‘Vibe Marketing’ Is Taking Over Beauty. What Is It?

Plus, Rhode hits Sephora

Author

Zihan Lyu
August 20, 2025

Skincare Unboxed

Here's what's happening this week in the world of beauty and skincare marketing:
- Rhode hits Sephora; the DTC brand gains nationwide shelf
- Mary Kay deploys AI shade finder to cut returns
- ‘Vibe Marketing’ is taking over beauty

💸 The $200B Miscalculation Marketers Can’t Afford

On stage at eTail Boston, Fospha’s Chief Product Officer, Dom Devlin, warned that retail’s reliance on last-click metrics is outdated, and it’s costing brands $200 billion in under-credited sales.

The missed connection is clear: shoppers often discover on TikTok, Meta, or Snap, but complete their purchase on Amazon, Walmart, or Target. Traditional attribution frameworks rarely connect those dots. As a result, channels that spark demand are stripped of credit, while budgets overweight the “closers” - whether or not they truly created the sale.

Dom called this the bottom-of-funnel trap: over-investing in channels that finish the purchase while underfunding those that generate demand. The fallout is higher acquisition costs and shrinking pipelines of future customers.

Fospha’s Halo platform was built to break that cycle. By integrating marketplace and DTC sales into one unified ROAS, it captures the full impact of discovery spend across the funnel. For brands like Nécessaire and Give Me Cosmetics, that visibility has unlocked the confidence to double down on demand generation while protecting profitability.

📥Download Fospha’s Halo Report to see how leaders are funding growth where it really starts.

📌WEEKLY MUST-KNOWS

Rhode enters all Sephora freestanding stores in the U.S. and Canada on Sept. 4, a month after its $1 billion acquisition by E.l.f. Beauty. This is a major DTC-to-retail pivot that adds scale, new audiences, and Sephora geo-targeting capabilities to an already viral brand.

Mary Kay launched an AI shade-matching tool to guide consumers to the right foundation in fewer steps. Expect higher conversion, fewer returns, and richer first-party data for CRM and product development. Signals that AI-guided shade, not static shade charts, is becoming table stakes across beauty.

Generative AI is shaping beauty creative and even product concepts around prompted ‘vibes.’ This lowers production costs and speeds iteration, but heightens authenticity, IP, and claims risks. Marketing, legal, and R&D teams will need shared guardrails on AI usage, disclosure, and validation.

🧐 What Does Brand Building Really Mean in eCommerce?

I had an engaging conversation with Alex Brownsell for the latest episode of the WARC Podcast. | Sam Carter, CEO at Fospha

We discussed where most brands get it wrong when it comes to brand building, with bad measurement and poor organizational structure amongst the biggest contributing factors - and how Fospha is aiming to solve the biggest questions around brand measurement with Glow.

Thanks Alex and team again for having me (and for offering a brief airconditioned respite from the intense heat and chaos of Cannes!)

⚡QUICK READS

Heaven Skincare’s Prism Protection Offers Broad-Spectrum SPF 50 Defense: Plant-powered SPF 50 moisturizer with niacinamide and multi-molecular HA signals ongoing SPF hybridization, creating content and retail education opportunities around anti-pollution and barrier claims. (More)

Beauty eCommerce Trends 2025: Data-driven personalization and flexible pricing over blanket promos highlight a shift to margin-aware LTV growth playbooks in beauty eCommerce. (More)

Skincare-Inspired Body Lotions: NIVEA’s Essentially Enriched Body Lotion leans into skincare-grade claims for body, signaling ongoing category blur and new merchandising/SEO angles. (More)

ClickZ is a ClickZ Media publication in the DTC eCommerce division