Undoubtedly the most anticipated launch of the year, Fenty Skin posted a video on Instagram in July two weeks before the product was released. The featured clip Rihanna in a tropical location, skin lit up, basking in the sun alongside models Paloma Elsesser and Halima Aden—as well as rappers A$AP Rocky and Lil Nas X. “I never approached skincare from a gender perspective,” Rihanna said of the cast. “For me, the only thing that makes it different is the color of the packaging.”
The beauty business, like so many others, is in a period of introspection on the question of representation. Men have certainly been selling beauty products for decades, even though they’ve often been repackaged under the heading of “skincare.” But for a brand as big as Fenty Skin to speak to men and women in the same breath? It is rarely done.
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“Beauty, wellness and personal care have been normalized and championed for women, but not for all genders,” says Lucie Greene, founder of Light Years, a research and forecasting agency. When the industry has spoken to men, Greene says, it’s often been through a very specific voice: a hypermasculine tone that gave men “permission” to take care of themselves, or an outdated 1990s metrosexual approach. which now looks comical. In recent years, beauty companies have begun to cater to a wider range of genres that don’t fit neatly into the more traditional “for her” and “for him” boxes. The goal? To sell a product, of course. But in a time when outdated ideas and stereotypes about gender and beauty are pushed aside, what’s good business can also have the power to help change cultural norms.
Fenty Skin is one of many brands that claim gender inclusion. In August, Shiseido named trans model and actor Hunter Schafer (from HBO Euphoria) a global make-up ambassador. Super influencer Patrick Starrr’s long-awaited One/Size, a genderless beauty line that includes everything from eyeshadow to makeup wipes, is another. The line is a love letter to her fans: “I get DMs from [cis] men, trans men and trans women who tell me they live vicariously through me [as an Asian man who wears a full face of makeup]. They don’t have the confidence to go to a counter,” he says, whether because of their own comfort level or background.
This isn’t the beauty’s first foray into a more gender fluid space. In 1994, Calvin Klein made history with CK one, “a perfume for men or women”. Shot by Steven Meisel, the campaign featured models Kate Moss and Jenny Shimizu (who was considered androgyny at its peak at the time), as well as men and women – gay and straight – and created a brand new discussion about gender in the beauty industry, especially in luxury fragrance. That same year, MAC, whose credo had always been All Ages, All Races, All Genders, launched its first Viva Glam campaign with RuPaul, followed by kd lang three years later.
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The biggest players are following the moment as the gender dialogue becomes more urgent. Launch of Gucci Beauty Gucci Memory of a Smell last year, a fragrance positioned as asexual. The face of the campaign? Harry Styles. L’Oréal Paris also quietly featured a man in its True Match ads, and in July MAC announced K-pop star Lay Zhang as its new global ambassador. And even top brands like Chanel and Tom Ford Beauty have embraced male customers with men’s makeup lines (Tom Ford for Men Concealer is a cult favorite).
“As a culture, we realize that gender is no longer a fixed concept,” says Sam Cheow, senior vice president of corporate innovation and product development at Estée Lauder Companies, which owns brands like MAC, Tom Ford Beauty, Le Labo, and Frédéric Malle (the latter two are known for their very popular asexual perfumes). Cheow points to the evidence the needle is pushing: the growing backlash surrounding gender reveal parties; an increase in gender-neutral baby names (for example, in 2018, 51% of “Charlies” were female); and the arrival of Q, the world’s first genderless voice assistant.
But the overwhelming majority of Gen Zers have been pushing business leaders to change the way brands approach gender. “The traditional male/female ideology is outdated for this generation of consumers,” Cheow says, referring to those born after 1996. In fact, in a 2020 Pew Research Center report, 35% of Gen Zers know someone who prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns, compared to 25% of millennials, 16% of Gen Xers and 12% of baby boomers.
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Gen Z doesn’t subscribe to the beauty standards of generations before them, says Cheow, which explains Billie Eilish’s rise to style icon status. Unlike so many before her, the pop star landed a Calvin Klein campaign without having to show a layer of skin, posing in her trademark baggy hoodie instead.
“Eilish’s aesthetic, including her makeup, is not about the male gaze, but features individual, unexpected and sometimes intentionally uncomfortable looks,” says Greene.
Social media plays a vital role, says David Yi of the men’s grooming website Very good light and author of the next book Beautiful boys, which explores the history of men’s beauty through the ages. “Platforms like Instagram uplift people you don’t traditionally see or hear from, often from diverse backgrounds,” Yi says. “They are demanding change and companies are finally listening.” One of the influencers he most admires is David Lopez, a non-binary hairstylist who has been gaining traction on social media this year. “I want to degenerate the beauty space,” Lopez says, a mission “born from posts and brands that never really speak to me.” Most magazines and websites assume their reader is female, and brands tend to “present everything in a way that is clearly marketing to cisgender women and only feature cisgender women in their ads,” he says.
Lopez acknowledges that in pharmacies, there’s often only one narrow section in an aisle where men feel comfortable buying a product, and that’s it. If a non-binary or cisgender male consumer goes out of their “lane” and wants something in the women’s section, be it moisturizer or hair dye, there can be a sense of shame, either self-inflicted , or imposed by others. It’s equal opportunity, he says. On Lopez’s social media tutorials, “I’ll see comments like, ‘I’d divorce my husband if he wore concealer.’”
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Lopez challenges businesses to be more welcoming in their advertising. He applauds British skincare brand Elemis, which, like Fenty, incorporates women and men into its marketing. “And not just a tall, thin, androgynous 17-year-old who looks like he’s from the Midwest,” Lopez explains. “A lot of brands cater to younger, white, thinner, cisgender men that aren’t going to offend anyone.” Lopez credits part of his own success to the fact that “I come across as a cis man.” That alone made cisgender men feel more comfortable with the site’s content, Lopez believes.
We are only at the beginning of this movement, says Bob Scott, a non-binary New York makeup artist who works with Padma Lakshmi and Rachel Brosnahan. In the end, despite all this talk, we’re still stuck in conventional ways of seeing beauty. “Saying your brand is asexual or fluid is a start, but what I’ve seen is that most of these lines exploring this topic just reverse the binary,” Scott says. It can mean “putting a cis man in a cat’s eye, or making a cis woman look boyish. It doesn’t erase gender. It doesn’t turn it back to her ear. The space between “masculine ” and “feminine” remains largely unexplored. “This is where the real pioneering work begins”, adds Scott. “Remember that makeup is a form of expression just like music or art . He has no sex.
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