What Beauty & Wellness Brands Can Learn From Aesop, Kama Ayurveda and Forest Essentials
The beauty industry has a funny problem. Everyone is selling something that promises to make you feel better: better skin, better hair, better sleep, better rituals, better you. So the product is only half the battle. The other half is: why should anyone believe your bottle?
Walk through a beauty aisle today and you will see hundreds of beautifully designed products competing for roughly three seconds of attention. Clean typography, muted colours, botanical illustrations, clinical language, and words like natural, pure, science-backed, Ayurvedic, clean, luxury. Looking beautiful is no longer enough. Beauty brands need something harder to manufacture: a world people want to enter.
Three brands that understand this particularly well are Aesop, Kama Ayurveda and Forest Essentials. They look very different, come from different histories and speak with different voices. But underneath is a similar lesson:
Great beauty branding does not decorate the product. It changes what the product means. |
Beauty is one of the most emotional categories you can build in
Nobody needs an expensive face oil the way they need electricity. People buy skincare for functional reasons: hydration, acne, ageing, hair fall, sun protection. But underneath sit emotional ones. I want to feel taken care of. I want a ritual. I want confidence, calm, indulgence. I want to become the kind of person who owns this.
A beauty brand is never simply selling 30ml of formulation. It is selling an interpretation of self-care. The strongest brands make that interpretation unmistakably theirs.
Aesop: consistency so strong you can recognise the brand without the logo
Put an Aesop bottle on a shelf and there is a good chance you know what it is before reading the name. Amber bottles, dense typography, cream labels, an almost pharmaceutical presentation. No screaming claims, no enormous fruit floating behind the product, no attempt to look conventionally glamorous. That restraint is the branding.
Aesop describes its packaging philosophy as functional and modest rather than purely aesthetic, and says its interest in considered design extends from formulations to packaging and stores. A visual choice becomes powerful when it comes from a belief. Minimal packaging alone is not a brand strategy; thousands of skincare brands are minimal today. Aesop's restraint works because the same idea travels through the products, the writing, the packaging, the materials and the retail environment. Even its stores respond to their local context rather than being copied from city to city. The customer does not merely see a visual identity. They experience a philosophy.
Lesson 1 : Do not build a moodboard. Build a worldview.
A founder begins with “I want something earthy, premium and minimal.” Pinterest opens. Beige arrives. A serif font enters. A botanical drawing appears. Three hours later, congratulations: you look like 40 other wellness brands.
A strong brand cannot begin only with an aesthetic. Start deeper. What do you believe about beauty? Should it feel clinical, sensual, ancient, playful, ritualistic, rebellious, quiet, scientific? What are you reacting against in your category? Aesop's brown bottles are not the point. They are evidence of a larger point of view.
Kama Ayurveda: heritage translated, not preserved in a museum
Kama Ayurveda's raw material is not merely skincare. It has Ayurveda: centuries of philosophy, ingredients, rituals, language and cultural meaning that exist before the branding begins. That can be an enormous advantage. It can also be a trap, because heritage brands sometimes communicate tradition like a history lesson: heavy, distant, sacred to the point of inaccessible.
Kama Ayurveda takes a different route. The brand traces its beginnings to 2002 and founder Vivek Sahni's rediscovery of Ayurvedic medicinal preparations with guidance from an Ayurvedic guru in Kerala. Its current positioning connects that heritage to modern beauty, balance and contemporary skincare. Traditional ingredients such as Kumkumadi sit beside contemporary vocabulary like retinol alternatives, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid and clinically proven efficacy. The brand is effectively saying: ancient wisdom does not need to feel ancient.
Lesson 2: Heritage becomes valuable when you translate it
This is especially relevant for Indian wellness and beauty brands. India is sitting on an absurd amount of cultural material: Ayurveda, regional botanicals, hair rituals, oils, flowers, spices, textiles, architecture, fragrance, craft. Yet many brands use it in one of two predictable ways. Either make everything look extremely traditional, or strip away everything Indian to look “international.” Both can be lazy.
The interesting territory sits in the middle. How do we make something deeply rooted feel completely contemporary? Do not merely paste Indian motifs onto packaging. Understand the philosophy, then reinterpret it. Cultural depth should influence the brand's thinking, not become decoration.
Forest Essentials: turning Ayurveda into luxury
Ayurvedic ingredients existed long before luxury beauty brands did. So how do you take something familiar and change the market's perception of its value? Forest Essentials explicitly positions itself around luxury Ayurveda, combining traditional practices with modern aesthetics and a multisensory experience.
An oil may be familiar. Saffron may be familiar. Rose may be familiar. But put them inside beautiful packaging, high-touch retail, sensory language, premium photography, a controlled visual world and carefully named rituals, and the customer no longer experiences a commodity. They experience an indulgence. The ingredient has not necessarily changed. The meaning around it has. That is the power of positioning.
