A global speaker on cultural change, Sophie has shaped progressive brands across F&B, wellness, luxury and beauty from within creative agencies. Her work spans brand strategy, cultural intelligence and longevity-led positioning, architecting category futures from early-stage creation to established market leadership. Recognised by Forbes as one of the world’s top Female Futurists.
Beauty brands have increasingly excelled at considered, clinically credible and arguably category-compliant expressions. What’s shifting now isn’t a trend — it’s a recalibration. Not just a desire for the reintroduction of sensory experiences, of colour, texture and scent, but for a point of view, for transparency and for trust in the products we buy. To both feel something when we reach for a product and to trust both what goes onto our skin and into our bodies. The want was always there. The brands building the next chapter are the ones with the intelligence, the vision and the nerve to answer it. This is the future of Beauty’s Bigger Brief.
Beyond the Beige
For a while, beauty had a face. Dewy. Plump. Rosy and softly lit. The glazed donut era wasn’t just an aesthetic — it was a mood, commitment dressed up as effortlessness. Clean, quiet, expensive-looking. Beauty had glazed over.
Brands like Rhode make its audience feel committed to seeing results and caring about how your skin actually functions. The intelligence driving that wave — the focus on skin longevity, cellular resilience, biotechnological actives that work deep within the skin — was a genuinely important shift and that thinking isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s accelerating. What’s ending is the aesthetic it wore. The restraint. The beige. The self-effacing palette that made every brand look like it had been approved by the same algorithm.
The next era keeps the science. But it changes both how the message is delivered and the emotion the brand evokes. And underneath all of it, something more fundamental is shifting: a post-anxiety generation that wants permission to actively feel good again. To exist on a higher vibration. And they’re directing their spending accordingly.
Expressive Efficacy
Marc Jacobs Beauty’s return has been a bold signal — and it answers a want the beige era actively suppressed: the want for self-expression without apology. A maximalist overhaul that has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with timing. The packaging builds a complete design language from the ground up — a daisy for complexion, a star for eyes, a heart for lips — each rendered in exaggerated metallic and soft-touch silhouettes that transform everyday essentials into collectible objects. The concept driving the relaunch is “Joyride Sensoriality” — tactile finishes, immersive textures, formulas that perform as well as they feel.
Coty’s framing is unambiguous: “We saw an opportunity to offer something deliberately different: bold colour, unexpected textures, and a sensorial, fashion-led experience.” One packaging expert put it best: this isn’t being read as packaging — it’s being read as the first expression of what this new era intends to be. As Jacobs himself says: “I am not interested in one right way to look.” Arguably always a provocateur – the difference now is that the category is now ready to hear it.
Mintel frames it as sensorial beauty: routine as emotional regulation, not just maintenance. It’s also where the M&A logic starts to make sense. The brands commanding the highest acquisition values right now — including Salt & Stone, Grüns — aren’t selling cosmetics or supplements — they’re increasingly selling mood states. Brands that answer problems with rituals people return to. They offer brand expressions with genuine and unique desirability. The brands being bought are the ones that named a feeling people already had and built a world around it.. It’s formulation intelligence but with fewer steps. Progressive skincare actives that are genuinely pleasurable to use. Texture as a design decision. Fragrance as emotional architecture. Operational discipline underlies all of it. But so does feeling.
Answering the Want
The most interesting new brands aren’t creating wants. They’re identifying ones that already existed but weren’t being met — blind spots the category had long ignored. The backlash to complexity was inevitable. What’s notable is the precision with which the emerging brands have diagnosed exactly what was missing.
The signals were already there. While the category excelled at compliance, The Ordinary built an entire brand on calling it out — dismantling industry mistruths around parabens, ‘natural’ claims and animal testing, then taking direct aim at the misleading jargon saturating beauty marketing with the surreal, pointed Periodic Fable campaign.
The message: for too long, the industry had taught beauty wrong. But naming the problem is only the first move. The most exciting new brands are doing something harder. They’re solving it.
ROCCO is the skincare brand born from broadcaster and entrepreneur Laura Jackson’s growing frustration that routines had become overwhelming, joyless and disconnected from how they actually made you feel. The want it answers is simple: the want for joy.
Built on a neurocosmetic philosophy that treats emotional wellbeing and mood regulation as inseparable from skin efficacy, ROCCO brings skincare back to the ritual — small, mood-shifting moments that work on you from the outside in. The packaging says it all: baby blue tubes with bold cobalt stripes, blush pink lids stamped with a smiley face, sunshine yellow gradients. Every product carries FaceFeels, a signature mood-boosting scent developed with scientists to deliver an uplifting hit every single time you use it. Refillable formats put sustainability at the centre without sacrificing the pleasure of the product, and a community-first approach means ROCCO is built to be in genuine conversation with the people who use it. As Jackson puts it: “how you feel in your skin is just as important as how it looks.”
Beyond aesthetics, the most compelling new brands are also exposing genuine gaps in the market and blind spots the category has long ignored. YOM Beauty has done something genuinely revolutionary: it’s created an entirely new category logic for lip care. The want for safety and trust. The founding insight is disarmingly obvious but so far unanswered — lips aren’t just a surface, they’re a portal. Whatever goes on them goes in, and it needs to be safe. From that single idea, YOM has built a range where every ingredient meets both cosmetic and food-grade standards simultaneously, a dual-standard approach the brand calls “Bio-Logical.”
The credentials are serious: 100% certified food-grade ingredients and independently verified microplastic-free status via Flustix — third-party certification that moves the brand well beyond self-declared clean beauty territory.
The visual world matches the ambition: hyperreal dreamscapes of starry galaxies, cosmic constellations and creamy clouds that feel genuinely otherworldly. YOM has created a universe where flavour is vivid, tactile and almost edible, radiating an aura of pure goodness. It’s a visual language that does exactly what the brand promises — makes you want to taste it. Tonally it balances clinical rigour with real warmth; product names like Honey in the Milky Way and Persian Love Cake do a lot of that work. The brand tagline “Only let in what loves you back™” wraps the whole functional proposition in something that feels like self-care rather than safety compliance. For anyone watching the regulatory horizon, the proactive Flustix certification is a pointed move: microplastics in cosmetics is a live EU legislative risk, and YOM is already on the right side of it.
A Brave New Standard
The clean girl told a coherent story about a certain kind of effortlessness. Until the effort required to look effortless started to feel like exactly that — effort. What’s replacing it isn’t high-functioning maximalism. It’s a high-voltage experience. Permission for beauty to be playful again. A permission to bring colour, texture, and personality into the category, answering a real consumer desire while delivering a level of care that extends beyond the formula itself. The product can be joyful but the ingredient list has to be trustworthy. Looking good and feeling good should never have been in conflict.
Beauty is a high-growth category. The brands that win it aren’t just the ones with the best formulas — they’re the ones that build a world people want to live in. Real beliefs. Real behaviours. A community that keeps coming back because the product keeps delivering on the feeling it promised. The want was always there. The bigger brief is simply this: answer it. Those that do are building a brave new world of beauty.
About WeWantMore – WeWantMore is a strategic design agency with studios in London and Antwerp, partnering with the world’s most innovative FMCG and hospitality brands. The agency explores what creates the ‘want’—from consumer desire and category shifts to cultural momentum—unlocking new possibilities and limitless brand potential.
Website: https://wewantmore.studio/
