Five Brands, One Eye Patch: Why Beauty Needs a Market Correction

In the space of a week, three of the biggest names in beauty launched essentially the same product.

A week ago, Fenty Skin teased its Dew N Plump Fresh-Sliced Hydrogel Eye Patches: a twist-to-slice dispenser that cuts one fresh patch at a time. Within days, Glow Recipe revealed its Exopeptide Caffeine Fresh Slices Eye Mask and Huda Beauty unveiled its Undereye Jelly Patches. They use the same mechanism and the same promise, and they arrived at the same moment. Now Vitamasques has teased its own launch, with a wink.

The ‘slicing’ format isn’t new, either. Korean brand Wonder Bath brought its Slice Serum to market in July, a good two months ahead of everyone else.

The pattern didn’t go unnoticed. The Lipstick Lesbians were among the first to spot it, flagging Glow Recipe’s leaked launch as the copycat drops began to pile up.

Fenty handled it with humour, posting the Spider-Man pointing meme. Huda Kattan called it ‘too good’. Everyone laughed.

I didn’t. This isn’t a funny coincidence. It’s the clearest, most tangible example yet of how cooked the beauty industry has become.

The beauty industry is oversaturated and built on the wrong incentives, and it needs a correction.

How did five brands launch the same product in one week?

It wasn’t a coincidence and it wasn’t espionage. It’s how the industry works now.

Most beauty brands don’t invent their products. They buy them. Contract manufacturers and packaging suppliers develop formats and formulations, then pitch them to whoever can pay. If a supplier shows a clever new dispenser to five brands, and five brands say yes, you get five identical launches.

Charlotte Palermino, co-founder of Dieux, put it perfectly in her Substack breakdown of the saga: ‘this wasn’t a brand’s innovation, but a factory’s.’ In her reading, a packaging company shopped the design around, which explains why so many brands ended up with the same product pipeline. She also calls it what it is: ‘more a gimmick than anything.’

I say this with no moral high ground. When I launched Convié, we bought off-the-shelf formulas. They weren’t developed for us. Any other brand could have bought exactly the same product, and if they’d had a bigger budget, they could have tweaked the ingredients or packaging to call it their own.

That’s the dirty little secret of modern beauty. If you have the money, an introduction and can meet the MOQs, you can launch a beauty brand. You don’t need an idea, a formulation or a reason to exist. You just need capital.

Why is the beauty industry so saturated?

Three forces have made it too easy to launch a brand:

• Lower barriers to entry. White-label and private-label manufacturing means you can have a ‘range’ without a lab, a chemist or a single original formula.
• Globalisation. Anyone can access Korean, Chinese and European manufacturers, and Korean innovation cycles move faster than anyone else’s. As Palermino warns, unless you’re in Korea, by the time you launch in America, you’re already behind.
• Social-first launches. Products are increasingly designed to trend, not to work. Packaging that looks satisfying in a 7-second video gets prioritised over the formula inside it.

The result is a sea of (metaphorical) beige: thousands of brands and near-identical products, with nothing to separate them except the logo on the tube.

Why does nothing stay exclusive in beauty?

Unless you’ve invented a genuinely new ingredient or patented a formulation, almost nothing in beauty is protected for long. Formats get replicated. Textures get replicated. ‘Hero ingredients’ become category standards within a season.

This is especially true in makeup, tools and trend-led skincare. Innovation built on packaging lives on borrowed time, because the moment it works, the supply chain sells it to your competitors.

Frankly, it’s lazy. It’s also a shame, because the brands that get flattened by this are often the ones that did the work first.

Is the beauty industry broken?

The eye patches are a symptom of something much bigger.

I’ll be honest about where I’m coming from. Before I started Convié, I already felt disenfranchised with this industry, and a little lost. For much of my career as a marketer, I have often felt that half of my job was essentially inventing stories—reasons to convince people to spend money with us versus a competitor. It had to sound compelling, whether or not the product deserved it.

That isn’t marketing’s fault alone. It’s what the industry rewards.

