Understanding extreme beauty accessories boom Starting with the sculpting face band by Skims

Years ago, films and TV shows imagined the 2020s as an aerospace vision where flying saucers replaced skateboards and futuristic architecture towered over cities, LED-lit metropolises filled with robots ready to serve humans. Considering that Tesla has just launched a diner featuring an Optimus serving popcorn and that the Space Age is making a comeback in interior design, we could say they weren’t too far off. But if it’s true that we’re approaching an era where flying taxis and technologies that simulate human intelligence are everyday occurrences, there’s one development the past didn’t foresee growing alongside the automobile and computer industries: beauty. Because while in the 1950s it was unthinkable to leave the house still wearing curlers and beauty masks, today it’s trendy to show off your skincare, not only on social media, where Get Ready With Me videos have thrived since the dawn of YouTube, but also offline, with pimple and eye patch stickers used as actual accessories.

With wellness having transformed from necessity to indulgence into a real status symbol to flaunt to followers, mouth tape, gua sha, and other items like the lip gloss-holder chain have become the Holy Grail of femininity. And now, as if that weren’t enough, the shapewear brand Skims has launched a face-shaping band with all the potential to become the next Lyst it-item, following the Oura Ring and the Smartwatch. Already compared to one of the gadgets used by Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her, the Skims face band is an elastic strip in a neutral color (Clay or Cocoa) that wraps around the chin, neck, and forehead, to be worn overnight according to instructions to better define facial features and limit skin sagging. Priced at €62 and sold out in less than 24 hours (though you can join the waitlist, just like for surgery), it fits into a broader trend within the sleep industry (which is forecasted to reach a global value of $600 billion this year), the same one Kim Kardashian’s sister, Kourtney, is a part of with her melatonin gummies Lemme Sleep.

As of today, on TikTok, the nighttime beauty routine of the most followed influencers includes: tea or sleep aid pills, face, lip, and eye masks, patches on the forehead and mouth to delay wrinkle formation and avoid sleeping with the mouth open, silk scrunchies and caps for the hair (or using a roller to curl strands and wake up with soft curls), a plastic tool to widen the nostrils and ease oxygen intake (?), and finally, the jaw-shaping band (which now bears the signature of one of the Kardashian entrepreneur sisters). They call it the Morning Shed, the act of removing every morning all the layers of masks and patches applied before sleep. For those just discovering it, it seems more like the trailer for a low-budget horror film.

The risk of the beauty accessory boom isn’t really their absurdity - everyone’s free to do as they wish in their own bedroom, and we’re not here to criticise anyone wearing eight layers of fabric on their face - but rather their influence. While the wellness and cosmetics industries have indeed made great technological strides, their goals are the same as in the 1950s: convince consumers that they need one more product for self-care, and above all, sell it to them. The issue becomes more complex because, whereas in post-war years women’s beauty routines were confined to home and salons (amid harsh hair tools, ammonia in dyes, mercury in creams, and lead in lipsticks) in 2025 being beautiful isn’t enough to earn the associated privilege: you must demonstrate your dedication to the cause. On one side, we have content creators who, in the oversaturated social media market, desperately scramble for engagement with bizarre videos full of new and/or pointless products; on the other, consumers and followers (even very young ones, as seen in the case of the Sephora Kids) try to imitate them, fueling the trend.

Skincare, as well as sleepcare, fitness, and extreme treatments like vitamin IV drips, have become daily staples for anyone consuming online content - literally, considering how day and night serums have replaced carbs in the diet. Perhaps partly due to the currently prohibitive prices of luxury, wellness has become the main commodity to flaunt. If we’ve normalized wearing under-eye patches as part of an outfit (see Shablo at Sanremo, who wore red ones matching his suit), it won’t be long before the Skims Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap becomes the new must-have accessory, a kind of botox-core headband that we’re sure will soon feature in countless TikTok Morning Shed videos. And once everyone has one, it’ll be time for the accessories-for-the-accessory, like patches and pins to tighten and decorate it even more. Unless the baby face look comes back in style: in that case, will they start producing Hula Hoops for our heads?