Biz Sherbert talks to Peter Philips, creative and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, about how one product category has virally been outshining the rest.
Words by Biz Sherbert
Photograph by Robin Broadbent
Biz Sherbert talks to Peter Philips, creative and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, about how one product category has virally been outshining the rest.
Dior Lip Glow Oil has been viral since its 2020 inception. It has a distinctive look, producing a shine so intense and smooth that it’s almost like a CGI-rendered version of a glossed lip. The feel is important too; unlike most high-shine products, it isn’t sticky or greasy. It’s a frictionless lacquer that’s captured the hearts of millions.
The massive and continued popularity of Lip Glow Oil reflects an ambient richness that’s settled over beauty in the past few years, marked by products and messaging that seem to luxuriate in their luxuriousness – a shift from ‘oil-free’ formulations in the ’90s. Beauty critic Jessica DeFino notes: ‘You always hear about Cleopatra bathing her skin in oils and we have this sort of romanticised, historical idea of oil as a beauty product.’
Peter Philips, creative and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, says that post-pandemic, people are on the lookout for products with caring elements that don’t compromise cosmetic results, like the cherry oil infused in Dior Lip Glow Oil. ‘There is something pure about oil – something that nourishes,’ says Philips.
DeFino also believes there’s something to the fact that oil is nourishing to the body, beyond the skin. ‘Oils are a huge part of food culture. So it makes me think of how foods are really popping up in the beauty industry right now as these sort of inanimate icons.’ Gisou’s product range, including its viral hair oil, cen- tres around the use of honey. Laneige’s Lip Sleeping Mask – another viral product – is formulated using the brand’s Berry Fruit Complex.
‘There is something pure about oil – something that nourishes.’
Meanwhile, Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Skin has oriented its image and offerings around desserts since launching in 2022, almost always with viral success. Bieber initially promoted the line as a way to achieve ‘glazed donut skin’ and later collaborated with donut company Krispy Kreme to create a Strawberry Glaze variety of the brand’s lip treatment.
This isn’t happening in silo, DeFino says. Rather it can be understood as part of a larger change in beauty. ‘It’s interesting to me that all of that is happening at the same time as we’re seeing a big resurgence in diet culture behaviours and Ozempic – it feels like sublimated desire for the things that we won’t eat.’ Instead of stocking our larders, we’re adding luxury lipids to our beauty routines the way we might drizzle olive oil over a dish.
This generation of viral products also feels like a spiritual departure from the footnoted femininity of mid-to-late 2010s beauty, as defined by Glossier. Sure, Glossier made a birthday cake flavour moisturising lip balm, but the confection of that choice was tempered by the product’s tech-twee name, Balm Dotcom. And while visually millennial pink is only one or two shades away from the pink that forms the shell of many Dior lip products, the latter feels like it could be found painted on a delicate nineteenth-century teacup. If Glossier, a brand built on and through Instagram, is remembered as girlboss beauty, today’s TikTok-viral products are just girl beauty. ‘We had this very heavily made-up look that was trending for a time which the Kardashians are representative of. And then we got into this sort of Glossier, faux-natural beauty,’ DeFi- no explains. ‘Now the pendulum is starting to swing back in the direction of excess.’ Lara Violetta, a fashion and beauty creator, describes her tube of Lip Glow Oil as the ‘opposite of quiet luxury.’
Philips sees the no makeup-but-actually- lots-of-makeup approach still at play, but in a new and indeed more baroque way. He recalls that in the early 2000s no-makeup-makeup was typically a matter of Vaseline, a little concealer on any pimples, and maybe mascara to darken the roots of your lashes. Now, he describes the new natural look as ‘much more colourful and much more elaborate,’ often created using a variety of products. ‘Lipstick is not about a perfectly drawn lip, or perfectly drawn eyeliner. But it’s more about the naturality of how you apply your product… maybe tapping with your fingers, or it’s the creamy eyeshadow that you apply with your fingers and let it all blend in.’
‘Lipstick is not about a perfectly drawn lip, or perfectly drawn eyeliner. But it’s more about the naturality of how you apply your product… tapping with your fingers, or it’s the creamy eyeshadow that you apply with your fingers and let it all blend in.’
Lip Glow Oil made its way onto Violetta’s wishlist after she encountered a photo of Bella Hadid tearfully applying the product after watching Serena Williams’ final tennis match in 2022, which was doing the rounds online. For Violetta, it was ‘a moment of heavy cultural weight.’ A glam-refresh following an exceptionally photogenic cry seems to capture what this beauty epoch, and the viral products that define it, is all about: making sure every single moment is coated in the lustre of a viscous femininity.
In 2011, Lana Del Rey tweeted: ‘U should feel lucky to have my $79 lipstick kisses all over your face.’ More recently, user @mar8ot shared the screenshot of the tweet with the caption ‘me after getting a dior lipgloss for christmas.’ Similar jokes about rationing kisses coloured by a luxurious lip product have become popular online. The implication here is that the varnished kisses carry the luxury of the brand itself – almost like a lip-print logo. DeFino notes that the appeal of luxury brands in beauty could be tied to the return of literal logomania, which has already made its way through fashion as part of the 2000s revival and is now edging into beauty. This is especially interesting at a time when dupes have never been more widespread and accessible in beauty – the ‘real thing’ has never been so replicated, and perhaps for some, it occupies an even more venerated space at the top of the product pyramid as a result.
U should feel lucky to have my $79 lipstick kisses all over your face. You're probably used to those cheap tricks kissing you with their 99 cent lips pic.twitter.com/q3EvLnJEfn
— ☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ (@wildonyoubaby) August 14, 2021
The cost-per-kiss jokes also reflect a kind of winking nod to the price of beauty; in this case, riffing on the cost-per-use of a product. DeFino ties the rise of luxury-coded beauty to ‘a rejection of the idea that we need to hide our aesthetic labour.’ Even the high-gloss, high-shine finishes can be seen as a ‘display of the labour and a display of the product,’ which is at odds with past ideals of natural beauty propped up by a myth of effortlessness. In contrast, today’s routines relish in making effort apparent: influencer Alix Earle became one of TikTok’s biggest stars for getting real about what it takes to achieve her high-glam, bombshell looks – from a boob job and acne-obscuring filters, to every product she uses to mask a hangover and get ready for a night out (including Lip Glow Oil).
Over the past few days, I’ve been reapplying Dior Lip Glow Oil almost as soon as it gets the chance to dry. It smells like vanilla mint, like how I’d hoped my candy-flavoured childhood lip balms would when I revisited them in a burst of nostalgia. There’s something both life-affirming and armoured about the feeling, smell, and motion of applying the gloss – I understand why it’s inspired a kind of cultural fanfiction. It’s nice to feel the shine.