What Beauty Professionals Need to Know Today

Discover the most recent and relevant industry news and insights for beauty professionals, to help you excel in your job interviews, promotion conversations or simply to perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

BoF Careers distils business intelligence from across the breadth of our content — editorial briefings, newsletters, case studies, podcasts and events, exclusive interviews and conversations, as well as insights from the recent State of Fashion Special Edition | The New Face of Beauty — to deliver key takeaways and learnings in your job function.

Explore global job opportunities in beauty on BoF Careers today, from a senior beauty producer at Burberry in London, to a digital beauty & accessories designer at Bloomingdale’s in New York, or as a beauty trainer at Chalhoub Group in Riyadh.

Key articles and need-to-know insights for marketing professionals today:

1. Marc Jacobs Beauty Is Coming Back

Marc Jacobs Beauty is preparing a comeback, The Business of Beauty has learned, two years after its Velvet Noir mascara and other cult products were quietly pulled from shelves. The return is part of an expanded partnership with Coty, the New York-based beauty giant that has produced the brand’s fragrances for two decades. That licence will now run at least through 2038 and include cosmetics for the first time. New products are likely to hit shelves in 2025, people familiar with the deal told The Business of Beauty.

Beauty proved one of the keys to Jacobs’ creative and commercial resurgence. A 2021 Instagram post where the designer admitted to a facelift and calling for transparency in plastic surgery saw nearly 54,000 likes and resulted in a Vogue profile. The Daisy Marc Jacobs fragrance is ranked as the sixth best-selling fragrance in the US, according to Circana. Beauty trends are cyclical (Y2K makeup and hair has already come back around), but if Marc Jacobs Beauty can recapture its zeitgeist-making first impression with Gen-Z, its 2.0 era might be even more transformational than its first go-round.

2. Estée Lauder Is Falling Behind Rivals Like L’Oréal, Even on Its Home Turf

Estée Lauder Companies has lost market share in the US to competitors like L’Oréal, which has been quicker to seize on the now-booming market for dermatological beauty products with brands such as CeraVe and SkinCeuticals. Estée Lauder has also underinvested in advertising, forfeiting a chance to bolster sales, some analysts say.

To reach new customers across Asia, Estée Lauder has spent the past two years beefing up its global supply chain, but this is years overdue. The slow supply-chain revamp left Estée Lauder ill-prepared for China’s tumultuous reopening earlier this year. Sales tanked in its Asia-focused travel retail business, which represented nearly one-third of revenue in the most recent fiscal year.

3. What Investors Are Looking for in a Beauty Start-Up

Investors are always on the hunt for their next billion-dollar deal, yet founders are finding it is increasingly harder to raise capital. Generally, investors wait for patterns, or what they perceive to be working, and then fund brands that align with these patterns. This is why a million DTC beauty brands launched after Glossier or why we’re inundated with celebrity and influencer beauty lines post-Fenty Beauty.

When True Beauty Ventures’ Rich Gersten and Cristina Nuñez were looking at potential brands to invest in in 2020 and 2021, the two prioritised brands putting wholesale partnerships first – even though “brick and mortar was dead,” at the time, said Gersten, TBV co-founder and managing partner. For Kevin Murphy, managing director of Sonoma Brands, revenue was once “the end all be all” at the time of investment, “but revenue is just a marker of the things I’m really looking for – founder strength, brand magic, brand and product fit,” Murphy said.

4. Who Will Buy Amyris’ Brands?

Last week, Amyris filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and said it plans to sell off nine consumer lines, including JVN hair care from “Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness and clean makeup label Rose Inc. from model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, plus lines from actresses Naomi Watts and Tia Mowry, among others. It is rare for celebrity brands to go on the auction block, let alone so many at once. But Amyris’ creditors shouldn’t get their hopes up about what the sale of these lines will bring in.

Market sources say traditional beauty conglomerates like the Estée Lauder Companies or L’Oréal won’t consider an acquisition target unless it is raking in at least $50 to $75 million in net sales. Only one of Amyris’ brands meets that criteria — in 2022, Biossance reportedly hit $110 million in net sales. This leaves private equity firms, celebrity brand platforms and smaller companies as alternative buyers.

5. Inside YSL Beauty’s Formula for Staying Young

YSL Beauty last week launched MYSLF, a new men’s fragrance expressly created for Gen-Z and fronted by Austin Butler, with some pretty lofty goals. Emilie Poisson, the brand’s general manager, told BoF she hopes MYSLF will be the “biggest men’s launch in fragrance” for L’Oréal, which holds the license to manufacture, market and distribute beauty products for Saint Laurent.

YSL’s men’s fragrance business in the US is up 19 percent year to date (as of July 29), outpacing an overall US men’s prestige fragrance category that’s seen 10 percent growth during the same period, according to Circana. For MYSLF, Poisson said YSL will up the ante on social media spend by investing “like never before” in TikTok, Twitch and Reddit. It will also give out samples in Brooklyn barber shops as well as gyms in select US cities. As for Butler, who is 31 and very much a millennial, Poisson put it simply: messaging trumps age. Gen-Z fragrance is selling self-expression, and older generations have always been sold on becoming someone else or being sexy, successful or powerful.

6. Farfetch to Close Beauty Division

Farfetch is shutting down its beauty division at the end of the month to focus on improving sales of luxury fashion on its marketplace, according to an internal email viewed by The Business of Beauty. The luxury e-tailer will remove the beauty section of its marketplace on Aug. 31, including the dedicated section for Violet Grey, the luxury beauty retailer it acquired in January 2022. (Violet Grey will continue to operate its own website and stores.) Browns, Farfetch’s physical retail arm since 2015, will also close its beauty division, according to the email.

Farfetch is one of many fashion e-tailers that have struggled to become beauty destinations. Companies like Amazon-owned Shopbop, Moda Operandi and Yoox-Net-a-Porter, which Farfetch has agreed to acquire a majority stake in, have invested in beauty. Those retailers still generate most of their sales from fashion. Unlike with apparel, consumers prefer to preview beauty products in person at trusted retailers like Sephora and Ulta Beauty, experts say.

7. The BoF Podcast | Why Entrepreneurial Success Is About More Than a Big Exit

Beauty founders Ben Gorham of fragrance label Byredo, and Monique Rodriguez of hair care brand Mielle Organics, both took their businesses from indie beauty darlings with cult followings to high-profile exits to major conglomerates: Byredo sold to Spanish luxury giant Puig for $1 billion in 2022, while Procter & Gamble bought Mielle Organics earlier this year.

On The BoF Podcast, Gorham and Rodriguez sit down with Priya Rao, executive editor of The Business of Beauty, to share how they navigate entrepreneurship and success in a conversation from The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2023.

8. What Really Happens on a Tarte Influencer Trip

On an unseasonably pleasant afternoon in late July, a group of 13 contest winners and their plus-ones (and one reporter) arrived in New York for “Trippin with Tarte,” a three-day whirlwind that included a stay at the Plaza Hotel, sightseeing adventures and box seats at Beyoncé’s sold-out concert.

Tarte typically spends deep in the six figures to fly influencers like Alix Earle to locales like Dubai or Turks & Caicos. The posts from these trips can generate billions of social media impressions, enough that the makeup brand doesn’t spend any money on traditional marketing like billboards, commercials or online ads. Tarte’s executives say the Beyoncé trip was in the works for almost a year, predating controversies that framed the brand as exclusionary and wealth-obsessed. The mix of the attendees gathered at the Plaza Hotel before the concert felt like a direct rebuttal to those accusations. There were healthcare workers, teachers and small business owners.