When The Palette Meets The Pitch: P-Beauty For Marketing Enthusiasts

Any longtime makeup enthusiast in the Philippines will tell you that the actual buying of makeup in this country can be a frustrating experience. Buying products online may seem thrilling at first, but eventually it all piles up, thanks to miscalculations about shade and formula.

Then there’s the in-store experience, which is a different type of frustrating in itself if you don’t know what you want. Suddenly you’re surrounded by tinderas pushing practically the same products with the same air of quiet desperation: “Bestseller po ito.” “Long lasting.” “Para sa skin ninyo po.” “Dasurv ninyo po.” “Sige na po, last na po ito, habang sale pa po.” And once again, because of the ongoing budol of it all, you end up with products that you’re not even sure are going to work for you.

And let’s not even get started with the wild, wild world of Tiktok Shop.

So when you come across statistics about the beauty industry in the Philippines being a billion-peso enterprise, you start to wonder who’s buying this and where are all these products going–because certainly not all of these cosmetics are going to the landfill, are they?

There’s money in the business of beauty, for sure. But is the market truly aligned with the consumer, or are we missing the intent behind the message?

This is where Palette & Pitch comes in.

P-Beauty and The Creator Market

For the longest time, marketing for Philippine beauty products was perfectly aligned with social media influencers. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok have made it very easy for influencers to post their makeup tutorials and promote products without a second thought. (Whether or not these influencers are paid to do so is not within the purview of this blog… yet.) And while these quick videos are mesmerizing in and of themselves, these quick-attention-span bites do miss a lot of nuanced information when it comes to actual product review.

Come to think of it, video in general as a format does tend to miss out a lot when it comes to a full reckoning with a product. There’s not enough time spent talking about actual effects, not enough longitudinal data to prove performance over time… and, let’s face it, if an influencer even dares to criticize the product they’re reviewing, they’re immediately branded a “negative creator.”

But not every creator can find success in a collab like Jelly Eugenio or Slo Lopez, just as not every influencer can become a founder like Mae Layug or Teree Daisuke. And the experience of “getting ready” with the creator is slowly being revealed as being wildly different from the actual product experience.

The Industry’s Marketing Blind Spots

IMARC’s report on the beauty and personal care market discusses “opportunities” that the industry would need to explore as a whole, like ecommerce, Halal beauty, and native remedies. But if you ask us, based on actual conversations we’ve had with women in real life, we also feel that the industry has failed important segments of the P-beauty industry as well, both in market and in product.

First and foremost, we feel that P-beauty is not serving the trentahin and kuwarentahin segment as well as they should. Yes, your tita may have more income to afford Estee Lauder, but aging into your 30s, 40s, and 50s doesn’t mean buying high end for the sake of high end. This is especially true of Generation X, which was one of the first generations who have experienced wildly creative uses for makeup in the public realm. It would be nice if more of our local brands not only created makeup (not just skincare) for mature skin, but also featured older women in their advertising.

Related to the above, but no less important, is the absence of, and lack of visibility for, dry skin products in the market. We blame Vicki Belo for selling us on moisturizer being heavy, oily, and gross, but the fact remains that not all Filipinos have oily skin, and not all Filipinos can be served by namby-pamby “hydrators” alone. And just as it can be demoralizing to not see your skin tone represented in local products, it can be equally discouraging to not see your skin type at any price point.

And since we do mention Slo Lopez here, we are in agreement with her and Issy’s own aim for the industry to reckon with their own beauty standards. Simply put, we believe that we should not only be in the business of being pretty. We will take it further and state that the Philippine beauty industry–not everyone, but enough of them–has been complicit in weaponizing “pretty” as a “God-honoring” standard of beauty, while giving short shrift to the boundary-pushing queer creatives who have truly made the most of their product purchases.

We also believe that SM and Watsons should train their sales staff properly on how to sell cosmetics products, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Standing On The Edge of Beauty and Geekery

So with all of this happening in the Philippine beauty industry, where do we go from here?

Palette & Pitch may not have all the answers, but our goal is to stay one step closer to the data behind the hype. As a long-form blog, we will have more time and space to go over the questions that have not been addressed by ChatGPT and Tiktok, among other online spaces.

We will admit that our content is biased because our main author and strategist is, in fact, an older woman, but we will explore unique angles to beauty content while using our marketing and data analysis expertise to follow the trends (and the sales) in a scientific matter. It’s our way of contributing to society, and if it does make impact on the industry, so much the better.

For those who are ready to dive deeper into the marketing of the P-beauty industry, subscribing to the P&P: Insider Edition newsletter is a start.