Co-Founder, Melyon
There is a moment, early in anyone’s career in the beauty industry, when you understand that you are not really selling products. You are selling a feeling — a feeling of being seen, of being worth something, of belonging to something larger than yourself. The best brands in this industry have always known this. The ones that endure are the ones that mean it.
I spent eight years at Byredo. When I arrived, it was still the kind of brand that felt like a secret: a Stockholm-born fragrance house built on the private language of Ben Gorham’s bicultural memory, with a visual restraint that said more by leaving things out than most brands say with everything in. What I witnessed during those years was something rare — a brand that had been built not from a market brief but from a genuine inner necessity. You could feel the difference. Consumers could feel it too.
That experience taught me something that no financial model captures cleanly: the hardest thing in beauty is not building a brand. It is building one that lasts. And the reason it is hard is not distribution, not funding, not retail access — though all of those are real. It is that genuine conviction is extraordinarily difficult to sustain at scale, and almost impossible to manufacture.
The Problem With “Disruption”
The years since the pandemic have produced a remarkable number of new beauty brands. Accessible manufacturing, direct-to-consumer platforms, and social media have lowered the barriers to entry to the point where launching a skincare line requires little more than a manufacturer relationship and an Instagram account. By some estimates, thousands of new beauty brands entered the market between 2020 and 2024.
Many of them are good. Some are excellent. But a significant number are something else: assembled rather than built, positioned rather than believed, launched with the vocabulary of authenticity without the underlying substance. They speak the language of values — sustainability, inclusivity, transparency — because the data shows that consumers respond to that language. The values are the campaign.
Consumers, it turns out, are increasingly good at telling the difference.
Simultaneously, the consolidation wave has continued. Major conglomerates have acquired niche brands at an accelerating pace, absorbing the innovation that the independent sector generates and integrating it into portfolio structures built for scale rather than specificity. The market reads this as validation — proof that building a beauty brand is a viable path to liquidity. What it actually demonstrates is something more ambiguous: that the established system is very efficient at harvesting independent value, and less good at generating it from within.
The signal this sends to aspiring brand founders is, at best, mixed. Building a brand looks easy from the outside. The ones that last are anything but.
What Genuine Luxury Actually Means
Luxury, in its original and truest sense, is not about price. It is about time. It is about the kind of care, specificity, and accumulated intent that cannot be rushed or replicated quickly. A perfume house that has been developing its olfactory vocabulary for decades carries something in each bottle that a brand assembled last year cannot access regardless of its ingredient cost. Legacy is not marketing. It is the residue of sustained conviction. This is the definition of luxury that the industry’s consolidation wave tends to erode. When a niche brand is acquired and scaled, the first casualty is usually time — the time to develop products slowly, to say no to commercial pressures that would dilute the founding vision, to build a relationship with a specific consumer rather than optimizing for the broadest possible audience. Speed and scale are legitimate conglomerate values. They are not luxury values. The brands that will define the next chapter of luxury beauty are the ones being built right now with a different premise: that genuine legacy cannot be fast-tracked, that the consumer relationship has to be earned rather than engineered, and that the founding vision has to be specific enough to mean something — even at the cost of narrowing the immediate market.
Be the Change
Gandhi’s formulation — be the change you wish to see in the world — is so familiar that it risks passing without landing. But it contains a precise truth for anyone trying to build something new in an established industry: you cannot wait for the market to create the conditions you need. You have to demonstrate those conditions yourself. In beauty, this means something concrete. If you believe that luxury should be more inclusive — that the industry’s historical definition of the aspirational consumer has been too narrow, too homogeneous, too anchored in a particular cultural and clinical tradition — you cannot simply argue for change in the abstract. You have to build the brand that proves the argument. A new generation of founders is doing exactly that. Brands like Topicals, which reframes skincare for chronic skin conditions that the prestige market has long ignored; or Beneath Your Mask, which built its entire philosophy around the ritual needs of melanin-rich skin; or Joëlle Ciocco, whose cellular approach to skincare refused the cosmetic industry’s conventional categories for decades before the market caught up. What these brands share is not a demographic target or a trend insight. It is a founding conviction specific enough to be uncomfortable — a belief that the existing answers were insufficient, and a willingness to build from a different question.
This is the pattern that produces lasting brands: not a better campaign, but a better premise. The conviction that luxury skincare has been developed from too narrow a clinical and aesthetic baseline — and that building from a more inclusive starting point produces something genuinely better — is not a marketing position. It is a design philosophy. And when it is real, consumers feel the difference between a brand built for them and a brand that has been extended toward them as an afterthought.
Changing Minds Beyond the Campaign
Here is what a campaign cannot do: change the way someone understands their own worth. A campaign can reach you. It can make you aware that a product exists. It can associate a brand with feelings and values you already hold. But the deeper shift — the one that happens when a consumer picks up a product and feels, for the first time, that it was made with them in mind — is not something that can be engineered through media spend. It is the result of a brand that actually was made with them in mind, from the first formulation decision to the last word of the packaging copy. This is the kind of brand building that takes time. It requires a founder who is not optimizing for the fastest route to an exit but for the deepest possible connection with a specific consumer. It requires investors who understand that genuine brand equity is built over years, not quarters. It requires a willingness to be misunderstood in the short term — to occupy a position that the market does not yet have a clear category for — in the faith that the consumer will find you when the product is right. And it requires, above all, the conviction that beauty is not what a campaign says it is. Beauty is what endures when the campaign is over.
A Different Kind of Legacy
The most important brands in beauty history were not built to be acquired. They were built to last. The founders of the houses that now constitute the luxury conglomerates were not thinking about portfolio fit or strategic exit timelines. They were thinking about a specific way of experiencing the world — a fragrance, a texture, a ritual — and they were willing to spend decades making other people feel it too. That model is not obsolete. It is simply less common, because the incentives of the current market make it harder to sustain. The acquisition wave has made it rational to build for an exit. The social media cycle has made it tempting to build for attention. Neither of these is the same as building for time. The brands that will matter in twenty years are being founded right now by people who have not yet been convinced by the logic of the short term. Who are building for a consumer they believe in rather than a market segment they have identified. Who understand that being genuine — truly, specifically, uncompromisingly genuine — is one of the few remaining definitions of luxury that cannot be faked, replicated, or acquired. Building a brand is easy. Making it last requires something rarer: the willingness to mean it, from the beginning, and to keep meaning it long after the moment when it would have been simpler to stop.
That is the kind of beauty worth building. And that is the kind of beauty worth choosing.
Raouf Farhat is Co-Founder of Melyon and a luxury beauty industry executive with over twelve years of experience across independent and conglomerate brands. He previously spent eight years at Byredo AB in Stockholm, including through the brand’s acquisition by Puig,
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