By Johanna Augustin, CEO & partner, Pond Design

Beauty brands have an ongoing love affair with nostalgia. Some of the biggest brands in beauty are relaunching their past icons to tap into consumers’ growing passion for the past—like Lancôme and its Juicy Tubes lip gloss, MAC Cosmetics with its nude collection of shades or Mugler’s return to cosmetics after a 15-year absence.

A recent Mintel report also underlined that nostalgia is here to stay. Sixties-inspired looks are making a comeback and more than 70% of US adults enjoy products that evoke nostalgia.

It would be short-sighted to put this down to mere aesthetics, however. Nostalgia goes deeper than that. Just as nostalgia offers familiarity and reassurance in other sectors like fashion and music, in beauty it offers relief in a world where identity is increasingly being shaped by technology and the performance pressure of social media.

People are tired of being on; of beauty being something to optimize, document and present rather than simply experience. So, nostalgia is not about consumers wanting to return to the past, but about yearning for a feeling of coherence, for a time when they recognized themselves easily.

Beauty is particularly powerful here because scent, color and texture are emotional memory triggers. A shade, a gloss or a finish can reconnect you to a more grounded, confident version of yourself.

So, in fact, nostalgia in beauty is not about going back, it is about coming home to oneself.

But many brands miss this nuance. They see nostalgia purely as a chance to reissue past visuals or products, without much thought on how it can strategically strengthen the business.

A Strategic Tool

Beauty brands should be using nostalgia far more intentionally. Smart use of nostalgia identifies the emotional territory the original product or brand held, whether that was playfulness, glamour, rebellion or intimacy – and then rebuilds that emotional effect for today.

It shows up in updated formulations, expanded shade ranges, relevant casting and contemporary storytelling. It translates the emotion, not the aesthetic.

Kylie Cosmetics’ King Kylie range, for example, has updated formulations and expanded shade ranges that nod towards the brand’s history.

A Brand’s Refresh

Brands can also use nostalgia as an opportunity to refresh, use it to center their founding conviction and emotional territory. It builds trust by tapping into consumers’ memories and shared history with a brand. Bringing back a beloved product is not just recycling the past, it can reactivate that emotional bond, reminding people when the brand was part of their story.

For example, Clinique reissuing its Almost Lipstick in Black Honey allows a younger generation to re-connect with memories of their mothers’ cosmetics while re-imagining a product that resonates with today.

Balancing The Past

But nostalgia is not just about revisiting past products. It can also play an important role in innovation. Launching something new and reviving something familiar are two sides of the same coin. Nostalgia anchors trust with emotional continuity, while innovation drives growth through fresh relevance. The brands that win know how to balance both. They use nostalgia to create grounding and then push forward with purpose. Nostalgia becomes an emotional anchor to create the psychological safety required to adopt something new. This doesn’t just apply to long-standing brands.

Pamela Anderson’s Sonsie, for example, feels like it’s gone back in time to evoke trust in a more nature-kind beauty routine. It pairs innovation with a retro Los Angeles visual signature to evoke a sense of intellectual beauty and quiet reassurance that feels deeply rooted.

The key to keeping nostalgia feeling fresh rather than stuck in the past is to begin with the emotional truth and then evolve. You need to ask yourself, “Who did this product or brand allow the consumer to be?” That then becomes the foundation for renewal – to inform formulation, performance, inclusivity and representation, communicated with the tone and cultural language of now.

Urban Decay’s Naked eyeshadow palette, for example, deliberately pitched the release as a cross-generational moment, bridging OG fans and Generation Z newcomers.

From a brand design perspective, any aesthetic translation should feel like memory refracted through the present. The familiar emotional note remains, but it is expressed with modern clarity and taste. Sunscreen brand Vacation, for example borrows heavily from the aesthetics of the 1970s and 80s. It boasts nostalgic, retro design, but rendered in a super modern way – the images, for example, could be a postcard from 1982 but enhanced with super up-to-date typography.

A Creative Leap

Beyond using nostalgia to reconnect with consumers and give past icons new relevance, could its resurgence even be marking a more significant shift in the industry? After years of subdued palettes and ‘no-makeup’ approach, is nostalgia opening access to a more expressive beauty by reminding people how it once felt to be bold?

The next era will not be endless revival. It will be identity expansion, with new forms of color, texture, scent and self-expression that feel emotionally rooted but visually future facing. Vacation’s Classic Whip is a great example of this with its creative vibrancy and joy perfectly supporting the innovative formulation.

Beauty will move from performance to agency, from presentation to authorship. To me, it feels that nostalgia is the reset. The leap comes next.

About The Expert

Johanna is CEO of Pond Design, where she has spent over a decade leading its creative output crafting award-winning designs for global brands like Absolut, Male Skincare brand and Gant. With a background in architecture, marketing and advertising, she blends strategic insight with creative excellence.