Underwire

The beauty industry is worth somewhere between $100 billion and  $532 billion depending on who’s counting. I probably contribute around $100 of that each year – hard to tell how that fares to national averages, because not much research has been done identifying a number. 

(Seriously, try to look up how much people spend on specifically makeup, and you’re met with sourceless claims and BuzzFeed listicles adding up the total cost of haircuts, manicures, skincare, and makeup, but no one ever breaks it down into chunks.)

As far as makeup goes – I’m low maintenance. I have other things I would rather be doing, like laying on the couch doom-scrolling, so on days I do wear makeup, I keep it extraordinarily simple. I go for the whole “no makeup makeup” thing. If you’ve even been on Instagram, you will know what that means. If not, here you go.  

“No-makeup makeup” makeup

An air of “effortlessness” has been critical to our notions of beauty since at least as early as Castiglione was writing sprezzatura instruction manuals for Renaissance-era courtiers. More recently, it has manifested as trends like normcore fashion, folkpunk, and bug art. Much ink has spilled on the artistic merits of ironic detachment – but what about its economics? 

The cheeky notion of using makeup to not look like you’re wearing makeup sprung into the popular consciousness sometime in 2014. Looking at 2013 and earlier, the phrase “no makeup” renders you a Google search identical to an incel forum page. 

Why 2014? Because something major happened in beauty: the launch of Glossier. 

Glossier is a direct-to-consumer company, a model that now infects our podcasts with the intent of changing how we sleep, how we dress, and how we feed our dogs. Raising $8.4 million in 2014, Glossier grew out of a makeup blog, and built an “it girl” empire. Glossier’s ethos, the “I woke up like this” look, has spawned dozens of other so-called clean beauty brands, or otherwise gave major beauty conglomerates a new trend to market on. 

I am a victim of this trend. I love the cheeky, optimistic packaging of brands like Youthforia, Tower 28, and, of course, Miss Glossier herself. Once I overheard a girl in undergrad say that Glossier is for people who are already beautiful with good facial structure and I have been grasping onto that with every last vestige of my self-esteem. I wear Glossier, I must be naturally beautiful. 

Despite being a victim of cute marketing, I am also a lunatic cheapskate. I will buy the cheapest thing I can while still fitting all of my ethical and chemical criteria (vegan/cruelty-free, fragrance-free, etc etc). I am also addicted to making little charts. So, why not combine a shopping addiction with some data science? 

Methodology

(Or, you can skip ahead to the good stuff)

If I’m going to buy something it needs to fulfill three requirements:

• Be “reasonably priced”: a total nonsense qualifier. I don’t know the true cost of anything; I just am not going to buy a $30 blush. Purely a vibes-based judgment.
• Must be cruelty-free: animals are friends!
• Should be in a color I don’t already have: more on this later 

So, I stuck those qualifiers in a spreadsheet, along with some other important critical identifying information. I ended up with a database of a couple hundred entries that looks like this at the top:

Brand

Product

Product name

Application area

Color family

Shade name

HEX

Texture

Cost

Vegan

If I were to make a career pivot, probably a top-five job would be product naming. So, to honor our hardworking copywriters – a group of people with an underrated difficult job! – I did not only capture the general color (“color family”) but the unique name the shades are referred to by the company (“shade name”). Here are some choice faves: 

Brand	Color	Shade	HEX
Axiology	Red	Strength	890508
Axiology	Purple	The Goodness	963938
Merit	Purple	Raspberry Beret	93464D
Merit	Brown	Falcon	5D2F11
Kjaer Weis	Orange	Courage	E77358
Kjaer Weis	Red	Above and Beyond	DA5043
Ilia	Red	Cheek To Cheek	CE4E40
Ilia	Orange	I Put A Spell On You	FE7F5A
Glossier	Orange	Beam	FBA588
Glossier	Purple	Wisp	D474A4

I also, as seen above, cataloged texture (ex. matte, glossy, shimmery), application area (ex. eyes, face, lips), and product type (ex. lip gloss, multi-balm). Most fun, and most importantly, I pulled the color codes of all of the products in my sample. Aside from a tiny voice coming from the segment of my brain that gets a rush whenever I see something in rainbow order, I wondered what colors were canonical no-makeup makeup colors. 