Lesson 3: Premium branding is not about making things look expensive
Luxury is not gold foil, black packaging, a serif font or French words nobody understands. It is largely perceived intentionality. Does every detail feel considered? Does the language feel deliberate? Does the photography belong to the same world? Does opening the box feel different? Does the website behave differently? Does the product name create desire? Does the customer feel something before using the product?
If you want to charge a premium price, create a premium experience, not merely premium graphics.
Your packaging is probably doing more branding work than your logo
Think about what actually spends time inside the customer's home. Not your strategy PDF, your website hero or your Instagram grid. The bottle, the jar, the tube, the box. It sits beside the sink, in the shower, on the dressing table, in a handbag, sometimes every single day. Packaging is one of the most repeated brand interactions you will ever create. Aesop treats it as part of the overall product experience, weighing functionality, materials and environmental impact alongside appearance.
So ask more than “does this look nice?” Can I recognise it from two metres away? Does the range look like a family? Does it photograph well? Does it feel appropriate for the price? How does it feel in the hand? What happens when ten products sit together? Would someone want to leave it visible in their bathroom? That final question is underrated.
Design rituals, not just SKUs
People rarely fall in love with product catalogues. They fall in love with behaviours: the morning routine, the night ritual, the Sunday reset, hair oil before a shower, a fragrance before leaving home, hand wash beside the sink, tea while browsing a store. These moments make a brand part of everyday life.
Kama Ayurveda frames its products through the Ayurvedic philosophy of balance and daily practice. Aesop extends the experience into physical spaces, consultations, samples and small hospitality gestures. So ask: what ritual are we trying to own? “We sell skincare” is a category. A ritual is a relationship.
Stop saying “natural” unless you have something more interesting to say
The wellness category has a language problem. Everyone is clean, natural, pure, conscious, sustainable, effective, premium, science-backed. Once everybody owns the same words, nobody owns them. They may still matter, but they cannot be the whole positioning. Imagine three brands all saying: we use carefully selected natural ingredients to create effective products for healthy skin. Which one do you remember?
Your brand needs another layer: a specific ritual, a cultural origin, a formulation philosophy, an ingredient territory, a strong founder perspective, a sensorial experience, a clear enemy, a unique aesthetic world, a distinctive customer. Category language helps people understand what you are. Distinctive language helps them remember who you are.
Pass the “logo removed” test
Take your website, packaging, Instagram feed, photography and advertisements. Remove the logo. Could somebody still guess the brand? If not, you may have a logo, but not yet a brand world. Aesop can often pass this test. Forest Essentials has its own sensorial luxury language. Kama Ayurveda increasingly owns a recognisable relationship between contemporary beauty and Ayurvedic heritage.
Strong branding creates multiple recognition signals: typography, colour, packaging structure, art direction, language, ingredients, naming, photography, retail behaviour, tone. The logo is only one piece.
Memory comes before loyalty
Founders understandably think about repeat purchases, retention, LTV and subscriptions. But before any of that, somebody needs to remember you. Your customer may discover ten skincare brands before lunch. So one of your earliest questions should be: what will someone remember about us tomorrow? Not “what information should we tell them?” Information creates understanding. Distinctiveness creates memory. You need both.
If you are building a beauty or wellness brand today, ask these 7 questions
What do we believe about beauty that our competitors do not? That is the beginning of your worldview.
Which part of our story is truly ownable? Ingredient, origin, founder, culture, formulation or ritual.
What should our customer feel before trying the product? Curious, calm, indulgent, confident, energised.
What do we look like when the logo disappears? If the answer is “every skincare brand on Pinterest,” keep going.
What ritual could we own? Think beyond individual products.
Why is our premium believable? Formulation, craft, experience, scarcity, expertise, heritage. The price needs evidence.
What are we willing not to do? Strong brands have boundaries. That is what gives them shape.
The biggest lesson
These brands are not memorable because they found the perfect font. They are memorable because an idea holds everything together. Aesop turns restraint, intelligence and considered design into a complete environment. Kama Ayurveda translates traditional Ayurvedic knowledge into contemporary beauty and wellness. Forest Essentials transforms Ayurveda into an explicitly luxurious, multisensory proposition. Three different worlds, three different interpretations, and that is exactly the point.
Great beauty branding should make you more recognisably yourself, not more recognisably “beauty.” |
One final thought
The beauty market does not need another pretty bottle. It needs brands with something to say: a point of view, a ritual, a feeling, a world. Formulation can bring someone to the product. Performance can make them come back. But branding answers the question that comes before both: “Why should I pick this one?”
When that answer becomes clear, consistent and distinctive enough, you stop competing only on ingredients. You start owning meaning. That is where a beauty product begins becoming a beauty brand.
If you believe deeply in what you’re building, we’ll make sure the world sees why. At WHIMSGIC Studio, we build beauty and wellness brands where strategy, packaging, identity and experience all belong to the same world. In a category filled with beautiful products, pretty is the entry ticket. Being remembered is the real work.
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