Inside the Growth of the “Slow” Beauty Movement

Having grown up next door to an herb farm in Somerset, England, siblings Emily Cameron and Owen Mears have always harbored a keen awareness of their natural surroundings. 

“There were fields of echinacea, lemon balm, marshmallow root — the passage of time was punctuated by the changing of seasons and what was growing on the land around us,” said Mears.

In 2017, he and Cameron teamed with noses François Robert and Elodie Durande to launch Ffern, a natural perfumery brand with a business model built on quarterly, small-batch seasonal drops inspired by their defining childhood experience with scent.  

Each Ffern fragrance — of which there have been 26 to date, including the new jasmine and caraway seed-infused Autumn 24 Eau de Parfum — is bottled in Somerset and only created once. The $129, 30-ml. bottles are sold to the brand’s currently full ledger of members, while consumers who aren’t on the ledger can join a waiting list and be notified if a space becomes available. 

“By having a ledger, we can forecast not to have any waste — every bottle has a name on it,” said Cameron, noting that because the fragrances are 100 percent natural, each batch has slight variations and, like wine, evolve as they age. 

“A fragrance made of synthetic ingredients is completely scalable, completely possible to make sure the scent is the same every single time you make it,” said Mears. But with naturals, “if you harvest one field over or one week later let alone in another country — that molecular makeup changes slightly every time.”

Ffern embraces such inconsistencies — and a growing number of consumers, too, see the appeal. Though the founders didn’t specify how many members Ffern has, they shared that this April, the U.S. overtook U.K. as their most prominent consumer base for the first time. 

“We’re completely overwhelmed by the interest in what we’re doing and the excitement that has built up around it,” said Mears, who, alongside Cameron, produces a short film for each new fragrance (complete with original music), hosts a semimonthly podcast called “As The Season Turns” and helms a 500-square-foot store in London often used to host fragrance-making workshops and other activities.  

“It almost feels like we can dream bigger, because we don’t have to be fast,” said Cameron. “That’s the thing about not having constant new product — we have these single entities that we can build and create so much more around — each vial is a starting point to a whole new world.”

Ffern’s mindful launch schedule feels timely for more reasons than one.

Not only is beauty coming off the high of consecutive years of double-digit, post-COVID-19 sales growth, but an influx of trends emphasizing conscious consumption habits — from “de-influencing” to January’s #NoBuy2024 to this summer’s #UnderconsumptionCore — are gaining prominence on TikTok, prompting beauty and fashion consumers to reckon with the ethics of their shopping habits. 

Paradoxically, even though beauty brands are churning launches at seemingly record speed, data from Mintel shows beauty innovation has hit a 10-year low, with just 46 percent of global beauty and personal care launches during the first half of 2024 being genuinely new products (versus line extensions, reformulations or relaunches). 

By comparison, in 2015 nearly two-thirds — 63 percent — of launches were genuinely new products. 

“There are some brands out there that are treating skin care and beauty as though they are fast fashion, and that’s concerning,” said Charlotte Palermino, cofounder of Dieux Skin. 

Though 2020-founded Dieux doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a “slow” beauty brand, it counts just six products in its assortment, most recently adding a $34 cleanser, Baptism, to its lineup.

“We make skin care that histologically changes your skin — you can’t rush that development process. We also try not to be too duplicative of what’s already on the market, which is very challenging to do, so we have to take time,” Palermino said.

KraveBeauty, founded by longtime “slow” beauty advocate and content creator Liah Yoo, similarly inaugurates roughly one hero launch per year, while makeup brand Minori Beauty was founded in 2020 by Ipsy alum Anastasia Bezrukova with three products, and added its fourth only this year.

Despite not launching a new product for nearly three years, Bezrukova said Minori, which stands for “minimalist origins,” will more than double its business this year, closing 2024 with a projected $500,000 in sales.

This increase has been driven by a focus on boutique retail, with Minori entering just under 400 clothing stores, gift and specialty shops and spas during the period, including Detox Market in New York, Salt & Sundry in Washington, D.C. and The Latest Scoop in Canada. 

Rather than hindering expansion, Bezrukova has found Minori’s tight lineup — which ranges from $22 for a lip gloss in four shades to $32 for cream blushes and a highlighter — is an advantage for breaking into retail.

