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Last month, North West posted a TikTok to the account she shares with her mother, Kim Kardashian, of her go-to bed routine. “Pimple patch! Pimple patch!” the 11-year-old exclaims in a British accent, before the duo place yellow and pink Starface stars all over their faces. It garnered 30 million views.
That video was engineered by Starface, following a series of organic videos from West supporting the brand, joining celebrities like Hailey and Justin Bieber, SZA and Central Cee in promoting pimple patches by placing the stars on their spots.
“We’re really, really lucky because I feel like it’s one of the only skincare brands that you can tell people are wearing,” says Starface president Kara Brothers, sitting down with Vogue Business during a visit to London. “That’s certainly helped on social media. It has become a community.”
Pimple patches are trending. There’s 434 million videos that mention the term “best pimple patch” on TikTok. And 54.7 million posts that mention “Starface pimple patch”. Designed to protect pimples from bacteria, prevent skin picking, reduce redness and absorb fluid, earlier versions of pimple patches, from brands like Mighty Patch (launched 2017) were designed to partially conceal spots and blend in with skin. But when Starface entered the chat in 2019 with distinctive yellow and multi-coloured stars, the instantly recognisable patches became a status symbol for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Today, Starface says it sells 200 packs of its hydrocolloid stars per minute. Since 2021, the brand’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha (13-24) customer base has jumped from 44 per cent to over 60 per cent. The brand declined to share revenues, but said sales grew 93 per cent in 2023.
Starface was launched by former Elle beauty editor Julie Schott and her partner Brian Bordainick in 2019. The duo felt that the messaging around acne products was “boring, sad and clinical”, says Brothers, who was promoted in 2022 from her role as SVP of strategic projects, replacing Schott as CEO (the founders stepped back that same year). “At that time the beauty industry was quite different than it is today, especially for acne,” she says. “Then came Starface, which flipped the narrative on its head and made it fun. That’s the lens: How can we transform this conversation around acne and make it something you want to celebrate?”
“The popularity of pimple patches is really a side-effect of a more meaningful shift. Younger generations are more accepting of the things previous generations found at best embarrassing, and at worst shameful. They approach beauty from a far more direct origin in that they simply do not feel shame about things that are completely natural [like acne],” says Suzanne Scott, global associate beauty director at beauty consultancy and brand agency Seen Group.
So far, it’s been about maximalism. But now, in an unexpected move, Starface is launching clear star patches for the first time tomorrow, in a new multi-size pack. This may help the brand stay competitive, as clear patches become increasingly popular on TikTok, as more severe acne-prone customers seek bigger and more discreet styles from alternative brands such as Mighty Patch, or patches from Cosrx and PanOxyl. (The term “hydrocolloid bandages”, which severe acne users use to treat bigger areas, already features in 218.7 million posts on TikTok).
The clear star came from consumer feedback. After the pandemic, the brand received a message from a high schooler who’d been told to remove her yellow star in class, and begged the brand for a clear version to wear. Then, Brothers went to an NYU graduation and one of the graduates said she was worried about wearing a colourful star at work.
“It made sense,” Brothers says. “There’s probably not a hundred per cent of moments in the day where you can choose to decorate your face, unfortunately. And so to be able to offer our customers to stay within the Starface universe and offer them a really invisible patch is great. It shows we listen.”
Unlike the patches on the market, the clear patch is still star shaped, to “maintain the sense of fun”, she adds.
“The skincare market has always been crowded, but I feel like it’s gotten more and more. There are so many offerings,” Starface’s Brothers says. “We’ve seen other brands bring the playful attitude or understand the value of the pimple patch. The pimple patch market has grown tremendously in the US and the UK over the past couple years and, of course, we take a lot of pride in helping do that. We still stay true to bringing a fresh perspective. We do that via social media. That allows us to kind of cut through the noise a little bit.”
