That lipstick I bought? I did it for the plot

“I’m a sucker—I bought the Estée Lauder x Sabyasachi lipsticks in every single shade the day they launched,” Freya Parekh, a fellow beauty obsessive and friend, confesses to me over coffee. “I have not once used it. I’m not a fan of the formula.” She pauses, then adds the line that explains everything: “But I bought it for the plot and kept it because it looks pretty.”

You already know where this is going. Because you, too, have a drawer full of useless-yet-gorgeous things: the serum you bought just for the shelfie, the lip gloss that tastes like grainy glue but looks good in the mess of charms on your bag, the eye patches that double as a logo billboard. None of this is about skincare. It’s about the smug thrill of knowing you’re in on the hype.

The summer you’ve been obsessed with everything on the internet

This desire to have what everyone else has isn’t new, but its mechanism is. The modern cool-girl aesthetic is largely engineered and amplified by algorithms. Ahaana Khosla, trend forecaster and founder of Foresight Forum (and a self-proclaimed pop culture enthusiast), explains, “The cool-girl factor is very driven by algorithms designed to feed multiple people the same thing at the same time. Suddenly, if you’re seeing the colour brown everywhere, it kind of becomes your favourite colour, even though pink used to be.”

That’s why you had a summer obsessed with Labubus, Stanley Cups, and matcha, and why you now have a Pinterest board for your Burning Man fits despite never having set foot in the desert. A brand seeds a product with a few tastemakers, the algorithm pushes it wider, and before you know it, ubiquity becomes desirability. Marketers call this Visible Value—the more you see it, the more you want to be seen with it.

Judge a lipstick by its cover

But what elevates a simple lip balm or a hand sanitiser or olive oil or branded toilet paper into an object of desire? Enter aesthetic utility. Sammi Cohen, a former big-tech product manager and consumer-behaviour expert, explains: “Aesthetic utility is when a product’s look is just as important as its function. In beauty, it’s the lipstick that doubles as a social accessory. It’s a conversation piece when you pull it out of your bag. The packaging, the logo, the cultural story—those become part of its ‘use’.”

Translation: you’re not just buying skincare. You’re buying status, self-expression, and a ticket into someone else’s universe. That’s why a $20 Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment can signal just as much as an $800 La Mer cream. You’re not purchasing hydration. You’re purchasing Hailey Bieber’s entire vibe.

And that’s the real point. People are now buying because they want to belong. As Cohen puts it, “Not many people are willing to admit out aloud that they want to purchase an item specifically to feel like a ‘cool girl’, but buying a status product is exactly this. It allows you to signal your status to the world.”

It’s a canon event

When Louis Vuitton dropped a $160 lipstick, the internet gasped, then lined up. Was it the best formula alive? Not the point. It was Louis Vuitton. “It is a ticket into the Vuitton universe for someone who may never buy a trunk,” Cohen says.

Jhalak Ajbani, founder of Diam Beauty, likens it to fashion’s most meme-able accessories. “A great example outside of beauty is the Jacquemus mini bag—it’s not really practical, but it became a cultural signature because of the story and image behind it,” she says. Was she thinking of building a new status beauty product when she launched the Lip Blurring Pot or the Glassy Tint Balm? “Not exactly, because I’m thinking formula-first. But we made our packaging rose gold to add a touch of luxury so we strike that balance,” she confirms.

Quiet luxury could never

Fashion has spent years preaching “quiet luxury”—the Loro Piana knit, the Cartier watch only other in-the-know people recognise. Beauty laughs at that.

“I don’t think beauty can ever go quiet,” Cohen says. Much like trees in a forest, if no one recognises you’re using the $300 cream, it loses half its value. Beauty status is performative—it lives on the bathroom shelf, in GRWM videos, in the accidental-on-purpose placement of the Maison Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 in the corner. Khosla agrees: “We’re moving into loud luxury. Beauty is now branded, literally. Those Chanel logo eye patches? They’re wearable ads for your good taste.”

Beauty starter pack

Right now, beauty’s status lexicon includes Louis Vuitton lipstick and Victoria Beckham Beauty Foundation—the OG luxury collectibles. But the new guard is just as powerful: think Rhode, indē wild, Crown Affair, and Summer Fridays, more accessible brands that trade on the cultural capital of their influencer founders. And then there’s Touchland hand sanitizer—proof that Gen Alpha can elevate literally anything into a flex, viral enough to land the brand an $880 million acquisition.

But hype has a half-life. The products that stick need either mythology (La Mer’s sea kelp story) or utility (Dyson Airwrap, dupe-proof). Without one, the signal evaporates as fast as the algorithm refreshes. Just ask Kylie Lip Kits, KKW contour sticks, or Glossier Play—all buzzy until they weren’t.

Hot girls don’t hoard. They collect

And so, the cycle continues. We all end up with the same drawer: things too pretty to toss, too annoying to use, and too hyped not to buy. Three identical balms in packaging you swore you were “just collecting”.

And honestly? That’s fine. Sometimes the point of beauty is beauty. Sometimes you buy the thing because it’s shiny and gorgeous and makes you feel like a cooler version of yourself. You don’t need to justify it with 18-hour-wear claims.

So yes, you’ll keep buying beautiful, possibly useless, things. I will too. The only real suspense is: what’s the next product we’ll all agree to want, even if we never use it?