On the heels of Lawless Beauty’s successful Forget the Filler lip franchise, the makeup brand is taking the no-filler idea further with the debut of its first skin-care product on Friday.
Called Forget the Filler Skin-Plumping Line Smoothing Perfecting Cream, the new cream may be the first skin-care item from 6-year-old Lawless Beauty, but it is not the first time a makeup brand has attempted to expand to skin care. Other brands in recent memory include MAC Cosmetics in Nov. 2022, Ilia in January and Benefit Cosmetics in February. Forget the Filler’s claimed benefits include smoothing lines, plumping and hydrating.
The Forget the Filler franchise first debuted in 2021 with a lip gloss launch. Lawless followed up with an overnight lip mask in early 2022, and that is when the team understood the potential for Forget the Filler to extend beyond lip products. According to the company, Forget the Filler product sales have grown 201% year-to-date compared to 2022. Overall, Lawless sales have increased 135% year-over-year, and revenue has more than doubled year-over-year for four consecutive years.
“I want to be very strategic and do things that make sense. We will forever be a makeup brand, so we want to develop things that make sense, from a makeup perspective,” said Lawless.
Lawless readily admitted her hesitancy as a beauty consumer to purchase skin care from a historically makeup-centric brand. The notion of trusting your skin to a makeup brand whose products more often cause skin issues like acne is a common concern. But Lawless said there is another, more advantageous way to think about this makeup-skin care dichotomy. She said that makeup brands can have a better perspective on skin care because they understand how products need to perform to enhance makeup. The better your skin looks, the better your makeup looks. Lawless said she wanted the product to be universal and appropriate for sensitive skin and something that even makeup artists could rely on in their kits for different clients.
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“Everything you put on your face, from step one to step 50, should be doing something for your face,” said Lawless. “This is where makeup and skin care should be [headed.] … [Sometimes] it’s a mystery to figure out what products will all work with each other, and that’s why I wanted to create something non-problematic.”
The marketing will emphasize the clinical results of the Forget the Filler’s hero ingredient, Maxi-Lip, featuring a proprietary complex of peptides and biomimetic hyaluronic acid, among other soothing and plumping ingredients. A revised version of Maxi-Lip, called Maxi-Youth, is included in the Perfecting Cream. Imagery includes before-and-after photos from clinical tests, and side-by-side jars of the overnight lip mask and new face cream, with the statement, “Does for your face what the mask does for your lips.” Lawless is also partnering with two dermatologists, Dr. Dendy Engelman and Dr. Sheila Farhang, to create content and share the product’s benefits with their audiences.
“We focused on leveraging credibility and authority from multiple trustworthy sources to help people understand that, even if we are a makeup company, we’ve done the legwork with Forget the Filler for the lips, and we’ve done the same thing and more so for Forget the Filler for the skin,” said Michael McNeil, CMO of Lawless Beauty.
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Lawless Beauty will also lean heavily into video, both for unpaid social posts and paid advertising. McNeil said Lawless had quadrupled its video budget in the past two years. The videos consist of micro- and nano-influencer-produced video content to show their skin-care results with Perfecting Cream. These videos will be reshared on social platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. They’ll also be used in digital advertising that drives people to Sephora.com’s product page and LawlessBeauty.com microsites and landing pages. McNeill said video digital ads can often have a 3x-4x return on investment, compared to a static video. But there are, of course, invisible investment costs for videos, like the time it takes to produce them and the costs to establish a video team.
“Where we are at Lawless and who we are as a brand are well summed up in Forget the Filler Perfecting Cream,” said McNeil. “We’re a high-performance makeup company with skin-care roots and DNA. Even if you weren’t interested in any of the skin-care aspects of it, we made sure that we doubled down on how this works in your makeup routine. This is where we are saying, ‘OK, guys. You can have both.’”
