In my beauty industry job, I make nothing meaningful. And then I go home

September 2, 2026 — 5:30pm

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There is a special kind of fatigue that cannot be cured by sleep, a vacation in Biarritz, or the incessant application of a 140€ ($227) super serum. It is the fatigue of having produced something for a living without ever having made anything meaningful at all. This is what it feels like to be a luxury beauty creative.

Why? Because our industry is not really in the business of making something beautiful. It is in the numbers business, and beauty is merely a fabulous facade.

The top beauty conglomerates collectively launch tens of thousands of new products every year. This means that somewhere, at all times, a person with a degree in fine arts or advanced literature is being asked to make the 947th lip gloss launch feel “disruptive”. Incidentally, the word “disruptive” is evidence the English language has entirely given up on meaning.

Here is the original lie: that the work would be clever, or beautiful, or interesting, or in the rarest and most intoxicating cases, that it might shift something. Change a mind. Make someone feel something new.

The great campaigns did this. Chanel’s Égoïste – Jean-Paul Goude’s 1990 masterwork for the men’s fragrance in which a phalanx of women storm the balconies of a hotel, hurling the word Égoïste! at an unseen man to the thunder of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, slamming their shutters in synchronised,........

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