Last Thursday, September 17, Fenty’s PR agency pitched a new product, which it dubbed “first of its kind.” The product in question was a pack of hydrogel eye masks (certainly not a novelty) in what appeared, to American consumers, to be truly innovative packaging.
With a novel packaging system that freshly dispenses hydrogel under-eye patches through a grinder-style mechanism, as the user twists the grinder component, a fresh eye patch is dispensed. In its note to the media, Fenty said the packaging was “designed to solve some of the biggest pain points of traditional hydrogel patches, including messy liquid, single-use packaging, and patches that slip and slide.” All of this may well be true, except that it turned out Fenty was not the first to use this packaging; that distinction seems to belong to the Korean brand Wonder Bath, which launched hydrogel patches using this packaging back in July, which, for the time being, are only available in Korea.
Nor would Fenty be the last.
By Sunday, September 20, The Lipstick Lesbians received a package from Glow Recipe, which they shared with their 1.1 million Instagram followers. Glow Recipe was launching eye patches in the same packaging. “They probably said, we better release this soon,” said Alexis Androlockis in the video, referencing Fenty’s already-previewed patches. Videos began to proliferate across social media, with creators and commentators like packaging expert Allison Kent-Gunn Garibay (@allisonturquoise on social media) weighing in as well as marketing accounts like Brooke Yoakam (@thebrandblueprint_) who, in her post, said the brands involved all “got played by the same K-beauty manufacturer.”
And yet, the plot continued to thicken when, on Monday, another creator, Prableen Kaur Bhomrah, posted eye patches—once again, in the same grinder packaging, this time from Huda Beauty. Once again, creators rushed to post videos, and on Monday night, @Fentyskin posted a cartoon of the four packages looking at each other, a riff on the popular Spider-Man meme.
By Tuesday morning, Glow Recipe shared a cartoon of its own, depicting its package sitting amidst a blazing fire, with text reading “This is fine.” The caption read “Glow HQ right now…Just kidding, we actually love being in good company, especially alongside brands helmed by incredible female founders we love and admire 🤝More details to come… 👀”
And later, on Tuesday, Vitamasques posted a sneak peek of its own forthcoming eye patches in the same packaging.
Still, one can imagine it’s been a stressful 96 hours in the marketing departments for the three brands.
Noting that this is actually not so uncommon or surprising to those in the industry, cosmetic chemist and creator Jane Tsui (@janethechemist on social media) said in a video, “It's actually really interesting to see this all happen and go down in real time because now people are getting an inside look on how the beauty industry works.” As Kent-Gunn Garibay told BeautyMatter, “Consumers experience innovation very differently than the industry does.”
Huda Kattan herself posted on Yoakam’s post, writing “I think it’s pretty obvious that we all got screwed over by the same packaging supplier formulas are different, but we would lie to on the exclusivity with the packaging supplier, pretty crazy.” Though the comment had errors, Kattan seemed to suggest that the manufacturer had lied to her brand, while reassuring consumers that the products inside the packaging were different. Later, on yet another post, joking about the situation, Kattan commented that her brand would not launch the product at all, writing “Such a disaster 😂😂😂 we are not launching it anymore.” If true, this would presumably be a very expensive change of course.
But on a call with BeautyMatter, Glow Recipe co-founder and co-CEO Christine Chang said she saw it differently: “I don't think it's a screwed-over situation, it's more like we saw an innovation we were very excited about it, and it looks like other brands got excited about it as well, right? Because it's really innovative. It's very cool. Look, I don’t know [what manufacturer] Huda used, So it's hard for us to weigh in on her comment exactly. But I'm sorry she feels that way.”
There are, of course, NDAs around which brands work with which manufacturers and the public does not know which labs their products are made in, but according to Kent-Gunn Garibay, at least two prominent South Korean packaging manufacturers are providing this technology, and there are “competing claims within the supplier landscape around its development.”
And while the case of the eye patches might be the most viral, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Babba Rivera, founder of the hair brand Ceremonia commented on the same post, speaking to a similar experience industry followers will recall: “This is in part because the contract manufactures are terrible at honoring trade secrets and exclusivities. This happened to us with our dry shampoo pouf for @myceremonia—we paid hefty molding and exclusivity fees for the manufacturer to not release our design until 2 years after launch, yet in the same month another brand launched with the same packaging.”
“When I’m evaluating a highly differentiated stock package, I want to understand the competitive landscape around it before a brand commits significant resources to commercialization,” Kent-Gunn Garibay told BeautyMatter. “Who else has access to it? Is exclusivity available? If global exclusivity isn’t realistic, could we negotiate protection by geography, product category, channel, configuration, or time period? Are direct competitors already developing with it? Can we customize the component enough to create meaningful differentiation?” This week’s packaging pileup illustrates why those questions matter.
