Lip oil. Scalp serum. Tequila, somehow.

At this point a famous face on the bottle makes me check the ingredients twice.

So what does a celebrity brand actually need to survive the eye-roll?

-Abdel Khalil, Professional Eye-Roller

I’m going to start by saying this: I fkn love Jennifer Lawrence.

She has always been one of, if not, my favourite actress. She’s raw, real, funny asf and so incredibly talented.

So naturally, when I saw that she had FINALLY joined Instagram last month, I was so hype. Like yes, my girl, welcome to the circus.

Five days ago, she posted about launching her new hair care line: Mes beauty. The timing? Suspicious. The reaction from the internet: recession indicator.

I’ll admit, it’s a hilarious, razor-sharp piece of commentary, and it reveals exactly how the modern audience decodes corporate strategy. The reasoning follows a classic economic pattern: when the world feels unpredictable, traditional Hollywood financing tightens, and high-ticket luxury sponsorships slow down. So, A-list talent portfolios shift toward high-margin, recurring consumer commodities like makeup, scalp oils, and styling serums to hedge their bets against a downturn. A beauty line becomes the ultimate safety net.

But past the economic mathematics, this collective eye-roll exposes a much funnier, simpler reality: everyone is completely and utterly over the celebrity brand wave.

The celeb cash grab is so tired, and dropping a famous name on a plastic bottle no longer moves the needle. Nobody cares. The default response to a new Hollywood-backed beauty drop is no longer excitement; it is profound boredom. And frankly, the products are rarely ever good.

It’s not to say that consumers suddenly hate Jennifer Lawrence or Beyoncé or Rihanna. The issue is that the audience, after watching brand after brand after brand pop up, has learned commercial literacy. They have seen the mechanics of the celebrity brand incubator too many times to be tricked by it again.

We all know how the machine works now. A faceless private equity firm or beauty incubator builds a standard, generic formula in a lab, packages it in minimalist plastic, and licenses an A-list name to handle the distribution. The celebrity does a high-gloss photo shoot, pretends they’ve been obsessing over hair follicle health for a decade, and hops on an interview tour to pitch it as an authentic extension of their soul.

It’s a copy-paste commercial simulation, and consumers now reject the script. When a marketplace is crowded with an endless stream of identical, mediocre products hiding behind famous faces, the celebrity name stops acting as a premium differentiator. It actually starts acting as a warning sign of a lazy product.

To survive an environment where the audience has little trust for the celebrity wrapper, new brands have to abandon the legacy influencer playbook. The strategy can no longer rely on using a famous face to paper over an average formula.

The future belongs to product autonomy, building a business where the integrity and performance of the product can stand on its own two feet, even if the founder’s name was erased from the label.

Look at how the rare, successful outliers in this space operate. When Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty, or when Rihanna originally debuted Fenty Beauty, the initial hook was their fame, but the retention was driven by genuine innovation. Fenty fundamentally transformed the beauty industry by introducing an unprecedented range of foundation shades that solved a real consumer frustration. Rare Beauty focused heavily on accessible, ergonomically designed packaging for users with limited mobility.

The product utility did the heavy lifting.

The star power was just the megaphone, not the value proposition. If Jennifer Lawrence’s haircare venture wants to survive past its initial PR wave, it cannot rely on her Oscar-winning charm. As charming as that may be.

It has to prove that it can solve a specific hair-health problem better than a legacy drugstore staple that costs a third of the price.

Using a famous name as a shortcut to market share is a dead strategy. The ultimate flex is no longer being famous, but being functional.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.