There is a special kind of fatigue that cannot be cured by sleep, a vacation in Biarritz, or the incessant application of a 140β¬ ($227) super serum. It is the fatigue of having produced something for a living without ever having made anything meaningful at all. This is what it feels like to be a luxury beauty creative.
Why? Because our industry is not really in the business of making something beautiful. It is in the numbers business, and beauty is merely a fabulous facade.
The top beauty conglomerates collectively launch tens of thousands of new products every year. This means that somewhere, at all times, a person with a degree in fine arts or advanced literature is being asked to make the 947th lip gloss launch feel βdisruptiveβ. Incidentally, the word βdisruptiveβ is evidence the English language has entirely given up on meaning.
Here is the original lie: that the work would be clever, or beautiful, or interesting, or in the rarest and most intoxicating cases, that it might shift something. Change a mind. Make someone feel something new.
The great campaigns did this. Chanelβs ΓgoΓ―ste β Jean-Paul Goudeβs 1990 masterwork for the menβs fragrance in which a phalanx of women storm the balconies of a hotel, hurling the word ΓgoΓ―ste! at an unseen man to the thunder of Prokofievβs Dance of the Knights, slamming their shutters in synchronised, magnificent fury. No one A/B tested it. No algorithm suggested it. It was excessive and operatic and entirely uninterested in being relatable. That was 36 years ago, and the industry has been focus-grouping its way back to divine mediocrity ever since.
Creative burnout is not simply from working too hard. Humans can work very hard and feel wonderful about it, provided the work has a point. The burnout is from the pointlessness. It is the metabolic cost of pretending that what you are doing matters while knowing, in the part of your brain that still belongs to you, that you are making nothing but noise.
The World Health Organization formally classified burnout in 2019 as an occupational phenomenon characterised by βfeelings of energy depletion, increased mental distance from oneβs job, and reduced professional efficacyβ. Note that last phrase. Not reduced effort. Reduced efficacy. You are not burnt out because you are lazy. You are burnt out because you are competent and it doesnβt matter. This is a meaningfully different kind of hell.
I recently attended (read: survived) an annual international luxury marketing meeting. For those unfamiliar, the atmosphere resembles a TED Talk that fell into a nightclub, wrapped in a spreadsheet. Enormous screens. Presenters whose enthusiasm suggests a sincerely held belief that an increase in market penetration in South-East Asia is cause for an audible squeal (yes, this really happened). And music that is far too loud for a Monday morning.
You sit in an auditorium watching a succession of executives presenting growth metrics with the cadence of revival preachers. The word βpurposeβ is used. The word βvaluesβ is deployed. Everyone speaks to eco-responsibility while simultaneously announcing new product lines at maximum frequency. Someone uses the phrase βbeauty that moves the worldβ and you think, yes, it certainly moves units.
The CEO mentions βinvesting in creativityβ and βthe power of brand storytellingβ, and you think, wonderful, perhaps your favourite campaignβs creative budget will not be cut by 15 per cent this year. Spoiler: it will be cut by 20 per cent.
The form of capitalism practised by multinational beauty conglomerates, in which the hunger for self-optimisation is algorithmically commodified and answered with products that fuel even more want, is a particularly elegant form of perpetual-motion machine. It does not need to end. It does not need to mean. It only needs to continue. And it requires, for its continuation, a steady supply of talented, half-hopeful, increasingly underfunded people willing to believe that this quarterβs campaign might be the one that justifies their career.
So you go home. You go home and you make a quiche.
This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is a metaphor, but it is also an actual quiche, and the distinction matters because in advertising, nothing is ever completely the thing it claims to be.
A quiche is a very simple proposition. You make a crust. You fill it with eggs, cream and whatever you have β leeks, perhaps, or gruyΓ¨re, or the last of the spinach that is nearing its expiration not because of planned obsolescence but because it is spinach. You can put something a little creative in there. Like wattle seed. Or chilli crisp. You put it in the oven. You wait.
It does not require a deck. It does not require alignment across stakeholders. No one will A/B test your quiche. It will not be presented at an international reunion with accompanying bass drop.
And when it is done, you eat it. With your hands if you like. At your own table. In the silence that is available only to people who have, at least temporarily, stopped producing.
The only KPI is whether or not it tastes good. If it does, and it will, because a quiche is very difficult to ruin β which is more than I can say for a campaign β then you will have made something worth consuming.
This is not a revolution. A quiche will not dismantle a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. It will not fix the beauty industryβs waste problem, or give meaning to your job, or make the next reunion any less loud. But it is yours. You made it. It is the fruit (nay, the quiche!) of your labour. It has a crust and it has a filling and it has a purpose, which is to be eaten by a person who is hungry. And that person is you.
Set the oven to 180Β°C. You know what to do. Quiche against the machine.
Symonne Torpy is an Australian who currently calls Paris home, where she slays a new pair of heels every day. If you want to catch her after 7pm, there had better be wine on the table.