When considering what happened here, short of the obvious fact that the manufacturer provided the same packaging innovation to a number of brands, and none paid for exclusivity, product development consultant Tamar Kamen pointed to the question of minimum order quantities (MOQs). “Is it as simple as pay for the exclusivity in an ideal world? Yes,” but exclusivity “probably wasn’t offered,” Kamen said, noting that all three brands in question are major players at Sephora and the financial opportunity for the manufacturer (or manufacturers) would have been sizable. “If [exclusivity] was something that was on the table, it would have likely been for millions of units instead of hundreds of thousands of units,” Kamen said.
Kent-Gunn Garibay is thinking about the ensuing social media frenzy in terms of ownership and association—an important topic in the industry at the moment. “What makes this particularly fascinating from a packaging commercialization perspective is the speed at which we’re watching a highly differentiated supplier innovation move from pilot tooling to market across multiple major beauty brands. We now have at least three brands bringing the same grinder eye patch format to market on very similar timelines. And these aren’t brands operating in completely separate ecosystems. They have significant US distribution and overlap within Sephora, so they’re ultimately putting this innovation in front of many of the same consumers.” She explained although multiple brands may be entitled to commercialize the same stock package, a mechanism this distinctive becomes part of the product’s identity, creating an unusual competitive dynamic.
It is rare that anything feels truly owned in beauty—whether that’s a product name, packaging format, marketing strategy, or texture. Just this past weekend, social media erupted after Molly Sims tearfully accused another brand of using the name of her Yise Beauty Wide Awake Brightening & Depuffing Eye Cream. In her since-deleted video, Sims said the similarities extended beyond the name, arguing that “their marketing copy and campaign feels too close to home.” The accusation was leveled against Jones Road, whose founder, Bobbi Brown, said she had been unaware of Sims’s product and would rename her own. Because Yise had not trademarked the name, however, the claim centered less on legal ownership than on creative credit and industry etiquette. The situation also recalled the recent debate over who could claim the name and technique behind Patrick Ta’s Transition Blush, which launched in May.
These disputes expose the increasingly blurry distinction between inventing an idea, legally owning it, and becoming associated with it in consumers’ minds. As beauty’s development and marketing cycles accelerate, and brands draw from the same manufacturers, trend forecasts, and social platforms, similar ideas are increasingly likely to reach the market at once. That makes originality harder to establish and consumer perception more consequential: A brand may not have created or legally controlled an innovation, but with the right timing and marketing, it can still come to own it culturally.
“Consumers generally don’t distinguish between innovation developed internally by a beauty brand and innovation sourced through a packaging manufacturer. If a consumer encounters a new technology through one brand, they often experience it as that brand’s innovation,” Kent-Gunn Garibay said, noting that “When Fenty first teased the grinder format, the reaction online was incredibly curious and positive.” The existence of Glow Recipe’s and Huda Beauty’s products doesn’t change that the packaging is innovative; “What changes is any individual brand’s ability to build a strong association with it in the minds of consumers.”
Given the rapid rollout, some product formulators have speculated online that the brands may be using white-label formulas. Chang, however, distinguished the packaging’s visual similarity from the development of its contents. When asked about that allegation, she said, “Although the component might be really similar, that's the visual innovation that you're seeing, the contents of the formula, at least in our case, we wrote down the ingredients from the top to the bottom ourselves … Whether or not the contract manufacturer decided to keep things consistent [across brands] that we don't know.”
“It has exopeptides, it has caffeine, it has panthenol—some of our favorite clinically effective, proven ingredients are included in this formula, and we tested it extensively,” said Glow Recipe co-founder and co-CEO Sarah Lee, though the brand declined to elaborate on the testing completed. She pointed to the quick spread of the cushion compact as an example of the way innovation spreads rapidly in beauty. “Even if [one manufacturer] patents something, [another manufacturer] can create a tweaked version … If anything, it's exciting that so many people got excited about it, right? [These brands all] fell in love with this component and the technology and jumped on it quickly, right? It was honestly a matter of time,” she said.
Chang noted that pre-seeding to creators is a strategy the brand has long employed to drive hype around new launches and said that nothing it had done in the past few days was “reactionary.” Later on Tuesday, Glow Recipe began to tease more education around the product with a post that read “The packaging got your attention … but the formula will do the talking.” The brand declined to comment on the product’s price and said only that it will launch this fall.
Ultimately, the co-founders swore they did not see the coinciding launches as a negative thing; “[The founders of Fenty and Huda Beauty] are people that we respect and think very highly of, their stories are amazing too,” Lee said.
“Fenty absolutely benefited from being the first of these three brands to generate significant consumer attention around the format,” Kent-Gunn Garibay said, noting that even a few days’ head start can shape consumer perception.
“They were the brand that introduced many consumers to the grinder concept, and I think some of those consumers may continue to associate the format slightly more strongly with Fenty because of that first exposure.” But while being first may start the conversation, a lasting association requires more. “I expect that association to be much more fragmented across Fenty, Glow Recipe, and Huda Beauty precisely because their launches are happening so close together,” she said.
As these (and likely other) grinding eye masks hit the market, it will be a case of go-to-market plans, creator buzz, and of course, formula that ultimately determines whose eye patches win.