“We’re the only makeup brand carried in a lot of stores we’re in, but because our retailers don’t have to manage a huge stock-keeping-unit count and the testers, counter space and education that come with that, and because we have no slow-moving units, we have an extremely high reorder rate,” she said. 

Of course, there are challenges that come with operating a brand that isn’t consistently bringing new product to the fore, especially in a space where most competitors roll out multiple launches annually. (Glossier, for instance, drops product on a near-monthly basis, most recently adding three shades of its lip gloss this month, while Kosas and Huda Beauty, for instance, have both added more than four products this year).

Fundraising, navigating mainstream retail and even conceiving fresh social content as a slow beauty brand can each pose an uphill battle.

“The reality is the amount of capital required to start a brand today is as little as it’s ever been, and the amount of capital required to scale a brand today maybe is as high as it’s ever been,” said Rich Gersten, cofounder and managing partner of investment fund, True Beauty Ventures, which has invested in brands like Dieux, Moon Juice and K18. “If you want to pursue slower growth, fewer drops, a more patient growth profile, you won’t need to raise as much capital — but you probably won’t be able to access as much capital either. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation.” 

During an initial friends and family fundraising round to get Minori off the ground, concerns were raised about the profitability of the brand’s minimalist approach to product, though the way Bezrukova sees it, “as an investor, if you find a company that is able to double its sales year-over-year without newness, that is a much better indicator of health than the brand that is doubling their sales because they doubled their sku count.” 

This year, KraveBeauty expanded beyond the U.S. for the first time, launching at Cult Beauty in the U.K. and inking a Sephora Southeast Asia partnership to roll out to 39 doors across Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, with plans to also penetrate the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand with the retailer.

Testament to the power of retail expansion as a means to supercharge growth: KraveBeauty did eight figures in U.S. sales in 2023, and will log seven figures in international sales alone during its first year abroad.

“Our [approach] of having one hero launch a year, it’s very new to Sephora, but they also understand that, for many brands, the top three skus can comprise up to 80 percent of revenue — so there’s value in having curated lines on their shelves,” said Yoo, who sees KraveBeauty’s nine-product assortment as a skin care “capsule wardrobe.”

In addition to the spate of underconsumption-related trends seeing growth on social media, Yoo pointed to the “skin barrier” conversation that emerged in 2021 as also influencing mindful skin care practices.

“That conversation definitely added more fire to the less-is-more, skin care minimalism trend; people realized the easiest way to harm your skin barrier is by overdoing skin care and burning your skin with too many high-active products,” she said.

Like most beauty trends today, skin-barrier discourse began on TikTok — a fast-paced platform by nature which, admittedly can make it challenging to navigate as a slow beauty brand.

“You eventually do get a bit burnt out of creating social media content for the same product again and again,” said Bezrukova, adding that there are challenges “on the PR, news cycle side — for instance if you’re pitching a blush to an editor that you launched three years ago, it might seem less relevant to them to cover it.”

For Palermino, resident “skin care fairy godmother” to her more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, addressing questions about Dieux and strategizing content related to the platform’s trending beauty topic du jour can be effective ways to diversify her page and draw a wider audience. 

“We know we can fabricate social media moments through ideas versus just pure product plays. We find our formulas, ingredients and the history of different products and ingredients in skin care fascinating, so it leads to this endless well of content,” she said, adding “we haven’t felt a tension between scaling and staying true to brand mission because we’ve been doing both — and that could be because of how young we still are, but we haven’t run into an issue yet.”

Even a brand like Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, for instance, has shown that taking a measured approach to launching product — this year the brand only introduced a cleanser, blushes and a lip gloss-holding phone case — can drive not just big wins — but lead to actually bigger wins.

Still just two years old, Rhode consistently outpaces its competitors in the skin care category by earned media value, having nearly tripled Sol de Janeiro’s EMV in July, according to CreatorIQ, and maintaining its spot as the number-one brand in August with $19.2 million EMV for the month. La Roche-Posay come in second with $15.7 million.

For a brand like Ffern, whose definition of slow beauty encompasses small-batch production, “matching the scale of some of the mega brands out there is probably never going to be possible, but we can still go a lot further before we need to start worrying,” said Mears.

Besides, he added, “this is a lifelong project for us — we’re not rushing.”