The ugly truth behind beauty’s obsession with packaging

But what struck me first about these little bottles was the range of fragrances (“Sea and Sandstone”, “Crisp Morning Air”) – these were no longer grim products to stave off germs but luxury items to layer as perfume. They were dainty and colourful and crucially, covetable. That was the first thing. The second, which I noticed as I circled the grand display, was that each one was being sold alongside its own tiny holder, a handbag specifically for hand sanitiser, designed to dangle from your own larger bag. I approached them dreamily – 3in tall, encrusted with diamanté beads, this was an accessory for your accessory, and a sure sign (I thought, idly, as I floated off to Soho) of the nearing apocalypse.

Some years ago I used to edit the Observer’s beauty page, a job that veered pleasantly between thrilling, comforting and sickening in a single day. It became increasingly clear that the beauty world was evolving in opposition to the real world, which, perhaps, is how it should be – beauty as a place of fantasy and illusion, unbothered by the vagaries of nature.

But particularly in an office where behind us a desk of journalists were reporting on, say, how the climate crisis impacts human security, it became increasingly awkward to unpack an Instagrammable waist-high music box filled with glitter in order to retrieve the single cherry lip balm from its cardboard bowels. Every new product arrived in its own small wasteland of microplastics, every parcel intended as a viral unboxing opportunity. At first each delivery felt incredible – colleagues would gather round as if at a party –, but as months, then years passed, each arrival of another huge, vibrating box felt increasingly ominous.

The beauty industry produces more than 120bn units of packaging globally, a massive proportion of which goes into landfill. There have been moments of action to combat this, with some brands offering refillable products, but in an industry propelled by newness, the reality looks more like greenwashing. My eyes now open to the thriving market for tiny hand-sanitiser handbags, I see other brands increasingly appear to embrace the waste. They don’t think of it as waste, of course – this packaging for its packaging becomes coveted merch. Last month, Grazia reported, “Swinging from the handbags of the masses appears a fresh new status symbol. This time? It’s the not-so-humble beauty charm,” sparkly cases designed to hold individual cosmetics. Once contained, a lipstick transcends its simple lipstickness and becomes a cherished, dangling pet.

Last Christmas, Space NK offered complimentary “charming” services, where customers who bought a lip balm could have it adorned with branded bits of jewellery. Since then, there have been miniature toy versions of beauty products, big cuddly versions (one purchase per customer, such was the demand), vanity cases and purses to keep them in. Maybe the most successful piece of recent beauty merchandising, though, is the branded phone case with its tactile slot to carry and display a matching lip tint. The Established is calling this shift towards merch, “The lifestyle-ification of beauty”, encouraging customers to build a whole identity around a brand rather than just wear the mascara. Today, pimple patches have their own cute compacts to live in, lip glosses wear their own bracelets – hanging from a bag these are not just products, they’re pieces of their owners, they’re externalised ambitions, they’re precious, fruity, babies.

And one side effect of this beauty merchandise is that customers become cheerful walking billboards for the brand. It reminds me of my first term at art college, when a TV show came to town offering students £100 to do stunts of the producers’ choosing – my crush on one boy quickly dissolved when I heard he’d agreed to get the show’s name tattooed on his leg. Now, we think nothing of paying them. I do see the appeal of the objects, of course. There’s little I find more alluring than something little – as with a mini pig, a miniature handbag is a hundred times more charming than a normal one, partly due to its innate uselessness.

But accessories for accessories, packaging for packaging, the desperate humanising of inanimate objects… I find that dwelling too long on the meaning of this cultural shift brings on the feeling that we are hurtling towards some oblique catastrophe. The distant sound of drums, the smell of burning plastic, a sense of falling. It’s possible to torture myself, for fun, balancing these glancing fears around a crisis of overconsumption, inclination to dehumanise each other but impose personalities on moisturiser, death, with the equally pressing, some say primal need to buy three or four jangly pouches in which my lipbalm can safely nap.

Milky ways Imagine a life that is gentle and soft enough to allow for these milk-glass mugs from Yod and Co? They stack, like a neat little pastel rainbow, and appear to have the simple chunkiness of a cup in which you’d be served a £1.50 tea at a roadside caff. Available online from Glassette.

Bright spots Top Stories was a ‘prose periodical’ published in New York from 1978 to 1991. It included Cookie Mueller’s How to Get Rid of Pimples, a series of character studies of friends interspersed with spotty photographs by Nan Goldin and Peter Hujar, which I’ve had an eBay alert set up for decades. Little did I know, the republished set is available now for £23.

All of a flutter My boyfriend cuts my hair and I dye it at home – the only investment of time I make in my appearance is, whenever possible, visiting Teresa, online as ILoveLash.com, whois not just good company but an eyelash artist, and  expert in the ‘lash lift’. This is a sort of gentle perm of the lashes, one that instantly makes you look alert and expensive. Teresa’s newest treatment is the ‘anime lash sandwich’, which is pleasingly spiky.

Photograph by Getty Images