What Comes After Beauty Branding’s Bold Font Boom?

When aesthetician and beauty influencer Charlotte Palermino launched her skincare line Dieux in 2020, she didn’t want to do so with yet another minimalist beauty logo.

Instead, she wanted something that had a vintage feel to it, and drew inspiration from the appearance of Parisian metro station signs and Renaissance emblems and seals. The final product used a custom version of a refined font called Perpetua, often used in biblical printings — a nod to the brand’s name, the French word for gods. But more importantly, it satisfied her primary objective: to be distinct from the rest of the category.

“Everybody was doing sans serif at the time. [It was] almost dated already,” said Palermino. Bucking the trend, she said, was “one of the smartest decisions that we made, because people have tried to copy it, but it’s hard to do … it’s completely custom.”

With endless brand options in beauty, a distinct visual identity has never been more important; it can make the difference between standing out on the Sephora shelves versus blending into the masses. But the industry has a history of sameness in packaging: In the 2010s, it was all about the minimalist aesthetic, defined by muted pastel colours (think Millennial pink) and clean, sans serif fonts. More recently, the tide has shifted with bold, chunky lettering dominating beauty shelves, seen on brands from skincare company Yse Beauty to Gen-Z makeup label Youthforia.

With the beauty space increasingly saturated, brands have largely pivoted to loud, “billboard-level” branding, according to Helen Steed, Glossier’s creative director at the height of its aesthetic dominance, as a way to compete for consumers’ attention both on-screen and on-shelf.

The trending look reflects wider forces at play. The TikTok beauty boom rewarded playful brand identities that stood out on screen, like skincare brands Starface and Topicals — both of which are dedicated to emboldening users about their skin’s imperfections rather than hiding them. The ups and downs of the pandemic era also saw consumers gravitating towards cheery, uplifting branding, while Gen Alpha shoppers flocked to brands in rainbow hues, like tween-friendly lines Bubble and Yawn.

But amid this mass migration from minimalism to maximalism, brands seeking to stand out run the risk of looking the same, making it more important and challenging than ever to look unique enough to stand out at retail.

“The biggest thing is looking at what’s in the market, and then going against that,” said Ali Ozden, creative director of Universal Favourite, the creative agency behind Youthforia’s brand image.

The End of Blanding

In the 2010s, brands like Glossier and The Ordinary ushered in an era of sleek, monochromatic packaging and marketing in beauty, a transition that was simultaneously occurring in fashion. A number of luxury houses, including Saint Laurent, Balmain and Burberry, moved away from their more elaborate traditional logos, stripping them back in favour of simplified sans serif fonts.

But shoppers soon tired of the “blanding,” complaining that all brands looked the same, parroting their own version of the glossy Millennial aesthetic.

A side effect of the rise of TikTok, Gen-Z favours a less polished look, and brands that have embraced a playful, more approachable appearance have risen in popularity. Acne brand Starface, for example, which is known for its colourful star-shaped pimple patches, has a “squishy, round, comforting feeling,” said founder Julie Schott, with its pillowy typeface and smile details. “It just feels soft.”

In designing the brand’s visual identity, the Starface team took cues from their favourite animated TV shows like “The Peanuts” and “Hello Kitty,” and created a main brand “character,” called Big Yellow — a smiley face icon with star-shaped eyes on the brand’s pimple patch boxes — to humanise the product.

“He’s funny, he’s silly, he’s weird, he’s nervous sometimes,” said Schott. “These are the things that Starface represented early on in a world when there was an aesthetic that was unattainable in a lot of ways and not available to everyone.”

Brighter colour choices and bolder typefaces help convey relatability and positivity, two attributes more beauty brands today are looking to embody. Topicals doubled down on using funky, colourful labels for products intended to solve skin “issues” and reframe them in a positive light.

It also helps brands look less clinical, instead illustrating the confidence their products are meant to instil. Dermatologist-founded haircare label Seen, for instance, is meant to exude an elevated, contemporary feel with its bold lettering spaced out across packaging, while haircare company Olaplex rebranded in February with a thicker version of its original logo, and added sentence capitalisation to its secondary fonts — a pivot from its formerly all-caps typography, which could be “overwhelming” to shoppers, according to chief marketing officer Katie Gohman.

Fonts that Speak for Themselves

If too many brands, however, embrace the thick typefaces and bold colours that have become synonymous with this latest generation of beauty brands, they run the risk of becoming as overdone as the minimalist aesthetic once did. The brands that are clear on what makes them different will have an easier time reflecting their story through custom or unexpected font choices.

“There’s not a whole lot of pizzazz or glamour or the original essence of beauty products,” said Tara Tersigni, founder of Yawn. “You wanted beautiful bottles on your table … And that was what used to attract us to mess with our mother’s or grandmother’s stuff.”

With its mix of fonts, Dieux, for example, manages to communicate various elements of its brand world. The historic and biblical inspiration in its logo is meant to make customers feel like it’s something they’ve seen before, while its secondary fonts serve a different purpose. Cooper Black, which is used for product names, is more approachable and was often used in advertising in the 1960s and 1970s. The brand uses the feminine script-style Kapakana in event invitations, while the pared-back Swedish Simplon font, used for its ingredient list, is meant to emphasise the brand’s clinical backing all while “romanticising science,” said Palermino.

Bold fonts can still work, so long as they are infused with the storytelling that makes a brand unique. For instance, haircare brand Gisou’s logo, while thick, has a unique curving serif styling reminiscent of honey — a key ingredient in its products — and “feels like a big ice cream sundae,” said Steed. Through the unique font alone, it can communicate a “brand world [that] is whipped, creamy and lush.”

Whatever the approach, going “all in” on a chosen font style is especially helpful in the crowded beauty market, according to Universal Favourite’s Ozden. But an evocative logo doesn’t necessarily mean being the loudest brand in the room.

“The logo only does so much of the work. It’s the world that they build around it. That’s the magic,” said Steed. “But it doesn’t just get led by screaming the loudest. What are we saying?”