The Flex is in the Details | Ginger Sparks No. 27
ChapStick reinvents its format, the hairbrush becomes a luxury signal, and Clinique Black Honey expands into a collection.
This week, three familiar beauty categories made unexpected moves. Lip care reinvented its format, a basic haircare tool became a status object, and a cult shade expanded into a full collection. Packaging, positioning, and color all have something to say right now.
ChapStick Gets a Tube-Over
WWD asked the question we didn’t know we needed answered: “Can Lip Tubes Make ChapStick Sexy?” In a surprising rebrand, the heritage lip balm unveiled a new format as lip care continues to boom. The brand’s original Classic Lip Moisturizer with SPF 15 accounts for roughly a quarter of the business. So why take a solid seller, literally, into a different format in 2026?
ChapStick invented the lip care category in the 1880s and has been expanding its portfolio with innovative ingredients, skincare benefits, and flavors ever since. Today, it is the leader in lip care, synonymous with the product category, #1 by volume for its parent company, Evermark, and has over 80% brand awareness. In 2024, Yellow Wood Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, acquired ChapStick in its fifth corporate carveout in four years.
The data made the decision. In the Instagram post accompanying the WWD story, Evermark CMO Rachel Behm noted that tubes are up 27% from 2022 to 2024, and that the original stick format “was not serving our customer in the way that we could with a squeeze-tube format.” The goal, she added, was to “honor our heritage of hydration from a functional standpoint” while having more fun with packaging and flavors. HydraBalm delivers 24-hour moisture in cherry, vanilla, and guava, plus a fragrance-free option, and could comprise up to a quarter of ChapStick’s business.
HydraBalm rolls out this summer across ChapStick’s full retail footprint, including Target, Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Amazon, and several dollar-store chains. In tandem, the classic lip balms received a subtle design refresh alongside new bundle themes, including a Mocktails trio, a Vacation Getaway Collection, and an Ice Cream Collection. Between now and then, the brand is building fandom fast: a sponsored post with Knicks point guard Jose Alvarado during the NBA Finals, 24,000-plus products sold through TikTok Shop, and a deepening investment in social.
Ginger Spark: ChapStick isn’t operating in a vacuum. Summer Fridays, EADEM, Ole Henriksen, and rhode have spent the last few years owning the lip care conversation with tube formats and luxury positioning. HydraBalm is clearly a competitive answer. But ChapStick’s differentiator has always been price, and it isn’t abandoning that: HydraBalm retails at $4.29 for a two-pack at Target, undercutting Vaseline’s Lip Therapy tubes at around $5 and e.l.f.’s viral Squeeze Me lip tubes at $5 each.
What makes this move interesting is that ChapStick has something its competitors don’t: over a century of brand recognition and the kind of household-name equity that money can’t manufacture. The squeeze-tube format gives it a chance to modernize without abandoning the heritage, tapping into a growing consumer appetite for more tactile, controlled, and playful application experiences that we tracked in Ginger Sparks No. 19. The question isn’t whether ChapStick can compete. It’s whether a $4.29 tube can carry the same cultural weight as a rhode lip treatment.
Your Hairbrush Is Now a Status Symbol
The hairbrush has evolved from a simple utilitarian tool into a massive luxury status symbol. Driven by the “skinification” of hair, high-end vented and boar-bristle brushes are the newest flex item on the vanity shelf. Dyson Airwraps and luxury skincare make room. On X, Vogue reported on this direction, noting that hairbrushes have transformed from simple grooming tools into modern luxury items as brands innovate to capture market share.
Driven by consumer obsession with scalp health and damage prevention, the hairbrush is officially the latest micro-luxury flex. What used to be a basic $10 drugstore buy is now a high-end investment piece. The OG $225 Mason Pearson Bristle and Nylon Brush remains the ultimate status symbol, known for lasting decades while evenly distributing the hair’s natural oils. Newer entrants like La Bonne Brosse and Crown Affair have turned brushes into bonbon-like vanity accessories. The real innovation lives in flex technology, with flexible bristles that contour directly to the scalp. Manta (around $30) uses patented Flexguard technology to massage the scalp, minimize snagging, and stimulate blood circulation, at a price point that makes the flex genuinely accessible.
The entry point matters more than it looks. McKinsey’s 2024 Global Consumer Sentiment Survey found that 72% of consumers report adjusting their spending, substituting high-cost items for lower-cost alternatives except in categories they deemed “self-care” or “identity-reinforcing.” Millennials and Gen Z, priced out of the traditional markers of adulthood, aren’t foregoing pleasure. They’re redirecting it into things they can actually buy and display. Call it avocado toast for the scalp if you want, but Millennials perfected that logic, and Gen Z inherited it. The behavior is the same, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Ginger Spark: Celebrity hairstylists and beauty editors consistently praise what a quality brush actually does: high-end flexible brushes stimulate the capillaries, promote healthy hair growth over time, and are highly favored for detangling delicate hair types, from fine hair to extensions and tape-ins. Manta goes further with an ergonomic, dexterity-friendly design that photographs as well as it performs. At price points ranging from $30 to $225, the entry point is wide enough to make the flex democratic. Similar to Erewhon hauls, luxury brushes are the newest vanity-bragging-rights item. Next up: bodycare.
When One Shade Becomes a Brand
On June 24th, Clinique launched a limited-edition Black Honey Collection, complete with an eyeshadow palette, mascara, and nail polish. The website reads: “Go all in on Black Honey. Your go-to for lips, now for lids, lashes and nails.” The brand’s SVP of Global Marketing, Christie Sclater, explained how Black Honey has remained culturally relevant for five decades because it felt timeless rather than trend-driven. Clinique co-founder Carol Phillips famously described it as the “black turtleneck” of lip color: effortless, versatile, and universally flattering. “It doesn’t ask consumers to become someone else,” Sclater adds. “It simply brings out their version of the shade.”
Black Honey joins a very short list of beauty shades asked for by name, alongside Chanel Vamp and Linkin Park After Dark. These aren’t products so much as cultural shorthand, the kind of color that gets texted to a friend or screenshot-saved for years before a purchase. This isn’t the first time a major beauty brand has expanded a hero shade into a full collection; consider the NARS Orgasm Collection or the more recent success of RMS Crystal Slipper. But Black Honey earns its expansion because the inclusivity argument holds. As the YSL Beauty lavender blush controversy made clear when TikTok creator Golloria George and others called out the lack of flattering shade ranges for women of color, one color doesn’t suit all. Black Honey, by design, works differently. Sclater told The Cut that the new campaign says it plainly: “Black Honey Everything, Everywhere. The Difference Is You.”
GingerSpark: The nail inclusion is well-timed. According to Circana data for 2025, artificial nails are growing faster than any other nail category, surpassing traditional polish in sales for the first time. Healthy-looking nails are becoming one of the strongest luxury signals right now, and a shade like Black Honey, which enhances rather than masks, translates that same logic directly to the nail. Color is no longer just aesthetic. It is a strategic brand differentiator, and Clinique just proved it.
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