Beauty has always been a resilient space. In times of uncertainty, it often not only endures, but the category can even accelerate. Recent reports of L’Oréal’s strongest quarterly sales in years is proof of the Lipstick Effect at play. But as beauty remains economically robust, its cultural meaning is becoming more fragmented, with two distinct systems emerging:

  1. one centred around optimisation.
  2. and another around expression.

For brands, this divide will increasingly shape what role they play for consumers.

Optimisation

In this system, appearance is increasingly treated as a problem to solve. While beauty has long been about enhancement, today’s optimisation culture is seeing analysis and metrics shape how beauty is approached. At its most extreme, this logic is visible in controversial ‘looksmaxxing’ communities, where faces are broken down into metrics and evaluated against criteria like symmetry, proportions, and ratios.

On r/Rateme, a subreddit with over 312.5K followers, optimisation becomes a publicly performed process, as users rate each other’s appearances – often with striking bluntness. Language is hypermedical, with terms like “philtrum length” and “canthal tilts” being used as attractiveness barometers, and hair and makeup tips sit alongside suggestions for fillers or surgery within the same framework of “improvement.”

Less controversially, optimisation ideals are also showing up in more everyday manifestations, with the mainstreaming of tweakments, the rise of ingredient-led skincare, and the growing expectation that beauty should deliver measurable results. Within personal beauty routines, the ‘skinification’ of make-up is reframing products as skincare hybrids, positioned around function. Augustinus Badner x Victoria Beckham’s The Concealer Pen features the patented TFC8, a blend of vitamins, lipids, and peptides.

As well as providing coverage, the product’s active ingredients claim to reduce the appearance of wrinkles, strengthen the skin barrier, and enhance elasticity. Cosmetics are being recoded as tools of optimisation for a highly ingredient-literate consumer base, increasingly validated through claims of efficacy, scientific framing, and measurable proof.


Optimisation culture is expanding the boundaries of beauty, bringing wellness, supplements and even mental health under its umbrella. What emerges is a version of beauty that extends far beyond the surface, encompassing internal systems of health and wellbeing. The rise of concepts like “cortisol face” (a puffier appearance due to increased stress hormones) is emblematic of this shift. Whether scientifically sound or not, it reflects a broader cultural tendency to read the body as an interconnected system, where emotional and physiological states are believed to manifest externally.

Beauty-related optimisation extends beyond surface appearance into the management of internal systems, with brands like HUM Nutrition positioning gut health as directly linked to skin appearance, through supplements that claim to “nurture the gut and clear the skin”. Language takes on a medical element (“pre+probiotic”, “clinically tested”), reflecting an evidence-led, improvement-first approach.

Expression

While one system chases eternal optimisation, the other prioritises self-expression. Beauty becomes less about improvement and more about exploration of identity, mood and selfhood – among Highsnobiety’s “Cultural Pioneers”, 62% of men and 60% of women say beauty has taken on a greater role in how they express identity over the past year. Here, it is individual expression, not perfection, that becomes aspirational.

Half Magic Beauty’s champions abundant play, through a product universe of glitter, shimmer, and rhinestones – signifiers that destabilise fixed age codes, oscillating between childhood fantasy and adult experimentation. As put by Euphoria make-up artist Doniella Davy for Dazed Beauty, “There’s such an innocence about them, and they represent a tension between childhood, adolescence and adulthood”.

The brand’s product comms reinforce a sense of play. Soft-focus imagery dissolves visual boundaries – there are no hard lines or rules here. Retro glamour codes and pastel florals introduce a dreamlike, surreal effect, and cultural references drawn from Euphoria highlight makeup as an emotional language. Imagery is used to construct immersive emotional worlds that channel mood, and the face becomes a canvas to project inner states, rather than to optimise.

Individuality is key, replacing optimisation culture’s narrow ideal of beauty. Beauty becomes something to be interpreted, allowing consumers to explore their personal identity more intimately.

The cultural landscape is starting to reflect this: a recent Dove campaign pushed back against algorithmic-led beauty, and i-D’s new beauty zine distils this ethos into three words: Beauty Is You. Together, these signals point to a broader recalibration, with beauty becoming a site of self-exploration.

Digital culture is pushing beauty even further, as selfies, filters, and avatars enable new codes of self-expression, as tracked by cultural institutions like Somerset House in their recent exhibition titled ‘From the Selfie to the Avatar’ (featuring art from digital artists and hybrid creators like Ines Alpha). Within a cyber-beauty aesthetic, the constraints of the physical body no longer apply, and identity becomes fully malleable. Beauty is re-coded: exaggerated, distorted, or even rendered deliberately “ugly” as a form of subversion.Crucially, for younger audiences, cyber-beauty is no longer confined to the screen, as the boundaries between online and offline selves is dissolved, and digital identities are not separate from reality but continuous with it. What begins as filter feeds back into IRL self-presentation. The impact of digital culture is increasingly showing up across both high-end and mainstream beauty. ISAMAYA channels a post-natural, cyber-beauty aesthetic, through syringe-like packaging, futuristic chrome, and iridescent finishes, while Starface weaves internet aesthetics into the everyday, reframing blemishes as graphic interventions closer to emojis than skincare.

Beauty is increasingly governed by a tension between optimisation and expression. For brands, this signals a shift away from competing on product alone, towards competing on role: are you refining the self, or adapting it? Brands that succeed will be the ones that recognise beauty as a cultural system that is as much about identity as it is about appearance.

3 Key Takeaways for Brands

  1. Defining role in selfhood: Beauty brands are no longer competing against product alone, but within systems of cultural meaning, so they must build coherence around their role (e.g. enabling expression, evidence-led optimisation…).

  2. New forms of credibility: What counts as ‘credible’ is splintering as beauty fragments. Build trust through science and data in optimisation, or through creativity and cultural fluency in expression.

  3. Beauty’s expanding remit: Beauty now extends beyond appearance into internal systems of health, emotion, and identity, requiring brands to build relevance across new dimensions of wellbeing.

Caroline Bartlett, Senior Semiotician

The Two Faces of Beauty: Optimisation vs. Expression