AI doesn’t consume beauty products.

It doesn’t get nervous before a date.

And yet, somehow, we thought it could sell beauty products.

With zero training or instruction from us.

Let me explain.

In the latest State of Fashion: Beauty Volume 2, June 2025 report by BoF and McKinsey, you can read what most of us already feel in our guts: Consumers are starting to mistrust AI-generated beauty content. It just looks fake.

Especially Gen Z.

You know, the same people who can spot a sponsored post from ten scrolls away, and who treat filters like “digital lies”.

In fact we’re all tired of “perfect.”

All we really want is real.

The product doesn’t matter

Beauty was never about the brush or the bottle. It was about what it means to you.

I was sitting in a briefing. It was a big agency. The beauty strategy director floated in, with lesser strategists in tow.

It was one of the best briefings I had ever been in. For a fragrance brand.

At the end of it all I asked a silly question:

What does it smell like?

The room went silent (it was my first time working on fragrances).

The point is, they make the fragrance fit the mood that we set in the TV ad.

I didn’t know this at the time.

The current GenAI tools can’t get near that level of subtlety unless you tell them.

Outsourcing creativity is not the way

Beauty brands and agencies have jumped on AI like it was a miracle serum.

They thought:

• Less influencers
• More control
• Infinite content

And it worked. Sort of. Until it didn’t.

Because somewhere along the line, beauty content stopped making people feel. It just made them scroll past. Again. And again.

The irony of chasing “flawless”

The real glow-up? Texture. Crunchiness.

That slightly off-kilter, badly lit bathroom mirror selfie. The voice memo review. The friend who whispers, “This one actually works.”

AI can’t do that yet. Not because it’s broken, because it was never built to understand nuance.

You can’t automate goosebumps. You can’t outsource emotion.

You can’t get someone to fall in love with a product… if it looks like it was born in a server farm.

Sorry folks, ChatGPT is NOT intelligent.

You have to tell it these things, guide it towards this type of creative.

Here’s the subtle bit you might miss

The BoF report says only 10% of execs are actively using AI. 60% are still just experimenting. Staggering.

They suggest that you keep AI in the background, for support tasks.

That’s your sign.

Not to back away from AI, but to actually learn it. Not to replace creativity, but to amplify it.

This isn’t a tech issue. It’s a fluency issue.

The smartest brands will use AI to tell more human stories.

Not fake, vanilla, robotic, digital shadows.

So what do you do instead?

• Tell real stories. Real skin. Real experience.
• Make your brand tactile again. Pop-ups. Samples. Messy moments.
• Crucially, teach your teams to become fluent in GenAI, not let AI think for them.

The future of beauty isn’t synthetic.

It’s sensory.

And if you’re building a brand that wants to stand out in this chaos, remember: perfection is boring.

Make us feel something.

First published on Medium