This week, beauty’s biggest bust-up was all about semantics.

It started with a Vogue editorial showcasing former Miss Universe Olivia Culpo’s nuptials to San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey. Once the online commentariat finished picking over her dress (Culpo said she ‘”didn’t want to exude sex in any way”), the discourse latched onto an otherwise throwaway comment about her beauty regime: Culpo said she wasn’t wearing mascara, lip liner or eyebrow makeup.

Eschewing quotidian cosmetics products on her wedding day, especially in the face of celebrity guests and when photographed for Vogue, seemed like a bold choice. Culpo told the magazine it stemmed from her desire for simplicity and elegance. What irked some readers was what went unsaid: Culpo may have skipped cosmetic products, but she appeared to still be relying on a bevy of semi-permanent beauty treatments.

“She has lip filler, Botox, lash lift and microbladed eyebrows so I can see why she doesn’t need makeup for that,” read a typical comment on one of many TikTok videos dissecting her suspected treatments.

Culpo denied getting lash extensions or brow lamination, but previously posted pre-wedding content that mentioned lash lifts, Botox and filler, as well as in-clinic facials.

Culpo has stepped into a fiery section of internet discourse. Wearing too much makeup can attract cries of fakery. But making a show of wearing no makeup at all can draw accusations of being a “pick me girl” (a woman who is deemed to be rejecting feminine traits to impress men) and allegations of being anti-feminist, or trying too hard to be relatable. There’s no winning.

“The whole ‘no makeup makeup’ thing is always a bit tongue in cheek,” said Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trends agency Stylus. “One could argue that if you’ve made any steps towards making yourself look better, even if you’ve put a moisturiser on, you’ve cosmetically altered yourself.” Still, plenty of commenters on Culpo’s wedding were positive, praising her for what they saw as a timeless look.

The conversation has only grown more complicated with the rise of treatments such as brow and lash tinting, lamination or microblading of the brows, spray tanning and even lip “blushing,” all of which have rapidly gone from the preserve of the ultra-wealthy to many women’s monthly beauty budgets.

Even before these treatments hit the mainstream, the no-makeup ideal elicited strong feelings. Alicia Keys was applauded by some when she “gave up” wearing makeup in 2016, but others pointed out that with her wealth and ready access to weekly facials, she could afford to skip foundation (In 2023, she decided to embrace wearing it again).

“If you’re not going to wear makeup, just shut up and don’t wear your makeup,” said Amber Leaux, one-half of the podcasting duo Style & City Diaries, adding that she found it equally odd when Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, didn’t use a makeup artist for her wedding day. “It doesn’t make you one of us.”

Mirror, Mirror

The Italian expression for makeup is il trucco, which literally means “the trick.”

The main selling point of tweakments such as lash lifting and tinting, or brow lamination, is that they give the effect of having applied mascara or brow pencil, and last up to six weeks. It turns a daily ritual into a bi-monthly appointment.

Take eyebrows: in years gone by, you could have them shaped, perhaps dyed. If you had little to no hair left, tattooing was an extreme option.

Today, popular treatments include tinting, threading, lamination (a perm-style procedure that relaxes the hairs flat for a brushed-up look) or microblading, a permanent procedure that tattoos hair-thin strokes into the brow to reshape or densify them.

A quick scroll through social media – or the websites of Cosmopolitan and Allure – will give you an exhaustive guide to all the “high maintenance” things one can do to be “low maintenance.” Using a sunless tanner in the correct manner can take the place of foundation, bronzer and contour. A heatless curl wrap can fake a blowout overnight. Lash extensions, applied by a professional or at home, mean a lash curler and mascara is no longer needed. One slogan for DIY lash extension brand Lashify, which sells a $125 starter kit, is “mascara is dead.”

“If I have tweakments, of course I look good without wearing makeup,” said Leaux. “The reason I get my eyelashes done before I go on holiday is so I look peng when I wake up, so I don’t have to wear makeup.” [Peng is a British slang word meaning good or attractive].

