‘Vibe Marketing’ Is Taking Over Beauty. What Is It?

As recently as last year, marveling at AI-generated media required a suspension of disbelief. Impressive, but noticeably premature, like a same-day facelift reveal.

Today, advanced AI tools with the capability to read and generate text, images and video are utilised by beauty brands for everything from ad campaign storyboarding to cosmetic formulation. Companies big and small, have adopted generative AI and are increasingly using it to streamline their workflows. But with simultaneous AI skepticism, the process of prompting from ChatGPT or Midjourney needed a euphemism: Enter: “Vibe Marketing.”

“Vibe” as AI jargon was coined by Open AI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to explain the process of prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), and letting them generate code solutions that sometimes exceed human comprehension. “You fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,” Karpathy posted to X in February.

As the bar for immersive brand storytelling rises, vibe marketing is set to become standard practise in beauty. “For us it’s something exciting,” said Einari Eppo Nurmela, the co-founder of creative agency Dogma, which has worked on Prada Beauty and Byredo campaigns. “And it is absolutely necessary. Agencies that don’t adapt will get left behind.”

Vibe marketing may grant creative teams more time, but it also truncates the creative process, potentially rushing through the cultural nuances that make branding feel resonant and inclusive. Beauty brands can quickly feed forecasted trends, quotas, colour schemes, and reference imagery to AI tools, generating bespoke stock imagery, copywriting, ingredient lists and more. Non-technical creatives can refine ideas before outsourcing to specialists, and smaller teams can participate in fast-moving trends cycles. As skilled creatives grow anxious about displacement by the increasingly affordable AI tools, the industry speeds towards an AI-assisted future.

Vibe Marketing 101

In 2025, AI is in everyone’s toolkit. GPT-5, Google’s Veo 3 video suite and Midjourney’s V7 update are just the latest advanced image and video generators that beauty companies are harnessing to boost their content production. AI integrations have also been added to traditional design tools like the Adobe Creative Suite, allowing users who aren’t fluent in the software to describe their desired edits in a chat feature.

At Dogma, AI is integral to the brainstorming process, and Nurmela lists Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot among the 45-member team’s everyday apparatus. Nurmela explains that creative ideation is slow cognitive labour, each version a work in and of itself. AI can translate concepts into iterations in seconds, producing hyper-real reference imagery and storyboards for art direction. Others, like London-based branding agency Made Thought, which has worked with Frédéric Malle and Stella McCartney Beauty, are exploring the concept of a digital twin — like a responsive company handbook encoded with limitations to safeguard brand ethos.

Beauty powerhouses are incorporating AI into their workflows at scale. In March, Estée Lauder Companies announced a partnership with Adobe to “scale digital marketing production,” using Firefly Generative AI. Even indie brands like Canadian skincare label Three Ships, have also begun to rely on image generation to plan campaigns or mock up promotional materials. “We’ve also seen a huge rise in brands using AI in ways that erode consumer trust,” said co-founder Connie Lo, who has seen others create fake models and even generate before-and-after images.

AI can also generate cosmetic ingredients, as in the case of Prada Beauty’s Paradoxe Virtual Flower in summer 2024 — its synthetic heartnote, the Jasmine AI Accord, was culled from data on hundreds of variations of floral species fed to an LLM. A similar process is in place at Osmo, a “Olfactory Intelligence” (OI) company that has raised $60 million in funding from the likes of Lux Capital and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Osmo’s fragrance house, Generation, can formulate scent profiles and descriptive copy in seconds based on an input of descriptive terms.

“We’ve fused our Olfactory Intelligence with human creativity to design and manufacture fragrances for brands,” said founder and chief executive Alex Wiltschko. The OI is especially efficient when it comes to reformulation; if an ingredient’s supply becomes threatened or unavailable, the computer already has suggestions to back it up.

But AI-generated media — pejoratively dubbed “slop” — is yet to shed its reputation for blandness. Last year, video content overtook short-form articles in marketing performance due to reduced consumer attention spans, indicating that staying power would be a significant challenge for marketers from 2025 onwards. There’s a prevalent concern that AI will lower content quality over time, only helping brands to chase the trend cycle, rather than drive it.

How To Use AI Ethically

LLMs are notoriously agreeable, more likely to return biased or sanitised outputs when directed impolitely - with one study revealing that harsh prompting caused a 30 percent drop in productivity. It signals a future in which AI etiquette will be essential skill requirements for marketers, to ensure that humans remain in the driver’s seat.

AI Ethics Officers have become C-Suite essentials in anticipation of the inevitable intellectual property and advertising regulations. Made Thought, a London-based branding agency that has worked with Frédéric Malle and Stella McCartney Beauty, recently appointed Gian-carlo Lacanilao to the role of creative director of innovation and AI.

In July, Unilever introduced the Beauty AI Studio across 18 of the conglomerate’s markets. The proprietary tool will be used to generate assets for paid social and e-commerce content. “Our clickthrough conversion has doubled,” said Selina Sykes, digital marketing head and vice president of Unilever of beauty and wellbeing. But it will only be used to generate images of products, not people.

As GenAI becomes more difficult to discern, even indie beauty brands have been establishing policies to gain trust with their customers. This summer, Three Ships released a Responsible AI Policy outlining how the technology is and isn’t used throughout the business; the brand commits to not generating images of people or evaluating employee performance using AI, among other guidelines. “We believe it’s important to share openly how we use emerging technologies — especially before regulations catch up,” said co-founder Connie Lo. “Integrity, to us, means doing the right thing, especially when no one’s looking.”

Shortcutting human discernment risks the erasure of the insight that makes beauty marketing evocative and inclusive. AI is trained by scraping material from the public domain, much of which carries the biases of historical advertising. In 2024, Unilever-owned mass brand Dove published an AI prompting guide to “help set new digital standards of representation” after their research found that, of the characters produced by generic prompts, 37 percent were blond and 53 percent had olive skin — a reminder that to date, AI is not intrinsically innovative or culturally attuned without user intervention.

Lisa Payne, head of beauty trends at the trends intelligence agency Stylus, emphasised that a diversified creative workforce is essential for beauty marketing. “Beauty trends are inherently emotional responses to multiple factors driven by socio economics, pop culture, and the media,” she said. “AI can go so far, but human intuition is still a much more valuable tool, especially in the commercial analysis of micro trends.”

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