What Makes a Beauty Experience Last Forever?

It was an unusual kind of night for Harper’s Bazaar digital director Lynette Nylander long before it started: Rarely does a dinner invitation request guests to specify their favourite fragrance. She RSVP’ed Yes with Robert Piguet Fracas as her perfume of choice.

The second surprise came at the dinner itself, which brought about 30 guests around a table at Manhattan’s uber chic Le Veau d’Or and surrounded them with their favourite fragrances. Thrown by Into the Gloss, and themed around the Top Shelf interview franchise that inspired Glossier, attendees were instructed to put stickers over their phone cameras to prohibit the kind of photography such dinners are usually designed to capture. Instead, Top Shelf interviewees like Nylander, the fashion writer Rachel Tashjian Wise and the Palm Heights founder Gabriella Khalil pored over each other’s perfume picks, trading anecdotes, memories and eventually flacons. Nylander went home with Tashjian Wise’s pick, Roja Parfums Lily.

“The whole thing felt analog, which I think was quite intentional at a time when the beauty industry has become so online,” said Nylander. This unplugged quality is perhaps why some guests didn’t realise until departing with their gift bags that the night was, in essence, a tastefully branded influencer marketing activation for You Soie, Glossier’s latest fragrance.

For Ashley Weatherford, Into the Gloss’ editorial director and the dinner’s host, the goal was to create the perfect conditions for chic people to talk about their favourite beauty products. “To me, the experience of Top Shelf is learning about beauty through the eyes of another person,” she said. The event was a success by an unusual metric for an activation: no Instagram posts, no earned media value; just an old-fashioned, on-brand experience. Days later, Weatherford flew across the Atlantic to host another one in London.

Designing and executing, branded bespoke experiences is a major and growing area of investment for beauty brands of all sizes, thanks to “world-building” marketing strategies and case studies like Rhode (whose recent Rhode World, staged near Coachella, threatened to drown out the actual music festival). On the other hand, it’s become harder to engage event-jaded influencers or the scroll-nauseous public without giving them a reason to put away their phones.

“I had a lot of conversations with brands at the end of last year, and the one word every single brand said to me was they want to ‘elevate’ their events,” said Bec Wilson, the founder of the Eleven Consultancy, who works with clients like ShopMy and Sarah Creal Beauty.

“There’s more pressure now to have the best guest list and make it feel photo-worthy,” added David Samuel Ko, whose interior and events firm Maison Ko has staged similar activations with Summer Fridays and Tatcha. “I’ve seen a lot of brands now aim to build more of an experience, as opposed to, like, ‘We’re at this venue and our product is here, and there’s a bar and there’s a DJ.’”

It costs a lot of money to build a world for a night. A seated dinner for 50 influencers could easily cost $100,000, said Ko. But for something more “full-on,” $250,000 “is a number that I feel like most friends are comfortable spending to show up very intentionally.” Consumer facing pop-ups in cities like New York, where short-term rent is astronomical, start around $300,000, according to Wilson.

For more immersive installations, like those created by the Dutch “experience design” studio Random Studios, the price floor is much higher. Projects for the firm start just shy of $500,000, and scale up and past the $5 million mark; clients include Apple and Nike, as well as beauty brands like Victoria Beckham and Glossier. Last year, at a Paris pop-up celebrating the brand’s fragrance Fleur, Random Studio created a highly personal experience for guests: When they lifted a bottle of Fleur off a pressure-sensored plinth, a poem about the moment was AI-generated in front of their eyes.

Experience designers like Lea Lemaire, lead creative strategist at Random Studio, make it their job to ask questions like, “What are new ways to create space around a brand?”

“The bigger cost is really the creative time, the research, the validation,” she said.

New Ways to Create Space

Beauty is experiential by default, given the personal nature of applying a red lip or pressing a serum onto one’s skin. This was part of the design logic behind the brand’s House of Victoria Beckham pop-up for Selfridges, which transposed the founder’s home into the retailer.

It looked perfectly residential, except for the handbags hung on light fixtures and shelves stocked with perfumes. “Bringing this very domestic theme to the experience also lowered the barrier of interaction with the products,” said Lemaire. “It becomes very familiar somehow.”

These events are, by definition, fleeting; like an AI-generated poem, they’re over almost as soon as they begin. But the new challenge for brands has become making these moments last forever — or at least as long as possible — in the memories of shoppers.

Renaud Salmon, the chief creative officer of the Omani fragrance house Amouage, hopes to achieve this with the newly announced Atelier d’Ingénierie Fades, a Paris-based workshop in partnership with the designer Dimitry Hlinka that will produce objêt like 3D-printed furniture, alongside less tangible “sensory experiences” like scented DJ sets.

“We see today a big demand from retailers, but also from other people in the industry, to bring that experience to life and to the next level,” said Salmon, who sees Atelier d’Ingénierie Fades as a resource for non-Amouage brands, retailers, artists and the general public.

New and emerging technologies are crucial to these experiences, but those designing them take pains to direct visitors away from the digital world and into the real one. Salmon hopes that things like 3D printing sessions can be turned into performances — with an olfactory element.

“It’s so boring to put a screen into the [space],” Lemaire said. “It’s half as good as my phone that I have in my hand already. I could have shopped at home.”

Making a Branded Moment Last Forever

Typically, brands will calculate their event’s return-on-investment by how much social buzz it generates, which is related to how much content is made. For Valentino Beauty’s blockbuster Studio 54 event for its Born in Roma fragrance, coinciding with New York Fashion Week in September 2025, the presence of Cher alone generated $5 million in earned media value, according to digital marketing firm Lefty, or just over 1 percent of NYFW’s total EMV for the season.

Brands without the deep events staff, budgets or celebrity influence of L’Oréal can still invest in high-quality production, said Wilson. “It’s that world building and that storytelling that top class production teams can bring to life. Brands should be spending on that.”

Ko started his events firm in 2019, but is trained as an interior designer; his talent for eventing comes from his attention to a space’s smallest details. One of his favourite events that he created came in August 2025, when he designed an Okinawan market on the Hollywood Hills property known as the Flamingo Estate. There were fruit stalls, a tea room and live shamisen and taiko musicians. “Every area was, like, activated,” Ko said.

Another was a dinner in early 2025 for Summer Fridays’ Cloud Dew moisturiser, staged to resemble an art gallery for one night only. “The question was, ‘How do you make this gallery feel like it’s been here forever?’” he said. Ko placed the product on podiums beneath plexiglass and filled the room with silver pillows that looked like a contemporary artist’s take on clouds.

The goal of Instagrammability hasn’t changed, Ko said. But social media is oversupplied with photos of influencers at dinners and nearby displays of products.

What Nylander liked most about Glossier’s dinner was how much she learned about perfume, and how delightfully unbranded it was. “The idea that you can appreciate fragrance, from Glossier or in general, that you can see the bottle on your vanity — you’ll remember the dinner,” Nylander said, “and you’ll remember the experience it gave you.”

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Disclosure: Brennan Kilbane worked at Into the Gloss and Glossier from 2015 to 2017.