When identity becomes the product, pricing can get out of hand.
There’s a wild blip happening in who buys beauty now.
Gen Z boys and ten-year-old girls are showing up at shops like Sephora, driven by TikTok and influencer routines … and spending big bucks on skincare brands that would have felt out of place a short time ago.
Coverage from Business Insider and The New York Times points to rising interest in grooming, skincare routines, and brand-led identity among young men and pre-teen girls.
The spend is real; the logic sorta scary to me.
These purchases carry identity, self-presentation, and social signaling in a way that stuff like Axe Body Spray and toy makeup bags used to satisfy.
But now, these groups of customers are happily disposing of their allowances at high-priced cosmetics shops.
Now layer in what The Ordinary went and did.
They launched a mock grocery store called “The Markup Marché.”
A banana priced at $175.
An avocado over $300.
Everyday items reframed using the language and codes of premium wellness.
Photo: The Ordinary
It works not because it’s absurd (and it deliberately IS), but because people recognize the pattern straight away.
The packaging. The naming. And the puffed-up promise embedded in the descriptions.
This is waving a red flag at many of the mechanism behind the Sephora shift.
The product is the story around the formula, the perceived transformation.
That doesn’t (in itself) make consumers so shockingly irrational. It does point out how value is being constructed, with masses eating it up.
The Ordinary built its entire brand on stripping that ridiculous language and pricing model back.
So, now it’s using exaggeration to make the structure visible.
For founders and marketers, this is worth sitting with for a bit.
Customers pretty much never evaluate a product or brand in isolation. They DO consider what it empowers them to become to others, and how convincingly that story is delivered.
What do you think of the trend, and The Ordinary’s commentary:
End of civilization, or bright new opportunity?
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