As I scrolled through my TikTok For You page just a couple of days ago, a video came up on my feed of 2026 predictions. One slide predicted a Lindsay Lohan skincare brand, the next an Alix Earle gym wear brand and the third a Jenna Ortega haircare brand. With a simple Google search, I discovered that none of these things have any correlation to the celebrities they are paired with. However, when I opened the comments expecting backlash, all I saw were commenters discussing how good these ideas were.
Recently, more and more celebrities and influencers are becoming business owners, creating their own special brands or lines that have nothing to do with them or their content. Blake Lively founded a haircare brand, Kourtney Kardashian founded a health supplement brand and Mr. Beast founded multiple food brands. Many, if not most, of these celebrity-owned brands act as meaningless cash grabs, clearly being used as a method for celebrities to get more money from their audiences. Mr. Beast makes no content relating to food, but since his target audience is children, he created a new form of Lunchables titled Lunchly. More than this, he created a line of chocolate called Feastables and partnered with another celebrity run business, Prime by Logan Paul and KSI, and put one Prime in every box of Lunchly to generate even more money.
This type of audience exploitation is not uncommon and is present in most celebrity brands. Millie Bobby Brown is an actress but due to her mostly teenage to young adult fanbase, she founded an extremely successful skincare and clothing company. I have seen multiple articles even asking the question of will Generation Z buy anything that Millie Bobby Brown sells simply because it is hers?
Even if celebrities are not creating their own brands, they can still find ways to use their merchandise stores to earn excessive money from their audiences. Many artists have special edition vinyls now, which are the same exact record but with a different pattern on it. These vinyls are oftentimes time-sensitive and coming out one at a time, so if you already bought the special edition vinyl yesterday because you knew it would never be sold again but then you like the one you see tomorrow more, there is a chance you will buy that one too. For Taylor Swift’s recent album, The Life of a Showgirl, there were over 30 variants of the album for fans to purchase, including 27 physical copies consisting of 18 CDs, eight vinyls and one cassette as well as seven downloadable variants.
The worst part of these schemes is that they often end up being extremely successful. Intense collectors and casual fans alike frequently fall for them, purchasing one to multiple variants of their favorite artist or influencer’s products, for no reason besides the fact that their favorite celebrity told them to.
Consumerism trends have infiltrated every platform and do not even just apply to celebrities anymore. Every other video I see is connected to a TikTok shop link, selling me some sort of clothing or makeup product. Some influencer accounts have been entirely converted to pages to sell things on too. I can see a Mikayla Nogueira post and every single time I will expect regular content, until I look down and see the “sponsored” tag.
This obviously does not mean that every influencer product is bad. One of my favorite things I own is the Sacheu Beauty lip stain that I originally got from the TikTok shop, and many influencers do form brands that they care about. Hailey Bieber clearly values her beauty brand, Rhode, because it very much correlates with her character. Same with James Charles and his brand Painted, which is a makeup brand, and makes sense because he is known for his makeup videos. However, the amount of negative, meaningless brands and collaborations extremely overpowers the positives.
If later on this year someone lets me know that Lindsay Lohan actually did start a skincare brand, I can promise here that I will not be purchasing from it. Obviously I cannot mark all celebrity or influencer brands as meaningless cash grabs, but I can confidently say that celebrity brands take the spotlight away from people who really care about the products they are creating and work hard for recognition. If I want a good skincare product, I will be going to a brand who worked for their spot at the top because of the value of their product, not because of their preexisting fame, and I highly recommend you to do the same.
