wanting to know all about those ingredients and how they work biologically,” she said, adding that customers are showing more interest in her single mushroom powders than just her pre-concocted adaptogenic blends.
“We are entering the new frontier, and we can see from the numbers that the interest is growing. It's no longer a trendy, New York, L.A., metropolitan thing,” Bacon added.
Robyn Caywood, founder and chief science officer of Kamu Labs, a CBD and adaptogen ingestible brand, agreed, noting that potential for ingredient use is unbridled. “We're now in that phase where the rest of the country is catching up, and there is this trend everywhere for health and for taking more responsibility for being healthy. More importantly, people are seeking solutions,” she said.
“The future is that everybody is going to be interacting with a mushroom in their life on some level, whether that is your face serum, something for your hair, your handbag is made out of mushroom leather, and your bedside table might be made out of mushroom,” Bacon said.
Indeed, mushrooms are making their way into the mainstream, from beauty product packaging with Loli Beauty to fashion, with Stella McCartney’s experimentation with fungi-based fabric.
Board-certified dermatologist Dendy Engelman said fungi is a fertile ground for research. “We're having this
renaissance of Eastern and Western medicine playing nicely together,” she said. “Ancient herbs and minerals have been a mainstay in Chinese medicine for so long. And if you were Western-trained, that was either looked down upon or not fully understood,” she said.
Engelman said kojic acid, which comes from mushrooms, has been used clinically in dermatology for years. “Now, we're showing that there are so many other benefits, such as the antioxidant ones and anti-inflammatory ones. Those are key things that we think about with chronic inflammation in the skin, causing inflammation or self accelerated signs of aging,” she said. Mushrooms have also become the subject of many studies, making establishments in western medicine less skeptical of their purported benefits.
Engleman drew a connection between the legalization of recreational marijuana in New York and the surge of CBD and THC products, and the use of mushrooms in potentially medicinal ways. “I think of all of my psychiatry friends who talk about microdosing psilocybin for recalcitrant depression or PTSD. We have been holding onto these judgments against whole categories of potentially helpful things. Now we're really looking at those in a less judging way,” Engelman said.
Weil said curiosity around potential wellness benefits of psychedelic mushrooms seems to be increasing. “Everywhere I’ve gone over the past couple of years, increasingly I’m getting questions about psychedelics and psychedelic mushrooms in particular. It’s becoming a mainstream interest,” Weil said.
He said that movement is tied in with the increased interest in mushrooms from the beauty and wellness perspective. “They’re linked in that there’s a growing appreciation for the positive attributes of mushrooms, which was not really in the culture until recently,” he said.
From the purely culinary perspective, Dr. Uma Naidoo, a Harvard-trained nutritional psychiatrist, professional chef, nutrition specialist and author of
“This Is Your Brain on Food,” said, “people seem more interested in actually finding natural ways to feel better.”
She noted there are benefits to eating mushrooms, including gut health and immunity, and has seen an uptick in “functional food products,” like teas and supplements that contain mushrooms.
While there is “no harm” in drinking tea or other products with added mushrooms, Naidoo said she’d advise clients to add mushrooms into their diets before starting a supplement regimen.
“The thing about supplements people should speak to their doctors, they should check it out, they shouldn’t just think, ‘Oh, I saw that on TV, let me take it.’”
For super food brand Golde, which is best known for its turmeric latte and matcha tea blends, mushrooms have opened up an entirely new category, said cofounder Trinity Mouzon Wofford.
“We saw this with turmeric, we've seen this with matcha. Now, we’re starting to see it with this full category of functional mushrooms,” Wofford said. “It's not just one mushroom. There are all different mushrooms that have different types of benefits.”
Golde recently launched Shroom Shield, a powder supplement meant for immunity and stress management with reishi and turkey tail mushrooms. Wofford found via social listening that her consumers were either inexperienced with mushrooms, or didn’t like the tastes of mushroom powders — so, she formulated Shroom Shield to emulate the taste of hot cocoa, she said.
Wofford is playing heavily to ingredient education, given mushrooms’ reputation for being either culinary or psychedelic. “From a marketing perspective, there's nothing wrong with leaning into those stories a little bit, and creating that magic for the customer. But it's important, as a wellness product, to communicate that this is something that is safe and third party lab tested,” she said. “It's not like something that you're getting from your funny friend's backyard.” Q
1. Mushrooms are moving into the mainstream, and have become the ult imate cross-over ingredient bet ween health and beaut y. 2. Consumers are becoming increasingly attuned to the health benefits of different varieties, and brands are now formulating to mit igate the downsides, such as the taste. 3. Functional funghi are moving beyond topical and ingestible ingredients into packaging and even fabric.
Key Takeaways
From left to right: Golde Shroom Shield; Moon Juice SuperPower
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APRIL 9, 2021
MASTER CLASS
BACK IN THE DAY, with a click of her fingers Olamide Olowe headed to her happy place: YouTube. There, her favorite Black vloggers, like Beauty by JJ and Patricia Bright, offered tips and tricks for hyperpigmentation, acne and ingrown hairs, issues she was dealing with at the time.
Fast-forward a decade, the Texas native attended UCLA as a pre-med student with the hopes of one day becoming a doctor. But when Olowe realized her entrepreneurial spirit and passion for skin care, founding her own brand materialized as the clear goal. And Olowe did it — she cofounded SheaGirl while she was in college. After Unilever acquired SheaGirl’s parent company Sundial Brands, Olowe was ready to get started on her next project.
With her own skin concerns in
mind, Olowe founded Topicals, a brand with products that feature clinical grade and herbal ingredients geared toward those with chronic conditions like eczema and hyperpigmentation. Olowe is the youngest Black woman to raise over $2 million in funding, raising $2.6 million total, and is backed by celebs including Issa Rae and Yvonne Orji, and brands, including Warby Parker and Casper. With only two products: $36 Faded (a brightening, clearing gel) and $32 Like Butter (a hydrating mask), the brand sold out at Nordstrom in just two hours for its limited release back in August.
“Topicals is built around creating authentic and positive conversations and a community around living with a skin condition,” Olowe said in an interview. “In our effort to transform
the way people feel about skin, we believe building community creates a movement against unrealistic beauty standards.”
Here, the founder discusses voids in the beauty market, the importance of community building and what’s next for her Gen Z beauty brand, Topicals.
What led you to start Topicals?What was the process like?When I was at Shea Moisture, we did a beauty brand that was for young women of color and I really loved doing it. Then during my senior year of college, our parent company was acquired by Unilever. When that happened, I got to see what it's like when a brand is acquired and how they use the money to help the black community. And I thought that is so cool. I love skin care. I love beauty. And I love helping my community. I wanted to do something similar.
I leaned into my love for dermatology and decided that it would be good to build a brand in a category where people were really underserved. I felt like people had been looking, like myself, I never felt represented in beauty. After graduation from college in 2018, instead of going to a job I had accepted, I was like,‘I'm going to do nothing but focus on trying to build this brand.’
I pitched for two years to different investors, to different manufacturers and suppliers trying to get the brand up and running. Then I met my cofounder Claudia Teng through the process and her background is in clinical research. Then Topicals launched in August of 2020. We had to delay our launch twice. The first delay was due to COVID hitting in March and the second was during the Black Lives Matter protest when we shifted our marketing focus and our plans to donate to mental health organizations. But yeah, it's been a whirlwind since then.
Both products are between $32 and $36 and are meant to replace several steps in a consumer’s routine. Why did you develop the brand this way? As a person of color understanding socioeconomic classes and that not everyone has a ton of cash to drop on skin care, I wanted to make sure it was accessible to as many people as possible. They’re more expensive than drugstore products
but they actually function as all-in-one products. Typically people are wearing five single ingredients on their skin to get the same effect that they would get from Faded. Let’s see each of those products was $10, then they’d really be spending about $50 or $60 on product versus with Faded, you spend $36 and you get all those ingredients in one. I wanted it to be super functional.
You recently launched early aughts inspired tracksuits in honor of Black History Month. Can you share more about that project?We wanted to show that Topicals isn’t just a skin care brand but a lifestyle. For people with chronic skin conditions, we’ve never been celebrated by the brands we grew up using. The Bling Velour Zip Up is one of the ways Topicals celebrates funner flare-ups. In honor of Black History Month, we pledged to donate a portion of the sales to mental health organizations like Sad Girls Club and Fearless Femme 100.
When you first announced the brand, you created the Skin, Sun & Stars game and didn’t initially talk about what your products would be. Why is this sort of community building important to Topicals?Aside from our Skin, Sun & Stars game, we also like to be active on social media by constantly being engaged with our audience. For instance, on Oct. 3 we launched our take on the “Mean Girls” Burn Book, where people shared beauty standards they wish never existed. Topicals is built around creating authentic and positive conversations and a community around living with a skin condition. In our effort to transform the way people feel about skin, we believe building community creates a movement against unrealistic beauty standards.
What does your everyday skin care routine look like?I love products that multitask so I use the least amount of products possible. I use Fresh Soy Cleanser, Faded Brightening and Clearing Gel and SuperGoop Sunscreen. At night, I use Drunk Elephant’s Melting Butter cleanser and Like Butter as an overnight hydrating mask.
What’s next? Are there any new products coming soon?At Topicals, we get excited about skin conditions and categories that the beauty industry has ignored. You’ll continue to see us create products and experiences for our community that innovate in taboo categories.
Olamide Olowe The Topicals founder talks developing her own brand and creating an accessible skin care community. BY EMILY BURNS
DIRECT CONNECT: @olamideaolowe
“I love skin care. I love beauty.
And I love helping my community. ”
—OLAMIDE OLOWE
9
APRIL 9, 2021
EYE CANDY
Face Value¬ Voted on by Hollywood insiders, the SAG Awards are considered a pretty reliable indicator of how Oscar voters are thinking. And according to Stacy Jones, founder and chief executive officer of pop culture marketing firm Hollywood Branded, the same holds true for brands, many of which are looking for Hollywood’s diverse batch of fresh talent to modernize their brands.
“We’re looking at a world that is more colorful in ways of sexuality, in ways of race. Fashion houses [and beauty brands] have always had really strong celebrity moments, and we’ve started to see more inclusion from L’Oréal and Cover Girl,” Jones said.
“The world is actually changing to be more inclusive, and the younger generations are driving conversations on a daily basis,” Jones continued. “Generation Z doesn’t care as much about the gender or racial identities of their friends, the lines are blurring.
These brands have to find a way to become more contemporary or relatable because their core consumers are aging out.”
With that in mind, Jones reasoned that brands’ other criteria for talent to sign hasn’t changed. “The brands are looking for someone with multicultural appeal, and someone who has that baked-in feel of being high end,” Jones said. “They have something a little bit special, that has a fashion sense that comes across on-screen and at events, and someone with strong social media,” she said.
As social tides turn, brands will move further from tradition, Jones said. “It’s just not so cookie cutter,” she said. “You’re seeing richly developed actors who are themselves, not the status quo of what a Hollywood success story used to look like, being celebrated now.” Here, see some of Hollywood’s newer names to keep an eye on for beauty deals. —James Manso
Dan LevyKelvin Harrison Jr.
Ruby Barker
Josh O’Connor
Nicola CoughlanP
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Natalie Morales
Emma Corrin
Jonathan Bailey
