How lip gloss became the answer to Gen Z’s problems

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

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The Goop-ification that marked the last decade of consumerism (as exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s feel-good nostrums) shows increasing signs of decay as shoppers, especially Gen Z, exhibit a more critical eye.

Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all ... See more

She was very fond of saying, “People ask, is Glossier a tech company? Is it a beauty company? And I say, yes.” It was a little bit trendy, a little bit sexy to be a tech company in that age. And if you are a tech company, that justifies the amount of funding you're getting and can potentially raise your valuation.

In a sense, this is another manifestation of “Power to the People.” While often viewed through the lens of socio-political or -economic strife, this flock toward the excessive and extravagant is a push against another type of commercialized institutionalism:  wellness .

From seductive night luxe, to innocent kidcore, it’s as

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The reality of that particular kind of business is that there are certain things that just radically have to be rethought. The mechanics of how you convert in a beauty store, that will change. And that might be one of the things that changes for good. We might look back in five years and go, “my god, I can’t believe I used to try on makeup that som... See more

The creator of Real Housewives of Clapton had a theory for why niche consumer objects have become such potent symbols online. For millennials and Gen Z-ers, material gain is more about these small, semi-expensive life-style choices—oat milk in your latte—than about bigger ones such as buying a house or having children, which are much harder to achi

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