What Happens When Beauty Stops Feeling New?

I recently read Dr. Steven Dayan’s essay Can You Become Immune to Beauty?, and it made me think about a related question: What if the beauty routines we notice less over time are sometimes the ones we have come to rely on most?

Dr. Dayan writes about habituation, the tendency for our response to something to weaken after repeated exposure. The object does not necessarily become less beautiful or pleasurable, but our attention to it changes because it is no longer new. He also points to research suggesting that interruptions in pleasurable experiences can sometimes restore enjoyment that has faded through continuous exposure.

That idea becomes interesting in beauty because the industry is built on two forces that appear to work against each other. Beauty constantly sells novelty, yet many of its most successful products depend on consumers doing the same thing repeatedly.

Fragrance offers one of the clearest examples. Someone can wear the same perfume every morning and eventually notice it far less than they did when they first bought it. Research on olfactory adaptation shows that repeated or prolonged exposure to an odor can reduce sensitivity to that smell, while sensitivity gradually returns after time away.

A similar change can happen psychologically with the broader beauty experience. The first time someone opens an expensive moisturizer, the packaging feels special, the texture is unfamiliar, and they may pay close attention to how their skin feels afterward. Six months later, they can apply the same product almost automatically while thinking about everything they need to do the next morning. That does not necessarily mean the product has become less valuable. It may simply mean that what once felt remarkable has become normal.

Beauty brands sometimes underestimate this distinction. Excitement is often treated as evidence of a strong consumer relationship, which helps explain the constant pressure for another launch, ingredient, or limited edition. Yet novelty and familiarity serve different purposes. Novelty creates interest and trial, while familiarity can build trust, skill, comfort, and eventually routine. A product may therefore become less exciting as it becomes more integrated into someone’s life.

A 2026 Journal of Retailing study, When Familiar Retail Experiences Feel New: How Unfamiliar Environments Increase Enjoyment, offers another way to understand this tension. Across eight studies, the authors found that consumers liked familiar products more when they encountered them in an unfamiliar environment. The new surroundings encouraged a discovery-oriented mindset, which made the familiar products feel more novel.

The research wasn't specifically about beauty, but the implications for the industry are useful. Brands may not always need to change a trusted product to make the experience feel fresh. A new context, application method, occasion, or discovery experience can change how someone perceives something they already know.

Consumers already experience this in everyday life. A fragrance that fades into the background during a normal workweek can suddenly feel different when worn on vacation. A lipstick someone has owned for months can feel new again when paired with an entirely different look. Even returning to a product after experimenting with an alternative can remind them why they liked the original in the first place.

This also raises an interesting question in skincare: how often do consumers interpret familiarity as declining effectiveness? Someone may say that a product doesn’t work as it used to when part of what has changed is their reference point. The smoother, calmer, or more hydrated skin that initially felt like an obvious improvement may eventually become what they expect to see every morning.

That does not mean every product that appears to stop working is still effective. Skin changes, formulations can change, and a product may no longer meet someone’s needs. Brands should never use habituation to dismiss a legitimate concern. It does suggest, however, that the consumer’s perception of efficacy may depend partly on what they have learned to consider normal.

Beauty marketing has trained consumers to pay enormous attention to transformation. We document the before and after, the first application, the immediate glow, and the dramatic improvement. Maintenance is much harder to make exciting, even though maintaining a desired result may be exactly what a successful product eventually does.

My doctoral research has made me think about this tension somewhat differently. I study recurring beauty and grooming routines and how repeated practices become integrated into everyday life. Habituation helps explain why a familiar experience may attract less attention over time, but I am also interested in what familiarity may be building underneath that reduced attention. Something can become more ordinary while simultaneously becoming more psychologically important.

This becomes visible when the routine is disrupted. An interruption may renew attention or enjoyment, as habituation research suggests, but it can also reveal how much a person has come to rely on the routine precisely because it has become so dependable. Through a multi-method research design spanning qualitative work, construct and scale development, and controlled experiments, my doctoral research examines this broader relationship between repetition, reliance, and disruption. The findings are still developing, but they suggest that what happens when a routine is taken away may tell us something that everyday familiarity alone cannot.

Sometimes disruption does not create value. It reveals value that became hard to notice because it was so dependable. From a consumer-behavior perspective, habituation and attachment do not necessarily contradict each other. The immediate pleasure or novelty of an experience can decline while familiarity, trust, and reliance increase.

Brands may have an opportunity to introduce novelty around trusted products without disrupting what consumers already value. This also offers a lesson in how brands understand loyalty. Asking whether someone still finds a product exciting may reveal surprisingly little about the depth of the relationship. A more useful question may be what happens when that product is unavailable.

Beauty companies spend enormous amounts of time trying to create the first wow, and that makes sense because novelty earns attention. The more meaningful relationship may begin after the wow becomes ordinary and the product earns a place in someone’s life.

Beauty can stop feeling new without losing value. Sometimes a product stops feeling exciting long before it stops being important, and we only realize how much it mattered when it is no longer available.

Dania Khalife