The world of beauty marketing can often get a little weird. While the products are all dedicated at making us look more beautiful, sometimes selling prettiness gets a little boring, and brands have to get creative - like when Rihanna collaborated with MSCHF to sell sachets of Fenty products that had a 50 per cent chance of being lip gloss, and a 50 per cent chance of being ketchup. Did it work? We may never know, considering the difficulties of tracing the success of a marketing campaign to the russian roulette of recieving ketchup sachets, but Fenty Beauty is currently worth over a billion dollars. That’s all I’m saying.
The latest in weird beauty marketing landed in London this week in the form of massive, larger than life, King Kong-esque mascara wands dotted across London, courtesy of New York-based beauty brand Maybelline.
The wands, which are approximately the size of a pub garden parasol or large adult man, are suspended from billboards for Maybelline’s new Sky High mascara at central locations like Tube stations or traffic crossings, and that’s not even the best bit: they’re interactive.
This marketing is genius 😭 pic.twitter.com/fN4FHntgyg
— Drag Doll ♥️ (@DragDollCo) July 6, 2023
As buses and tube trains pass by the appropriately placed wands, their eyelashes are stroked by the wand in the style of applying mascara. Oh, it is important to note here that Maybelline has also attached large fake eyelashes to the buses and Tube trains.
It’s an objectively ridiculous marketing stunt, but the internet has just stumbled upon it and is treating it like a child they never knew they had. “I’d buy so fast lmfao this is good marketing,” wrote one Twitter user in reply to the video, with another adding, “They graduated from the Barbie marketing university with HONORS,” and third commenter adding, “They’re on the way to servington university.” One simply said: “This is the best thing i’ve ever seen in my life.”
The stunt has helped to fuel already-high opinions of the new mascara, which has taken over TikTok with creators testing it out and posting glowing reviews of the product. Its formula, enriched with bamboo extract, is said to be “super lengthening and volumising” with a “flex tower mascara brush”. Sadly the real life brush is a little smaller than in the ads, but people seem to be loving the product regardless.
So much so, that Londoners are even plotting to track down the stylish tube carriage and bus so they can see them in real life. “Finding barbie bus is over, I need to find maybelline Bakerloo carriage,” said one Twitter user, with many more speculating that it has blown the marketing for the Barbie movie (in cinemas later this month) straight out of the water. If I was a Mattel executive reading that after spending roughly millions on an advertising campaign, I’d be punching my desk right now. But who knows, maybe larger than life Margot Robbies in Leicester Square are next?
