Genderless Beauty Brands are the Future of the Industry

In the past, the beauty industry was targeted to women, but over the past few years, beauty products are straying away from targeting genders. While beauty products have been sold to men for decades, they were often repackaged under grooming.

Rihanna’s Fenty Skin, which was released at the end of July, featured male and female models in their campaign with models Paloma Elsesser, Halima Aden, and rappers A$AP Rocky and Lil Nas X. “I never approached skin care from a gender standpoint,” Rihanna said of the casting. “To me, the only thing that makes it different is the color of the packaging.”

Fenty isn’t the only brand embracing this new gender inclusivity, in July Patrick Starr released a genderless beauty line called One/Size and in August Shiseido named trans model and actor Hunter Schafer a global makeup ambassador.

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This isn’t the beauty industries’ first launch into gender inclusivity, as they started with fragrances. Back in 1994, Calvin Klein stepped into a more gender-fluid space with CK One, “a fragrance for man or woman” and the campaign starred Kate Moss, Jenny Shimizu, and other gay and straight men and women. M.A.C who prides itself on being about All Ages, All Races, All Genders, debuted its first Viva Glam campaign with RuPaul that same year.

Last year, fragrances revisited gender inclusivity with Gucci Beauty launching Gucci Mémoire d’Une Odeur, a genderless fragrance with Harry Styles as the face of the campaign. In regards to makeup, L’Oréal Paris had a man in its True Match advertisement and in July, M.A.C announced that K-pop star Lay Zhang was its global ambassador. Chanel and Tom Ford also released men’s makeup lines.