And about my sample: I pulled most of these from Credo, an online beauty department store priding itself on offering “clean beauty, vetted to the highest standard”. Many of these brands I knew from elsewhere, but since I cannot buy just one thing at a time (because the same amount of work and packaging goes into two things, therefore making it eco-friendly), Credo has become the place I shop for beauty products. Swatches were pulled from color-picking the little squares that let you know what color product you are looking at. Veganness is judged based on listed or researched information about brand formulary and testing practices. If I mischaracterized a brand, it is because I got it wrong or didn’t check properly, so please make sure you double-check if you are feeling ~*~influenced~*~. Texture was pulled from brand-developed copy, so I cannot confirm how true-to-life it is. 

The color of no-makeup makeup 

With all of my HEX Codes in tow, obviously the first thing to chart is all of the colors. A big mathematically-driven rainbow. I picked two random variables for the axes, and mapped every data point.

Cute! This is every color for every product that I virtually swatched. But this doesn’t tell us anything about the brands, the products, or their canniness for looking like they’re not makeup at all. 

Just to get a feel for the number of brands and products I’m looking at, I decided to go with the highest possible view of the data and look at what products each company concentrates in, and what those color palettes look like. Mocking it up quickly we get this.

Okay, this is kind of useless – the markers are too small and bunched together to actually identify individual colors. Mouseover the points at your own caution. One takeaway is that everyone carries blush. Assume (correctly. So is it still really an assumption?) that a multibalm is designed with cheek application in mind, then every brand in this study has at least two shades. Lipstick is underrepresented (I suppose any color other than rosy-adjacent is too obviously an externally sourced pigment?), and so is eyeshadow (for the same reason?). A possible reason for this underrepresentation is I am not perfect and might have forgotten to capture every brands’ every product. Another possible reason is maybe lipstick and eyeshadow aren’t worth the formulation, the market is too competitive, or it doesn’t fit the clean girl vibe. 

Another way to break this down to tell a story might be looking at what color ranges companies are dominating. The best two represented brands in my list are Glossier (hey bestieeeee) and Kjaer Weis. I own many Glossier products, I own no Kjaer Weis products. Is there a reason?   

To the untrained eye, the above two samples may look similar in color range, but to the level 999 trained eye who compiled these colors it also looks similar in color range. That makes sense – who blushes green? Of course, if we’re talking about the colors of natural makeup and minimalist adornment, then, yes, actually, there are some big differences between the palettes. 

Most interestingly, to me, a person who buys from Glossier twice a year, if not more, is the difference in blush ranges: Glossier runs 10 blush shades (or Cloud Paint, in brand parlay), while Kjaer Weis runs 13. Glossier blush comes in pink, orange, and purple, with variations on temperature in those categories. Kjaer Weis blushes come in pink, orange, and purple, but also brown and red. The differences between red, pink, and purple can be argued, but the Kjaer Weis browns are brown. The Kjaer Weis palette is not as rich and jammy as Glossier’s palette. I mean, just look at the shade Soar – it’s delectable! Kjaer Weis Happy pink does not come close.

Glossier Soar

Kjaer Weis Happy

Though for complete accuracy, I need to do some additional coding (#GirlsWhoCode) and show what these colors actually look like on skin. The easiest way to do that would be to not code at all; the easiest way would be to not even ask such a brave question. But what is life if not a never-ending struggle. Anyway, so, I took one of the charts I already made and I added two lines of code, and was able to simulate the look of makeup on skin. Kind of. 

Oh yeah baby that’s totally what skin looks like, oh yeah. 

Conclusion…?

If I have learned anything from this, it’s that I am so vulnerable to marketing. A few months ago when updating my database with a few more brands, I ended up buying ~$100 worth of makeup. My conclusion is that if that’s the cost  of motivating myself to finish this visual investigation, then I suppose it’s worth it? 

Well, actually, I suppose the real conclusion is that I am lucky to have a skin tone that can wear these shades. Many women have reported that the no makeup look isn’t for them, not because they don’t love the aesthetics, but that brands’ formulas are too sheer for dark skin, or clash against olive tones. Others are dealing with skin concerns like acne or redness that frustrate the canvas of smooth and even skin needed for The Look ^tm.