Growth at all costs broke the incentives

For the best part of a decade, investor money poured into beauty, and with it came a single obsession: customer acquisition. Grow the customer base, grow revenue, grow the valuation. Profitability could come later.

That mindset amplified the worst behaviours:

• Brands became afraid to stand for anything. A firm point of view narrows your audience, and a narrow audience doesn’t fit a rapid-growth chart. So brands hedge their bets. They try to be for everyone, and end up meaning nothing to anyone.
• Trend-hopping became a strategy. If a format, an ingredient or a viral moment drives buzz and sales this quarter, jump on it, whether or not it has anything to do with who you are. Five brands, one eye patch.
• Vanity metrics replaced value. Shares, likes and launch sell-outs became proof of success, even when the customers never came back.

We’ve been optimising for the wrong things, and we’ve built a house of cards on top of them.

It’s a race to the bottom

When every brand chases the same trends, buys from the same suppliers and fights for the same fleeting attention, there’s only one way to compete: louder, cheaper, faster. Margins shrink. Identities blur. Consumers grow cynical. Each brand gives away a little more of what makes it distinct in exchange for a little more reach.

Brands shouldn’t sacrifice who they are for cheap likes and shares. But for years, the system has rewarded exactly that.

That house of cards is going to come down. And frankly, it needs to.

Do we need fewer beauty brands?

Yes. Let the house of cards fall. I’ll go further: the market needs to force the weakest brands out.

We need fewer launches and more closures among brands that have nothing distinctive to offer. We need a market that lets consumers focus on a smaller, better assortment instead of scrolling past forty versions of the same caffeine eye patch.

The correction has already started. In 2026 alone, AS Beauty shut down both CoverFX and Mally Beauty, and Malin + Goetz put its UK business into administration and closed all seven stores. Tariffs, rising costs and fierce competition are squeezing margins, and brands without a real point of difference are the first to go.

That isn’t a tragedy. It’s healthy for consumers, who deserve less noise and better products. It’s healthy for retailers, whose shelves have become interchangeable. It’s healthy for the planet, which doesn’t need another million units of a product nobody will remember by Christmas. And it’s healthy for the brands that deserve to win.

Why is celebrity no longer enough to sell beauty?

For a while, a famous face was a business plan. You licensed a name, bought a white-label range, posted to 50 million followers and watched the launch sell out.

Those days are over, and the celebrity brands built on nothing but a name also need to go.

Take Gwen Stefani’s GXVE. It reportedly slipped off Sephora’s shelves and went quiet on social media. Has ANYONE noticed?

Fame buys you attention. It doesn’t buy you a second purchase. A follower count gets people to try a product once. Whether they come back depends entirely on what happens when they use it. If the product is interchangeable with a dozen others on the same shelf, and many of them are, the celebrity becomes the only reason to buy it. That reason fades as soon as the next famous name launches.

Look at the celebrity brands that have lasted and you’ll see the name was never the product:

• Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades and changed what the whole industry considered acceptable. That’s performance and inclusivity, not just Rihanna. (The irony that Fenty is now one of five brands with the same eye patch isn’t lost on me.)
• Rare Beauty built a community around mental health, with a mission its customers support and a formula story behind the products.
• Rhode earned such loyal repeat customers with a tight, performance-led range that e.l.f. acquired it in 2025 in a deal worth up to $1 billion.

In each case the famous name was a megaphone for something real. It never replaced it.

Consumers today want two things celebrity can’t manufacture:

Community. People want to belong to something: shared values, a conversation and a brand that listens back. A celebrity who posts once a month and hands the rest to an agency isn’t a community. It’s a billboard. (It’s also why founder-led marketing done properly outperforms a borrowed face.)

Performance. People are more ingredient-literate and more sceptical than ever. They read reviews, watch dupes get tested and compare formulas. If your product doesn’t deliver, no famous face can save it.

A celebrity brand without community or performance isn’t a brand, it’s merchandise, and merchandise has a shelf-life.

Which beauty brands will survive the shake-out?

Economically, the Western world is in shaky waters. Brands who have enjoyed years of stability are feeling the pinch, the traditional marketing playbook has been thrown out the window, and businesses and consumers alike are battling existential crises on a daily basis. Running a business has always been hard, but it feels particularly gruelling at the moment, and many are not set up to survive—but those who WILL make it through to the other side are the brands who have a reason to exist beyond the trend cycle. 

1. Brands with real formulation IP. Dermo-cosmetic skincare brands, ideally those that formulate in-house, have a genuine moat. Their science is theirs, and it can’t be bought off a supplier’s shelf.

2. Brands that sell performance, not gimmicks. Who cares how satisfying the dispenser is if the product inside is mediocre? Novel packaging gets you a launch moment. Performance gets you a repeat customer.

3. Brands with a distinct point of view, backed by substance. A clear worldview and a recognisable voice make you memorable. But identity only holds when there’s something real underneath it. The strongest brands pair a point of view with a product that delivers.

What should beauty brands do now?

If you’re building, or thinking about launching a beauty brand, ask yourself these questions honestly:

1. Could someone else buy what you’re selling tomorrow?
If the answer is yes, your product isn’t your moat, so your brand has to be.

But brand alone shouldn’t be your moat, either. Yes, people buy on emotion. But if the only real value you provide is a positive feeling, is that enough?

As brand builders and business owners, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. You shouldn’t get by just because you have beautiful, inspirational imagery and you’ve built an emotive universe around a product that’s no better than anyone else’s.

What your moat should be depends on what you sell:

• If you’re a physical product brand, performance must trump everything else. Imagery sells the first purchase. Performance earns the second.
• If you’re a service business, your expertise and specialisation are the moat.
• If you’re a tech business, the technology is the moat.

Brand should amplify real value. It should never stand in for it.

2. Are you protecting what you’ve created?
That means patents where you can, exclusivity clauses with manufacturers, and first-mover speed backed by storytelling that makes you the name people associate with the idea.

3. Is this launch driven by a trend or a need?
Trend-led launches have a shelf life measured in weeks.

4. Would anyone miss you if you disappeared?
That’s the real test of a brand. If the answer is no, the market will eventually make the decision for you.

The bottom line

The eye patch saga is a warning. When five brands can launch the same product in the same week, the problem isn’t copying. It’s that there was never anything to copy in the first place.

It’s the natural endpoint of an industry that spent a decade prizing acquisition over profitability, buzz over substance and trends over identity. That model is collapsing, and I won’t miss it.

My prediction? In 12 months, one of these eye patches will still be on shelves, and it’ll be the one that performs best, not the one with the most satisfying dispenser. I’ll check back.

Beauty doesn’t need more brands. It needs better ones, with the courage to stand for something.

FAQ

Why are so many beauty products the same?

Most brands source formulas and packaging from the same contract manufacturers and suppliers, who sell the same innovations to multiple clients. Without patented formulations, products quickly converge.

What is the eye patch dispenser trend?

It’s a Korean-originated ‘fresh slice’ format in which a twist mechanism cuts a single hydrogel patch or serum portion at a time. Fenty Skin, Glow Recipe and Huda Beauty all launched versions in September 2026.

Is the beauty industry oversaturated?

Yes. Low barriers to entry, white-label manufacturing and trend-driven launches have created a market crowded with interchangeable brands, and 2026 has already seen a wave of closures.

Why are so many beauty brands failing?

Years of investment focused on growth over profitability pushed brands to chase trends and vanity metrics instead of building distinct identities and products that perform. With costs rising and competition fierce, brands without a clear reason to exist are being forced out.

Why do celebrity beauty brands fail?

Celebrity drives trial, not loyalty. Brands that rely on a famous name without offering strong product performance or building a genuine community struggle to earn repeat purchases once launch hype fades.

How can a beauty brand stand out?

Through formulation IP, proven performance and genuine community, with a distinctive brand identity that amplifies real value rather than replacing it.