It was recently the world’s first Metaverse Beauty Week. Beauty brands like Lush, Neutrogena and Glossybox came together for the five-day virtual event, marketed under the slogan Reality Gets a Makeover. Hosted across various metaverses, MBW offered all kinds of immersive experiences. You could play interactive beauty games. You could “try on” make-up using AR filters. And, something new to me, you could collect virtual beauty products for your avatar.
In other words: brands now want us to buy products to make our avatars more attractive! There were virtual versions of SPF serums and body creams. There were digital brow pencils, eyeliners and freckle tints. One Gen Z brand even debuted a digital hair shine spray to let “your avatar transform into the glowing goddess it deserves to be.”
Apparently this is happening elsewhere, too. Estée Lauder recently announced a digital version of their Advanced Night Repair anti-ageing serum to give your avatar a “virtual glow.” Other big brands like L’Oréal, Johnson & Johnson and Fenty Beauty have already filed trademarks for digital beauty products, from skincare creams to sun-care to virtual perfumes.
At first I was sceptical. Would anyone really want these? Marketing for Metaverse Beauty Week insisted this was a groundbreaking event, a subversion of beauty standards, that I should get ready to immerse myself in a revolution. The “next frontier for the beauty industry” — the “future of beauty”! But seriously. A serum for pixellated skin? A hair conditioner for a glitchy cartoon alien?? Surely nobody would actually pay for their virtual avatars to look attractive?
But then again, they already do. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this isn’t anything new or surprising at all. We’ve been obsessing over the appearance of our online avatars for years.
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