
8 Min Read |
Let’s rewind to meet two typical beauty consumers, pre-2020. One of them is a Millennial or Gen Z beauty user who is at ease in the digital world, and totally comfortable with cutting-edge technology. She’s enthusiastic about new brands with a tech-heavy approach to product development because she’s seen how effective intense engineering can be; she gets excited when a new wellness device is launched, or when her favorite beauty line releases a product with new active ingredients. And she knows how to educate herself — online — about that ingredient and the processes it went through before it landed in the formula of her moisturizer.
The other consumer may be a little older, or maybe not. Either way, she has spent less of her life immersed in a data-driven digital realm. She’s more likely to opt for products with naturally-sourced ingredients than those that have been altered or enhanced in a lab, and she’d usually prefer to make her purchases in-store rather than online. She feels a mild but persistent distrust of digitized processes; of online shopping, of technology that claims to enhance wellness or make life easier; and she doesn’t feel like she’s missing out on anything by avoiding immersion in the virtual world.
And then skip forwards to the start of 2020…