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An influencer who scouts for VC firms breaks down 5 beauty industry trends to watch in 2023

  • Blake Newby is a beauty influencer and scout for a venture-capital fund.
  • The fund is the part of VC firm BrainTrust that invests in Black beauty and wellness companies.
  • Newby shared her top five trends to watch in the beauty industry in 2023.

Beauty brands are trying to figure out how to build credibility and staying power as trends shift rapidly on social media, according to influencer and VC scout Blake Newby.

Newby scouts for a fund associated with the BrainTrust Founders Studio, a branch of the venture-capital firm BrainTrust that invests in Black founders of beauty and wellness companies. She built connections with founders in the industry as a former beauty editor who worked for publications like Essence and Glamour.

As celebrity- and influencer-backed companies like the makeup brand Morphe Cosmetics and Addison Rae’s Item Beauty stumble, Newby shared with Insider her thoughts on what’s next for the beauty industry and what brands should — and shouldn’t — be doing right now.

1. Look to the red carpet for long lasting trends

Instead of chasing fleeting trends on TikTok, beauty brands should focus on cyclical and long-term themes, Newby said.

For instance, “slugging,” a skincare routine that involved putting Vaseline on your face and leaving it overnight, swept the app in 2022 and faded just as quickly.

“That would not have been enough time for a brand to to basically create an entire slugging product,” Newby said.  

Newby said brands should look to traditional beauty showcases, like red-carpet events, to spot trends with staying power. She pointed to bold blush looks, which were all over the Met Gala in 2022, and are still popular today.

“I believe, contrary to many, that red carpet and Fashion Week beauty trends still drive a lot,” Newby said. “We look at two years ago when everybody was doing blush. Now there’s blush everywhere, every brand has a liquid blush.”

2. Brands need to embrace color

Continuing on the note of blush, Newby said that when brands ask what to do next, her answer is often to incorporate color into their cosmetics.

The “clean girl” and more fresh-faced aesthetics that blew up online in 2021 still matter to an extent, but they are giving way to more colorful looks.

Colorful makeup is among the cyclical trends that Newby says brands should focus on. She also said these products will reach women of color, who are no longer hesitant to wear bolder makeup looks. 

“Women of color, I would dare to say, we consume more color and we prefer color,” said Newby.

3. Black skincare brands are evolving their formulas, and will lead the clinical skincare industry

As an investor in Black founders, Newby has noticed that Black skincare brands are developing more advanced formulas.

Black skincare brands like BeautyStat, which BrainTrust invested in, and Epilogic are creating products like retinol and Vitamin C serums that are backed and based in science because they have Black chemists in their labs. Previously, Black skincare was more focused on hydration and moisture-driven products. 

“Ron Robinson is one of the most brilliant chemists I’ve ever met in my life,” Newby said. “He is using Vitamin C at some of the highest concentrations that we’ve ever seen in safe ways for Black skin, and his product is literally life-changing.”

4. Put the people developing the product at the forefront of the brand, as cconsumers seek reputation over familiar faces

Newby thinks that celebrities will still have a big role in the beauty industry, but said shoppers also want proof these products actually work.

She said consumers are much savvier now than they were five to ten years ago, and are skeptical when celebrities that hadn’t previously shown an interest in the beauty industry launch their own brands.

These celebrity brands are often created with experts, Newby said. As an example, Robinson is the chemist for Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode. But those experts are not at the forefront of their marketing, which she thinks needs to change.

“People want a product that works and they want to know that it works,” she said. “Who better to explain the efficacy of a product or to explain the history of a product than the person who created it.”

5. Brands’ relationships with beauty influencers will change

Newby said brands have to get creative with the way they work with beauty influencers and ditch one-off collaborations in favor of long-term relationships. 

She said inorganic content doesn’t perform as well with audiences these days. It’s not beneficial for brands to send products to a creator for a single post or campaign.

“Rarely do sponsored posts perform as well,” she said. “What I’ve heard a lot of brands say is that they’re going to spend less money on these posts with creators because they’re just not seeing the ROI as much.”

In turn, beauty influencers also need become knowledgeable about the ins and outs of beauty industry, from knowing product formulas to actually helping brands cultivate collections. It’s not enough anymore to test out products for posts. 

This why we’re seeing brands arrange more PR trips with influencers, like Tarte Cosmetics’ lavish Dubai trip with Alix Earle and Meredith Duxbury.

“We have to be students of the industry,” Newby said. “We now are going to have to be not just creators but the consultants and the quasi scientists and the testers. And so our role with these brands will look bigger.” 

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