What’s Behind Beauty’s Charm Obsession

Beauty’s latest must-have obsession doesn’t moisturise the skin, tint lips or carry a pleasing scent — but it does offer sparkle.

Lately, beauty shoppers have been rushing to personalise everything from lip balms to key chains with jewellery-style charms from their favourite brands.

“Basically anything you can think of, we will find a way to charm it,” said Margaret Mitchell, chief commercial officer at Space NK. The British beauty retailer is offering complimentary “charming” services in two of its largest stores during the holiday season, where customers who buy a lip balm can have it adorned with branded charms. The charming craze began to pick up steam at the start of the year when the popularity of the viral insulated reusable Stanley Cups became so great, it created a cottage industry of ways to adorn them.

Etsy sellers offer a range of “cup charms” and accessories like cloud-shaped straw covers or rainbow-beaded wrist bracelets, while Amazon touts add-ons like stackable snack trays that fit over the top of the cup. Meanwhile, charm bracelets and necklaces have increasingly been rising in popularity, with Google searches soaring 75 percent in the last year, benefitting a swath of brands from Danish jewellery giant Pandora to the Charleston, S.C.-based Hart Jewelry.

From there, “charming” spilling over into the beauty world was inevitable, said Shai Eisenman, founder of the Gen-Z skincare line Bubble. Customers want to personalise and prettify as many of their purchases as possible, with lip balms proving a particularly popular charming target. Bubble’s first range of charms, priced at $15 for five, features branded motifs, replicas of top-selling products and emojis, all threaded onto a chain that easily attaches to its $9 Tell All Lip Balm. Since its September release, it has sold out four times, and a follow-up holiday themed range was equally popular when it debuted on Bubble’s website.

But the craze isn’t limited to tween-friendly brands, or even a tween-friendly price point: for the holidays, Chanel released a refillable smaller version of its classic Chanel No.5 perfume on a decorated chain, designed to thread onto a purse strap for $195. A sizable portion of the Carolina Herrera lipstick display in upmarket London retailer Harrods is dedicated to charms, with customers able to pick a patterned case and add on a $27 charm to their $53 lipstick and case from a selection of brightly-coloured details like enamel butterflies, tassels and hearts.

“We have definitely been pleasantly surprised by how phenomenal [Carolina Herrera sales] have been,” said Imogen Porter, beauty buying manager at Harrods.

The rise of beauty charms dovetails with a wider obsession with branded merchandise, that started with elevated athleisure — cosmetics makers Glossier, Jones Road and Summer Fridays all offer sweatshirts, slippers or totes — but has increasingly skewed towards toys and trinkets, appealing to the incredibly important Gen Alpha shopper, but also Gen-Zers and Millennials, who similarly crave personalisation or some form of cuteness in their purchases. Bubble also offer a cuddly, stuffed toy version of their best-selling moisturiser called Slammy The Squoosh (currently sold out and limited to one per customer due to popularity) while in September, retailer Ulta Beauty launched tiny toy versions of some of its top products, like Tarte eyeshadow palettes and E.l.f Beauty lip oils for $9.99.

A successful foray into charms can help create buzz and increase a brand’s chance of having a viral moment, but moreover, they can be a low-lift way to recruit new customers, whilst also allowing brands to offer a kind of personalisation to their products that would otherwise be onerous.

The Ultimate Brand Builder

For Eisenman, selling charms is less about driving sales than it is about building brand awareness. She said that to stay in line with the business’s ethos of being an affordable brand for teens — many items are under $15 — the charms were also low-priced, but are weighty and high-quality. As a consequence, Bubble is “barely making any profit on them,” said Eisenman.

“We never wanted to be a brand that sells merchandise for like $80,” she added.

Instead, they serve as a way to increase traction amongst existing customers, and provide a little more visibility and advertising for the brand; a lip balm adorned with five branded charms is more of a conversation starter than just a lip balm. As Porter points out, for higher-end brands, charms can also be an entry point. “You may not be able to buy into Herrera fashion, but you’re getting a piece of it via the beauty line instead,” she said, adding that the customers often choose a different, additional charm when they come back to buy a new lipstick refill.

“It’s a great way to drive loyalty, because once the customer has bought into that original set-up with the case and the refill, they’re more likely to come back and keep replenishing,” she said.

Personalisation Mania

Moreover, by offering charms, brands give customers personalisation options without needing to change their core product offering or create a new service like engraving or embossing. For Bubble, the charms were not even especially difficult to produce from a procurement or supply chain perspective — Eisenman said they were much quicker to manufacture than a new skincare product.

Personalisation is frequently tipped as an area of interest for beauty shoppers, but execution can be costly and cumbersome. Adding on a selection of charms or other adornments is a much lighter lift with big impact. Porter said Harrods’ well-to-do customers are especially motivated by the sense that a product is somehow customised to them. “It’s just so important for our customers [to] feel like they’re getting something unique,” she said.

With their bright colours, eye-catching patterns and limited-edition nature, they’re also perfect TikTok and Instagram fodder. Similar trends have buoyed add-on purchases like vanity cases and pochettes from cosmetics makers like Saie and Fara Homidi, while Rhode’s viral “lip case,” an iPhone cover with a groover contoured to hold its signature lip balms, is one of the year’s breakout beauty buys.

“It’s that blurring of the lines between accessories and beauty…it’s beauty living beyond just being a functional product and actually being an object in itself,” said Porter.

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