• by Olivia McLean , Columnist, July 17, 2018

Covergirl and James Charles. Maybelline and Manny Gutierrez. Rimmel and Lewys Ball. Across the board, beauty brands are expanding their aisles and SKUs to accommodate a new kind of consumer. 

Socially transgressive and unapologetic, this consumer rejects traditional gender constructs of male/female, masculine/feminine in favor of more fluid identity expressions that allow them to express themselves across a variety of attributes, some of which may be masculine, feminine, a combination of the two, or neither. 

They are gender fluid.

A number of beauty brands have responded to this paradigm shift by making more room for male representation in their media and marketing budgets. While this is certainly a step forward, these efforts often fall short of addressing the broader cultural phenomenon that is gender fluidity. 

Inclusion of male influencers in beauty campaigns (example: Covergirl with James Charles) are often reduced to images of men in caked-on masks of makeup, drawn in bold and bright colors that fail to reflect the diverse and multifaceted ways that men are engaging with the beauty category.  

Though the maximalist makeup looks seen on celebrities like Jeffree Starr certainly serve as one manifestation of gender fluidity in beauty, the oversimplification of “male beauty” to a single image of a man in red lipstick wearing doll eyelash extensions is about as limiting and inaccurate as saying that all women who wear shoes wear heels. 

The importance of this nuance has been recognized by some beauty retailers, like Blue Mercury, which announced this past summer that it would be increasing efforts to cater to male consumers seeking “subtly enhancing” makeup.

“Our male clients are on CNBC, doing a TED Talk, and they realize that their image is going to be around forever,” Blue Mercury Founder Barry Beck said in an interview with Forbes this month. “They’ve got to look good and they’re buying in the makeup category…”

Yet, though a number of men want to dip their toes into the beauty category more discreetly, most beauty brands continue to act on “gender fluidity” by reducing the image of “male beauty” to one where men are simply reimagined as pink, glittery unicorns.

The real issue with this approach isn’t that glittery makeup isn’t attractive or that this isn’t how men want to use beauty to express themselves. In some cases, this is exactly how men want to engage with beauty. The issue is that such a narrow portrayal of male beauty fails to speak authentically to how men are engaging beauty as a new means of expressing and exploring gender. Such efforts represent token diversity of a demographic, without respect or mind for its diverse modes of expression. 

Apart from these problems, reducing all men in beauty into a single, often clownish portrayal has another flaw. It still makes beauty all about gender. The beauty campaign becomes all about men who are “acting” or “looking” like women,” as opposed to what this movement is really about: a culture shift away from gender stereotypes and labels altogether. 

In looking to the future, beauty brands would do well to follow in the footsteps of brands like Milk Makeup, which show consumers today as they really are — operating on a spectrum between the natural and the bold, the traditional and the progressive, the “masculine” and the more “effeminate.” These consumers are the new aspiration, confidently navigating the beauty industry to arrive at unique, self-identifying looks that he, she, or they can truly claim as their own sans, gender label or construct.