Over the weekend Cheryl Cole, Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren sauntered down a catwalk in the centre of Paris for L'Oréal’s first ever fashion week show. They weren’t alone as they joined professional models Irina Shayk and Doutzen Kroes to walk the Champs-Elysse. Septuagenarian Fonda strode down the runway in head-to-toe animal print while Mirren swung a cane as she performed a camp saunter for the Instagramming crowd. While this publicity stunt was grandiose, it also demonstrated a total misunderstanding of how millennial women consume from and interact with the beauty industry in 2017.
As a consumer, the beauty market seems flooded with options, but the reality is different: seven companies own 182 brands. Mega conglomerates Estée Lauder Companies, L'Oréal, Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Shiseido, Johnson and Johnson, and Coty, have made billions from flying under the radar as the owners of both luxury and accessible labels. Estée, for instance, is Clinique, La Mer, M.A.C, Bumble and bumble, Bobbi Brown, Aveda, smash box and 17 more label’s umbrella company. While, L’Oréal is the machine churning in the background of Yves Saint Laurent beauty, Shu Uemura, Urban Decay, Maybelline, Kheils, Lance, La Roche-Posay and until very recently The Body Shop.
For decades new trends and products have lived and died by what these seven companies have decided to present. But, then vlogging was born and not long after Instagram. In recent years there has been a sea surge of new beauty brands that have undramatically usurped the staid ways of yore. Names like Kylie Cosmetics and Glossier spring to mind as instant examples of the new breed of beauty. With this, has come fresh opportunities for consumers to find and interact with make-up, skin, body and hair care lines.
The numbers speak for themselves. L'Oréal was founded in 1909 and has 4 million Instagram followers. In comparison, Kylie Cosmetics, which was launched in 2015 has 14.5 million Instagram followers.
A report from 2015 showed that millennial women aged 18 to 34 purchase the most products in the $13 billion (£9.7 billion) cosmetics industry market. The TABS Analytics report said, 'Millennials are twice as likely to be heavy buyers and account for 47% of all heavy buyers.' Digging further into the data it was found that millennials skew towards purchasing online from speciality beauty merchants (35% vs. 22%).
You have to ask yourself, was this splashy show that was designed to be a 'grammable moment a last-ditch effort to make L'Oréal relevant to a digital community? It certainly delivered coverage from traditional press and images of the show took up Instagram real estate on the evening of, but how much will the looks created backstage actually impact the consumer they should be targeting? And then there's the unspoken question about what diversity really means to large beauty brands. Featuring Jane Fonda (79) and Helen Mirren (71) in the catwalk show certainly demonstrates an increasing commitment to age diversity. But if the recent firing of Munroe Bergdoff as a L'Oreal spokersperson tells us anything it's that for large beauty brands, that diversity must be firmly uncoupled from any hint of controversy for it to be palatable.
But irony is, it's that true authenticity, that willingness to have difficult conversations, that millennials want to see in the brands they lend their patronage to. So the question is, who was L'Oreal's bells and whistles beauty show really aimed at?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.