The pimple patch revolution
Starface has a youthful, childlike tone of voice on social media, riffing on memes and popular culture, which Brothers believes is its edge. It’s centred on the brand mascot, “Big Yellow”, a personification of the brand’s yellow star patch, Brothers says. A far cry from the aspirational or scientific tone of other acne products, Big Yellow speaks in memes and slang, and refers to the customers as “bestie”.
Starface recreated the Homer Simpson disappearing meme to tease the launch of the clear stars; produced its own version of viral series Sylvanian Drama (with Star boxes instead of Sylvanian Families) and left tongue-in-cheek reviews on film review platform Letterboxd (popularised by young stars like The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri). “When they clean the fish tank so you could see right thru it… that was so satisfying,” it wrote under Finding Nemo, sharing the screenshot on TikTok and Instagram. “With that, I think that the customers relate to us in a really accessible, friendly way. It’s like seeing something your friend posted,” Brothers says.
While many TikTok creators will attest to the efficacy of pimple patches, the functionality of pimple patches is not always the focus for Starface. “It’s table stakes for us to be efficacious and for the product to work. But really, outside of that, we’re here to just create this universe that you can tap into and enjoy,” Brothers says.
The pimple patch industry has benefited from increasingly popular “go to bed with me” content, reversing the #GRWM (get ready with me) trend to show how regular people prepare for bed. Pimple patches often form part of that routine. Starface has leaned into user-generated content (UGC), spotlighting its real community wearing the stars at various points of the day. On its actual campaigns, to complement the UGC, Starface has a firm no retouch policy.
UGC, also employed by Gen Z brands like Rhode and Djerf Avenue, is a crucial element in the purchase journey for young consumers, who are doing more research than ever into products, and want to see themselves reflected in brands’ content.
“We repost people in their different looks for the day. We have a lot of inside jokes with our community online and they know things about Big Yellow. They’ve helped us personify Big Yellow. They helped us launch Big Yellow’s pet chicken. And so this is the whole universe that we’re creating. And with that, it’s really through this friendly, fun tone. We try to stay away from telling our customers what to do.”
A style item
The brand has partnered with fashion brands to position Starface as a style item, in a bid to boost its positioning. In 2022, Starface became the first pimple patch brand to walk a runway, used by the makeup artist for New York brand Puppets and Puppets. In March of this year, Starface partnered with London-based fashion designer, Kiko Kostadinov on its first international runway appearance at Paris Fashion Week for AW24. To celebrate its new neutral selection, Earth Star, models wore multiple patches around their cheeks and eyes. “We like to think about ourselves as almost like a fashion brand or take a lot of cues from the industry of reinventing ourselves through different colour ways of the moment,” Brothers says.
Even outside of pimple patches, Starface is exploring new categories. Already the brand sells face masks and pore patches. It recently pre-launched new Star Balm lip balm with a surprise drop, before its official launch in August (the product appeared in the North West video, alongside the pimple patches). For now, however, pimple patches remain the core.
Starface launched wholesale in 2020, a year after its launch, and is now stocked on Amazon and across CVS, Target, Walmart in the US, and Boots and Superdrug in the UK, to name a few. Wholesale makes up the “vast majority” of sales, Brothers says. “We’ve learned along the way that with the universality of a pimple, it’s really important to be everywhere that our customers are and where they might need a pimple patch. Whether you’re in the airport or you’re in the drug store or you’re in the grocery store. That retail strategy has really helped spur growth.” This likely lends itself to Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z customers, who can add the pimple patch into their parents’ cart.
For now, these younger customers are the focus. But with new categories and the clear patch on the horizon, is there potential to convert older consumers, too?
“There’s an opportunity here to shift some of the marketing spend to pull in an older consumer,” Scott says. “We know this is a group that likely has more disposable income and large appetites for beauty. I think it’s just a matter of time before we see pimple patches designed for older women, that use the same hydrocolloid and salicylic acid ingredients, albeit with a more elevated design.”
Will they wear coloured stars on their faces? Perhaps not. But the clear stars could be the start.
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