How the Beauty Industry Turned Ancient Rituals Into Luxury Products
As beauty brands market ancient practices through anti-ageing claims and aspirational branding, their original cultural meanings are often left behind.
By Aniesha Chidwick
G
ua sha tools, hair oils, and promises of ‘anti-aging’ benefits sit on polished shelves across the world, constantly appearing across social media feeds. Beauty consumers today are being encouraged to turn to nature, embrace skincare rituals, and trust healing ingredients that existed long before the beauty industry repackaged them for luxury.
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Centuries ago, beauty rituals across cultures were rooted in care rather than correction. Ingredients like rice water, castor oil, turmeric and fermented skincare were used not as trends, but as traditions. They were tied to wellness, nourishment, routine and community. Today, many of these same remedies are being stripped of their cultural context and sold back to consumers through marketing that targets insecurity, ageing and the pressure to constantly improve ourselves.
The rituals once associated with care have become sculpting tools, lifting treatments and anti-aging solutions. Somewhere between ancestral practice and modern-day branding, beauty stopped asking how we could care for ourselves and started asking how we could improve ourselves.
The industry still hides comfortably behind the aesthetic of self-care. Soft packaging, minimalist branding and routines reframed as ‘rituals’ rather than consumption. When in reality, it’s an industry still deeply invested in insecurity and the fear of ageing. Consumers as young as their early twenties are being encouraged to think preventatively, building skincare routines around wrinkles that do not even exist yet.
Many of the rituals now marketed as anti-aging solutions were never originally practiced to fight time at all. They were about maintenance, protection, connection and care. Not perfection.
What makes this shift so interesting is how heavily beauty now relies on the language of authenticity. Ancient remedies immediately feel more trustworthy. Traditional ingredients suggest wisdom, simplicity and wellness in a beauty industry that often feels oversaturated and excessive. Consumers are no longer just buying products, they are buying into the feeling of returning to something more natural, more intentional and somehow more real.
But often, what is being sold is a version of these rituals detached from the cultures they came from. Gua sha becomes less about traditional Chinese medicinal practice and more about achieving a sculpted jawline. Hair oiling, long practiced across South Asian cultures as a form of care and routine, is now repackaged as a luxury treatment focused on repair and optimisation. Practices once passed through generations are now filtered through aesthetics, algorithms and consumption.
The irony is that many consumers are genuinely searching for comfort and care. In a beauty culture built around constant improvement, rituals offer slowness and familiarity. But even wellness has become performative. What once existed as acts of care are now content, trends and marketing strategies.
Beauty has always reflected the anxieties of its time. Right now, those anxieties revolve around ageing, perfection and the pressure to constantly maintain ourselves. The industry understands this perfectly. It has simply learned that ancestral rituals sell better when wrapped in the language of luxury.
Cherub Magazine
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