Would you buy a £120 lipstick? That’s the question that Louis Vuitton are gambling on with the launch of La Beauté, their new beauty line. The price is sky-high and the stakes are even higher.
The venerable fashion house is entering a crowded marketplace, thanks to newly-launched products from couture house Celine and long-established makeup collections from rivals like Chanel and Hermès. But, as La Beauté creative director Dame Pat McGrath put it in a press statement: “The beauty universe is about so much more than just product. What we are creating here will unlock a new level in luxury beauty.”
With full respect to McGrath – who has been called the most influential makeup artist in the world – these are just products. They are beautiful: the 55-shade monogrammed lipstick range is encased in refillable, sleek packaging and the eight eyeshadow palettes sit pretty in their petal-shaped casing – but they are products nonetheless, and very expensive ones at that.
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While the lipsticks are currently commanding all the buzz, the refillable eyeshadow palettes clock in at an astronomical £190, and the accessories are even costlier. A Vuitton-monogrammed keychain lipstick case will set you back a cool £350 – you could buy 30 lipsticks at Superdrug for that.
Unsurprisingly, beauty fans have already called out LV for these astronomical prices. “Absolutely tone deaf and honestly desperate-looking,” one user commented on the brand’s announcement post on Instagram. Model and beauty founder Celina Locks has said the line is “beautiful… but $160 for a lipstick is insane” while celebrity hairstylist Sam McKnight archly commented: “Good luck with that.”
Even among its high-end competitors, Vuitton’s prices are an outlier – a Hermès lipstick will set you back around £63, while you can pick up a Dior one for around £40. Even if you were a diehard Pat McGrath fan – and I can’t think of a single fashion addict who wasn’t wowed by the luminescent glass skin she pulled off at Maison Margiela’s spring/summer 2024 show – you can still tap into her artistry with her own beauty company Pat McGrath Labs, where a lipstick retails for £36.
Given all this, you would think that my natural answer to the question of buying this insanely overpriced lipstick would be a hard no. But this is where I guiltily, reluctantly put my hand up.
Sue me, but if I had a spare £120 lying around, I would be putting one of those lipsticks in my shopping basket at a moment’s notice. I know, time to sharpen those pitchforks and grease the guillotine. I don’t think my eagerness to drop cash on something that will fall out of my handbag on a night out is a good thing, either.
If I could cut out the reptilian part of my brain that whispers “ooh, a little treat for moi?” every time it comes across something remotely desirable, I would, and I’m fully aware of the Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake”-like implications of a Parisian fashion house pushing such a ludicrously priced collection on the masses at a time when wealth inequality has never felt more entrenched or pernicious.
But I know exactly what LV is up to with these prices – they provide a counterpoint to the rest of their collection, and one that singlehandedly catapults them into the centre of the cultural conversation.
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You see, as much as fashion houses trumpet their artisanal wares or talk up their one Spanish supplier who painstakingly hand-cuts their leather from the finest Catalonian cowhides, luxury is entirely relative. When you’re looking at a brand where leather goods routinely retail for thousands of pounds – to the point where handbag addicts pore over travel destinations where you can purchase Vuitton bags for the cheapest possible price – a £120 lipstick actually seems like a steal.
That tiny monogrammed lipstick case starts looking like a Vuitton Speedy – a very small one, perhaps, but one that still carries a faint whisper of the bigger, more luxurious thing. This mindset applies to one-percenters too. Everybody loves a bargain – it’s just that they probably view a hundred-pound lippie as their version of walking into Boots on a whim after work and getting something from the makeup aisle for a tenner.
This idea of relative luxury – and how it can irrationally bend and warp our perception of what makes products a “steal” or not – is exactly what Louis Vuitton is appealing to with the launch of this line.
The people who do end up purchasing these products will be well aware that these prices are ridiculous. They’ll know that dozens of other brands sell similar-ish lipsticks at significantly cheaper prices. They will know all this and buy it anyway, because luxury doesn’t work on an entirely rational level. If it did, why did I spend the last half hour browsing the La Beauté shade range?
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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