Beauty wants you to go all touchy-feely

There are beauty products I use because they work. Then there are the ones I use because I enjoy having them around.

For me, it started with Eadem’s Le Chouchou lip balm. Nothing particularly revolutionary about the formula. What kept me hooked was the little metal applicator, cool against my lips every time I used it. It was such a small detail, but suddenly putting on lip balm felt like something I wanted to do rather than something I had to do.

That, essentially, is sensory beauty. It is everything about a product that exists beyond its shade, ingredients or promised results: the texture, temperature, scent, sound, and even the way it feels in your hand.

Spend five minutes on Beautygram and you’ll see products wobble, bounce, squish, and melt. Applicators are cold metal or soft silicone. Blushes come in jelly-like textures that practically beg to be poked. Creams melt into skin, compacts make satisfying little clicks, and some skincare smells suspiciously good enough to eat. The product is no longer just something you use. It is something you experience.

Makeup with a personality

For years, beauty sold us performance: full coverage, long wear, pigment payoff, sweat-proof, transfer-proof. Then makeup started borrowing from skincare and every product suddenly had an extensive ingredient list that sounded like a chemistry lesson.

We kept asking our products to work harder. Now, perhaps, we want them to be a little more fun, too. Marc Jacobs Beauty’s return, for instance, taps into its Joyride Sensoriality concept–the idea that beauty should be playful and engage the sense–with the bouncy Money Shot jelly highlighter gel and the cream-to-powder Born Star eyeshadows that open with an addictive swivel mechanism, all designed to make makeup more satisfying to touch and use.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. Milk Makeup’s Cooling Water Jelly Tint has a satisfyingly squishy texture, Gush Beauty’s Play Pot comes with a cute spongy applicator, and Sheglam’s Lunar Glow Highlighter goes all in on space-inspired packaging. Too Faced adds a peachy scent and rollerball to its loose setting powder, while Typsy Beauty spotlights a cooling metal applicator.

Aaron Christopher, a makeup artist and publicist, thinks some of this comes down to beauty becoming predictable. “I think the beauty community is bored of plain-Jane makeup,” he says. “It can’t just be about performance anymore. If I’m making a purchase, I want it to smell good, feel sexy, and look cool sitting on my vanity. If it's another black casing, it won't make me feel excited. In the words of the famous Cassandra meme, ‘Where's the flavour?’”

That is a different expectation from simply wanting a good blush. Now, the blush has to work, but it can also have a texture you want to touch and packaging you want to leave on your vanity. Christopher points to Huda Beauty’s Easy Bake Powder, whose recognisable scent eventually inspired a fragrance. “When your setting powder has its own perfume lore? That’s called branding,” he says. And he has a point. When formulas and beauty claims start sounding increasingly alike, sensory details can set a product apart.

It is the ritual, too

There is also something deeper happening here. “Sensory experiences tend to stay with us because our brains are wired to connect sensations with emotions and memories,” says Arpita Kohli, psychologist and counsellor at PSRI Hospital, Delhi. “A particular scent, texture or even the feeling of applying a product can activate areas of the brain associated with emotion, reward, and memory.”

That makes beauty particularly suited to sensory experiences, because so much of it is ritual. The perfume before a wedding. The lipstick before going out. The moisturiser before bed. When something feels good, smells familiar or simply makes the routine more pleasurable, we are more likely to look forward to repeating it.

Makeup artist Nishi Singh has noticed the shift in how consumers talk about products, too. “We’ve spent years talking about makeup in terms of coverage, pigmentation, and longevity. Now we are talking about bounce, melt, glide, cooling, and touch. That tells me consumers are becoming much more conscious of how a product makes them feel, not just what it does,” she says.

Of course, a good texture cannot save a bad formula. No amount of satisfying packaging will make you repurchase a product that does not deliver what it has promised. But perhaps that is exactly why sensory beauty feels less like a gimmick and more like the next logical step. We are not choosing pleasure instead of performance. We are asking for both.