Marc Jacobs Beauty Relaunch — Beauty Might Finally Be Getting Its Personality Back Too
- Lucy Seremak
- May 30
- 5 min read
Marc Jacobs Beauty is returning
For the past few years, beauty has been looking increasingly… beige. Not literally, although there has certainly been no shortage of taupes, neutrals, soft pinks, muted creams, and products promising that elusive “your skin but better” finish. But emotionally beige too. Safe. Polished. Focus-grouped into submission. Somewhere between the tenth minimalist serum launch and another clinically clean compact wrapped in pale beige packaging, beauty started losing some of its personality.
The original Marc Jacobs Beauty launched in 2013 under a licensing agreement with Kendo Brands, the beauty incubator behind brands like Fenty Beauty and KVD Beauty. When the agreement ended in 2021, the brand disappeared rather abruptly from shelves, leaving behind a surprisingly emotional reaction from consumers who had spent years building collections around it. The relaunch now arrives under Coty — and thankfully, not as a soulless licensing exercise with a designer logo slapped onto generic formulas and forgettable packaging. Marc Jacobs Beauty deserved better than that. And from what we’ve seen so far, it got it.
Walk down Marc Jacobs memory lane
I still remember my first Marc Jacobs Beauty palette. It was my first luxury makeup product, and at the time it genuinely shifted my perception of what beauty could feel like. Until then, makeup largely lived in shiny plastic packaging with loud logos, questionable hinges, and formulas you convinced yourself were better than they actually were because the campaign imagery was good. Then suddenly there was this sleek black lacquered compact sitting in my hands that felt more like an object from a beautifully designed apartment than a makeup palette. The packaging, reportedly inspired by the lacquered coffee table in Marc Jacobs’ own living room, felt expensive in a way beauty rarely did back then. Not loud-expensive. Confident-expensive. The subtle logo somehow carried more authority than the oversized branding dominating many beauty counters at the time. It understood something many luxury brands still struggle with: when a product is truly desirable, it does not need to scream. That palette ended up becoming the beginning of quite a large Marc Jacobs Beauty collection over the years. And somewhere in a drawer, I still keep it for sentimental reasons, despite owning products technically “better” by today’s standards. Not because it is the most advanced formula ever made, but because it reminds me of a very specific beauty era — one that felt new, aspirational, and emotionally charged. The brand disappeared just before I could restock my favourite blush. I have been looking for a replacement ever since. Nothing has quite hit the same. And that is perhaps the most interesting part of this relaunch. It reveals how emotionally attached people became to beauty products during that era. Not just because of performance, but because beauty still had strong identities back then. Products felt tied to worlds, aesthetics, personalities, fantasies. Beauty brands invited you into something. The original Marc Jacobs Beauty arrived at a moment when prestige beauty still felt heavily divided between either overly serious luxury or mass-market trend chasing. Marc Jacobs entered somewhere in-between. Luxurious without becoming intimidating. Cool without trying too hard to appear cool — arguably the hardest thing to achieve in branding. Looking back now, it also feels strangely ahead of its time. The weighted packaging. The editorial aesthetic. The understated branding. The tactile experience. To put it shortly, Marc Jacobs Beauty showed how creative driection in beauty should look like. Many of the design codes that later became standard in prestige beauty were already sitting inside those black lacquered compacts.
Beauty Moved On
But beauty moved on. As it always does. The pandemic years shifted the industry heavily towards skincare and minimalist makeup. The “clean girl” aesthetic took over feeds, campaigns, product development, and even the way people approached beauty routines. To be fair, a lot of good came from that shift. Makeup formulas improved dramatically. Consumers became far more educated about ingredients, quality, skin health, and product performance. Brands were pushed to create products that worked harder instead of simply looking pretty on a vanity table. But somewhere along the way, beauty became increasingly sanitised. Every brand started blending into the same visual language. Pale neutrals. Clinical typography. Minimal packaging. Effortless makeup. Entire launches designed to offend absolutely no one. The industry became so obsessed with looking elevated that many brands accidentally removed the fun. Recently, it has often felt like only indie brands were willing to take genuine creative risks anymore. That is why the return of Marc Jacobs Beauty feels culturally interesting beyond simple nostalgia.
Marc Jacobs Beauty Relaunch
The relaunch does not appear embarrassed by personality. Quite the opposite. It leans directly into the Marc Jacobs universe. The univers that is very diffrent to the original black lacquer aestetic. The colours, the playful proportions, the boldness, the slightly chaotic glamour — the collection feels visually connected to the wider Marc Jacobs fashion DNA instead of existing as a disconnected licensing afterthought. That matters. Too often, large corporations treat designer beauty lines as merchandising opportunities rather than extensions of a fashion house’s identity. Consumers notice that disconnect immediately. Luxury customers today are significantly more visually literate and brand-aware than they were a decade ago. They expect coherence. They expect storytelling. They expect emotional consistency across categories. Marc Jacobs Beauty seems to understand that.
Start of New Era?
I can't shake the feeling that this creative direction is again ahead of its time and signals a return to something beauty has been missing for a while: personality. The brand return arrives at a very specific cultural moment. One where people appear increasingly exhausted by aesthetic sameness. Quiet luxury dominated fashion for years because economic uncertainty tends to reward understatement. But beauty operates slightly differently. Beauty is ritualistic. Emotional. Theatrical. It lives on bathroom shelves, in handbags, on vanities, in memories. People do not only buy makeup for functionality. They buy it for identity projection. That does not mean the clean girl aesthetic is suddenly disappearing overnight. It may never go away and that's fine with me. But that being said, I belive that after years of lockdown, cost of living crisis, and everything that world is trowing at us we deserve a bit of fun. I may not go back to multicolored cutcreas makeup any time soon but a high quality formula, with skincare benefits wraped in fun, fresh, playful but at the same time elevated paceging... sign me up! And I know I'm not alone in this feeling. Marc Jacobs Beauty relaunch may represent one of the first visible cracks in beauty’s long reign of minimalist sameness and new trends in luxury beauty. A reminder that consumers still crave personality, humour, colour, emotional attachment, and products that feel distinctive rather than algorithmically approved. And honestly? Beauty could use a little more of that again. Because perhaps the most telling thing about Marc Jacobs Beauty’s return is not that people missed the products. It is that people missed how the products made them feel.
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