Can Beauty Sell Wellness While Teaching Us to Find Flaws?
You can use a gentle cleanser and still be harsh with yourself. While applying skincare, you might notice a breakout, compare your face with someone else’s, or notice something else you wish you could change. Nothing has been said aloud, but a few minutes of caring for your skin have become a few minutes of picking yourself apart.
I love skincare, and I do not think wanting clearer skin is the problem. What interests me is how easily self-care can turn into self-evaluation. A product can be sold as self-care without the experience of using it feeling particularly caring.
That is why I find Ulta Beauty’s approach to wellness interesting. Its Wellness by Ulta Beauty concept includes categories such as Rest & Reset and Essential Routines, alongside an emphasis on education and guidance. This creates an opportunity to serve more than the appearance someone wants to achieve and make room for how they want to feel.
Ulta has also addressed the internal conversation directly. In 2023, it launched The Joy Project with Mel Robbins after associates reported regularly hearing customers criticize themselves while shopping. The initiative included training to help associates recognize negative self-talk and support customers in responding differently. The retailer acknowledged a problem another product might not solve: how someone feels about themselves while looking for it.
Beekman 1802 approaches this through a philosophy built around two ingredients: goat milk and kindness. Kindness isn't a cosmetic ingredient in the literal sense, but the positioning links gentle skin care to how we treat ourselves and others. In the article A Kinder World Starts with You: Building a Self-Kindness Routine, psychiatrist Eva Ritvo discusses pairing skincare with supportive self-talk, including the private commentary that finds fault with our appearance. This is brand-published guidance, not a clinical trial, but it recognizes that a skincare routine includes more than what happens on the surface.
What I appreciate about these examples is that they leave room for wanting better skin without treating the person underneath it as a problem. That seems important as beauty moves further into wellness. Products that promise comfort should be marketed with care, too, so the language around them feels just as soothing.
The skin–brain axis gives us a scientific reason to consider the wider experience. In Beyond Beauty: Neurocosmetics, the Skin-Brain Axis, and the Future of Emotionally Intelligent Skincare, Diala Haykal and her co-authors discuss how the skin and brain communicate through nervous-system and immune processes. Touch provides sensory information to the brain, while emotional stress can influence skin processes. The relationship runs in both directions.
My doctoral research examines how recurring beauty and grooming routines become integrated into everyday life and how people may come to rely on them psychologically. Participants have connected these practices with feeling calm, prepared, confident or more like themselves. Those accounts have made me interested in what happens across hundreds of mornings and evenings, rather than only during one application.
I didn't test internal self-talk in that research, but it raises a question I want to explore. When a routine repeats, what else repeats alongside it? Someone may become more familiar and comfortable in their own skin, or they may return to the same criticisms every evening. Looking only at which products they use would miss an important part of that experience.
This is also why I would not turn the idea into advice to repeat enthusiastic affirmations in the mirror. In Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others, published in Psychological Science, repeating a strongly positive statement made some participants with low self-esteem feel worse rather than better. Encouraging kindness is not the same as insisting someone believe something they don't feel.
The alternative can be much more ordinary. You can be frustrated with your skin without being frustrated with yourself. You can notice that a treatment isn't giving you the results you hoped for without treating it as a personal failure. Wanting improvement and withholding judgment are not incompatible.
For brands, I think this is where the beauty and wellness conversation needs to become more demanding. It is hard to promise emotional comfort while continually giving consumers new reasons to dislike their faces. Explaining what a product can help with is useful; suggesting that every visible feature needs correcting is something else.
That doesn't require abandoning efficacy or pretending skin concerns don't matter. It requires recognizing that a brand's description of a concern can shape how someone thinks about themselves. I would like to see beauty companies give application language the same attention they give texture, scent, and packaging.
Next, I'd want to keep the product constant and examine how instructions, attention, and internal dialogue shape the experience over repeated use. Does someone leave the routine feeling cared for, or more preoccupied with what still needs fixing? Those outcomes could differ even when the product performs exactly as promised.
Dania Khalife
