Beauty

An unrestricted category with a restricted border

Most beauty advertising runs without friction. The exception is claims: a serum that "smooths the appearance of fine lines" is cosmetics, one that "rebuilds collagen" is making a physiological claim and inherits the rules that apply to health products. The same is true of aesthetic procedures, which sit somewhere between beauty and medicine depending on the market and the wording.

This is not a reason to write timidly. It is a reason to know which sentence moved the page across the line, so the strongest permissible version gets used rather than a cautious one.

Local versus brand

A salon and a cosmetics brand share a category and share almost no marketing problem. A salon competes inside a few kilometres, and maps, reviews and local search decide most of it. A brand competes on shelf and on feed, where creative volume and repeat purchase economics decide it. They get different plans.

Creative

Beauty is one of the few categories where the product genuinely is the visual, which raises the bar rather than lowering it: stock-looking creative is invisible here in a way it is not in B2B. We produce in sets, shoot for the format rather than crop into it, and treat user-generated material as a production stream with rights cleared up front, not as something found later.

What we measure

For salons: bookings, and specifically bookings that arrived. For brands: repeat rate, because first-order economics in beauty are frequently negative on purpose and the whole business lives in the second purchase.