2024 Beauty Predictions: Scalp Retinol, Replication, & Exploiting the Limbic System

The Don't Buy List: Issue #66

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Don’t Buy List! 2024 is careening toward us at a speed I find distressing, if only because I fear the coming year’s beauty trends will seek to further separate us from our minds/spirits/selves until we’re mere bodies animated by an industry-planted desire to buy! More on that in a minute.

First, as social proof that signing up for this newsletter was a good idea, a round-up of 2023 accomplishments: In February, the Sunday Herald profiled me as “the woman the beauty industry fears.” In June, I was named one of “2023’s Most Innovative and Visionary Talents” on AdWeek’s Creative 100 list, alongside Keke Palmer and Glennon Doyle and Lil Dicky. The Guardian picked up my investigation into the beauty retailers that fund anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that month too. My Grand Theory of Food Face (dewy dumpling skin, glazed donut skin) was published by the Sunday Times in October. In November, I was hired by the Guardian to write a monthly beauty advice column (Ask Ugly), I won a Country & Town House Sustainability Award for Sustainable Beauty Influencer, I appeared in the Peacock documentary House of Kardashian, and I was interviewed on Jameela Jamil’s podcast. In December I wrote another piece for the New York Times (but published the better version here on The Unpublishable).

Throughout the year, my work in this newsletter was quoted in or highlighted by NPR, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the MIT Technology Review, Marie Claire, the Los Angeles Times, Vox, The Face, BeautyMatter, System Beauty, Dazed, the Cut, i-D, Wired, Atmos, Nylon, Fortune, Refinery29, El Pais, HighSnobiety, Rolling Stone Italia, The Canadian Press, and more.

I published 86 articles here! The Unpublishable’s readership grew from 53,000 to 91,000. About 87,000 of you access most of my reporting for free, thanks to a small percentage of paying subscribers, to whom I am very grateful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As for my 2024 beauty trend predictions:

via E.l.f. Beauty

• FRAGRANCE, LIPS, and EYES will be the beauty industry’s focus areas for 2024, thanks to their exploitable associations with inner wellbeing: FRAGRANCE has a scientific claim to the brain via the limbic system; LIPS represent the life-sustaining functions of breath, communication, consumption (also an erogenous zone); EYES are the “windows to the soul” and the site of recent surgical innovation.

• See also: NEUROCOSMETICS.

• As the continued influence of COSMETIC OZEMPIC discourages the consumption of food and depletes bodies of necessary fats, the beauty industry will encourage people to compensate — psychologically, physically — with beauty products and procedures. OZEMPIC will become the new BOTOX, and debates about its non-medical use will center around a skewed definition of “feeling good” (by way of looking “good”) and autonomy. Exercising aesthetic autonomy will diminish the urge to fight for bodily autonomy — just as bodily autonomy appears on the ballot of the American Presidential election.

• The VAGINAL COSMETICS market will expand. A new NIPPLE COSMETICS category will emerge (perhaps for post-surgery care after breast lifts, breast reductions, and [small] implants). A line of ASSHOLE BLEACHING products may even end up in Sephora?

• Innovation is dead; replication will reign. Following a year of DUPES, most NEW PRODUCTS WILL AIM TO EVOKE OTHER PRODUCTS, in the style of “Falscara” (false lashes to recreate the look of mascara) or “Botox in a bottle” (moisturizer to recreate the look of Botox), “Lip Flip Treatment Balm” (a lip balm to recreate the look of a Botox lip flip), or the “shine therapy straightening iron” (a tool to recreate the look of hair oil). Human features will not factor into inspiration.

• SCALP RETINOL.

• MENOPAUSE PLASTIC SURGERY will follow the MENOPAUSE COSMETICS boom of 2023, further 1) positioning menopause (specifically) and bodily changes (generally) as obstacles on the quest to remain THE REAL YOU and 2) framing menopause as a medical catastrophe to be reversed rather than a mundane (if challenging) life event one must move through.

• INDIVIDUALIZED TREATMENTS will turn the body into a site of EXTRACTIVE COSMETIC CAPITALISM. Aesthetic doctors will remove patients’ own FAT, STEM CELLS, and BLOOD for use in plumping procedures, tailor-made moisturizers, plasma hair growth injections, etc.

• The ANTI-AGING sector will continue to broaden its reach to babies. Skincare packaging and marketing will become more KID-FRIENDLY — colorful, quirky, employing words like “weird,” as is already trending — in order to increase its appeal to children and further infantilize the industry’s core customers (grown women).

Happy New Year!

-Jessica