Three-inch roots. Split ends. Desperation. Hair dye from a box. Cutting your own bangs.
Sound familiar? It should. No, it’s not the trailer for the next horror movie (but that’s a good guess!) – it was our reality for part of 2020.
Maybe you’ve blocked it from your mind, but this time last year, most of us were missing our hairdressers and giving into boredom-induced beauty changes (often inspired by a TikTok trend).
We saw the flops. We saw the surprising successes. (If you missed it, Brad Mondo reacted to all of them… and didn’t hold back). Though there were some good times, we all let out a huge sigh of relief when hair salons reopened.
Now, a whole year later, everything is reopening… Pattern89’s artificial intelligence analyzed marketing creative from 2020 to 2021, in order to determine changes in beauty-related content. AI found that beauty trends in marketing are having a resurgence.
Here are the “highlights.” ?♀️
Staying at home and covering up with face masks meant that people felt less of a need to wear makeup. From 2019 to 2020, images of lipstick dropped 93% in popularity.
In contrast, from 2020 to 2021:
- Images including makeup have gone up 165%.
- Lipstick imagery has increased by 9%.
- The lipstick emoji, ?, saw a huge increase in CTR: 1,438%!
Needless to say, makeup is making a comeback this year. But it’s not alone.
Social distancing definitely helped limit the spread of COVID-19, but it also kept us from any… unwanted smells. Now that restrictions are easing, here’s what AI found:
- The word “deodorant” has gone up 70% in body copy.
- It has also increased by 261% in headlines.
No one’s complaining about that one.
There was one area in which AI found a significant decrease in ad content: hair care. It increased substantially from 2019 to 2020 (haircut imagery rose 337%), but now that people aren’t cutting and bleaching their hair with as much fervor as they were in the height of quarantine, these numbers have declined.
- Haircut imagery has decreased by 9%.
- Images of scissors have gone down 54%.
- The word “haircut” in body copy has dropped 84%.
In 2021, advertisements are leaving haircuts to the professionals and piling on the makeup. Just like old times.
The pandemic affected more than just beauty trends in marketing. For more creative insights related to the weirdest year of our lives, check out our interactive Pandemic Timeline.
Use predictive AI to give your ads a makeover, too.
Pattern89’s AI analyzes over 500 billion data points and over 49,000 creative dimensions of every ad. It is constantly updating to reflect trends and can give performance predictions with 95% accuracy.
In a world that is changing faster than ever, you need a tool that will work with you to craft the best ad creative possible. Schedule a demo today, so that your ads can have a transformation like this:
