Beauty as a System
Role
Systems researcher and designer
Made with
Assistant Prof. Chad Hall
Timeline
8 weeks
Project
Project Overview
Beauty marketing runs on a loop: it makes people insecure, insecurity drives purchases, and revenue funds more marketing. With Lily-Rose Day and Kiana Gregorich, I set out to understand that loop and then make it visible. I led the systems mapping and diagrams, working from stakeholder interviews and a literature review to chart how brands, media, and consumers shape one another. Our team then used those maps to build Oogly, a fictional beauty brand that exaggerates the industry’s own logic to expose it, using critical design to ask questions rather than propose a product.
Challenge
Consumers of beauty marketing are often aware of how it works but feel resigned to it. Our interviews, which ranged from a middle school student to a designer who worked inside the beauty industry, showed a consistent awareness of emotional manipulation, paired with resignation or quiet resistance. For me, the challenge was to represent a system with many competing incentives in a way that was accurate and also usable for design. The maps had to hold up as research and also give the team specific mechanisms to exaggerate in the brand.
Results
I mapped the system four ways:
A stakeholder map of brands, agencies, influencers, media, retailers, regulators, and consumers, showing who influences whom.
A values-versus-visibility matrix that sorts brands by actual ethics against how visible their ethical messaging is (greenwashing, exploitive, silent good, ideal).
A Fogg Behavior Model mapping of how consumers respond, from trend adoption and aesthetic impulse to ethical frustration and skeptical opt-out.
A causal loop diagram showing marketing, media amplification, consumer insecurity, purchases, and revenue reinforcing one another, with consumer backlash and regulatory pressure pushing back.
Affinity mapping of our interviews gave four themes: beauty anxiety, contradiction in branding, consumer cynicism, and the normalization of discomfort in product experiences. Each Oogly design exaggerates one of these mechanisms, so the maps became the source for the team’s design decisions. The brand looks clean and familiar, but the details are distorted, with bruising, unsettling copy, absurd prices, and inflated review counts. The team delivered a Figma website prototype, physical product models, and branding for each collection.
interviews
systems maps