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For These French Teens, the Best Beauty Brands Are Not From France
Young American brands have become more relevant than their legacy French competitors, according to some Gen-Z customers at a cosmetics pop-up in Paris.
Imagine a ball pit — but one crowded with teens and 20-somethings instead of small children, and filled with biodegradable confetti instead of plastic spheres. That is one way to describe the scene on Saturday at a pop-up shop that Glossier, the American beauty brand, opened last week in Paris to promote the release of its latest fragrance, Fleur.
In an area surrounded by purple mesh screens, visitors could plod through the purple confetti toward a tall pile of it, atop which sat a bottle of the new perfume. When a person grabbed the bottle from its perch, the action set off a process that resulted in a personalized poem — composed by artificial intelligence — appearing on a nearby screen.
“You hold fleur with grace / beneath lavender light / your gaze tranquil elegance,” read a poem spat out for a friend of Jeanne Melman’s. At 17, Ms. Melman, a high school student in Paris, is part of a cohort that Glossier has made deep inroads with since it was started 11 years ago: Generation Z, or Génération Zède as it is called locally.
Ms. Melman went to the pop-up with two friends, both also 17. All three of them said Glossier products were among the American exports that they most highly prized. Ms. Melman recalled the time she tried a Krispy Kreme doughnut after the chain arrived in France in 2023: “Good but not exceptional,” she said. While visiting a pen pal in Cincinnati last summer, Ms. Melman added, she became acquainted with pickleball, which she “kind of liked.”
Glossier, known for skin care and makeup products that the brand says enhance a person’s natural beauty, has been tightening its grip on French customers since 2018, when it started shipping to France.