Payne said that authenticity is such a prized quality for influencers and celebrities, when a mainstream face appears disingenuous, it angers viewers more than listing a series of expensive treatments might do. And the choice to detail the lack of makeup in proximity to Culpo’s other comments about wanting a pure, clean look was uncomfortable to some.

“There’s a certain sort of unwritten rule that [celebrities] are essentially a vehicle of inspiration for fashion and for beauty,” said Payne.

Though many celebrities, the most recent example being Sophia Richie Grainge, choose low-key beauty looks for their big day, by claiming not to wear makeup, Culpo didn’t let people play along. “[With Richie Grainge] viewers might not be able to afford all the products…but they could at least find dupes,” said Payne.

Culpo’s error then, was not choosing a simpler look, it was how she chose to present it. Saying you want to be a natural beauty doesn’t sit right with consumers when they know an extensive treatment plan has been undertaken ahead of the big day, said Payne. “It comes off more like ‘you can’t afford to look as beautiful as I do naturally on my wedding day’.”

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Aurea Holding, an investment firm that Jatania runs with former UBS Group AG banker Paul Raphael, is in exclusive talks to acquire The Body Shop after beating rival bidders in an auction process, according to the people.

The consortium also includes Charles Denton, who was previously chief executive officer of fragrance and beauty brands Molton Brown and Erno Laszlo, the people said. The new owners plan to retain all of The Body Shop’s UK stores, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

The Body Shop fell into administration in February, three months after private equity firm Aurelius agreed to buy the chain for £207 million ($266 million). Administrators from FRP Advisory closed the retailer’s underperforming stores, leading to hundreds of job losses. FRP blamed the collapse on financial challenges under its previous owners Natura & Co.

A representative for the consortium declined to comment. A spokesperson for FRP couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

The Body Shop’s international business in Europe and parts of Asia were sold to a family office before the UK arm declared insolvency. FRP has been running an auction of the remaining business, which includes about 100 outlets, after concluding that an alternative restructuring was not viable.

The Body Shop was founded in 1976 by animal rights activist Anita Roddick, beginning with a small store in Brighton on England’s south coast. It became popular for selling cosmetics and hygiene products that were not tested on animals, but the business has struggled to compete with rivals and has been unprofitable for years.

Jatania built a fortune in cosmetics and sold Lornamead, the owner of personal-care brands including Lypsyl, to rival Li & Fung Ltd. for almost $200 million in 2013. In recent months, Jatania has been trying to sell a Grade I-listed stately home he owns in Denham, Buckinghamshire which previously housed American banker J. P. Morgan.

--With assistance from Irene García Pérez, Sabah Meddings and Damian Shepherd.

This article was written by Dinesh Nair from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

In the weeks before June’s couture shows, workers in European ateliers hunched over garments carefully sewing and ornamenting them with beads and other decorative flourishes, at times with little more than skilled hands and an eyed needle.

Some 40,000 years ago, a similar scene was taking place, for much the same reasons.

In a new paper that happened to coincide with the couture shows last month, an international team of researchers made the argument that the advent of eyed needles was connected to a “pivotal shift” in clothing and human history. Prior to that point, humans appear to have made the earliest tailored garments — ones that were actually fitted to the body, rather than just animal skins wrapped around it — by scraping hides, puncturing holes in them with bone awls and tying the pieces together with fibres or sinew in order to keep warm in chilly climates. Eyed needles let palaeolithic humans pierce holes and thread fibres simultaneously, which was more efficient and also allowed for more refined stitching.

With this ability, they could have started making underwear for added warmth, and importantly, decorating clothes by attaching fur trims, beads and other adornments, allowing clothing to become a means of expressing everything from group identity to social status.

“Eyed needles mark that transition in the function of clothing from a physical necessity in certain environments at certain times to a necessary social function at all times,” said Dr. Ian Gilligan, a researcher at the University of Sydney and lead author of the paper.

For that reason, eyed needles were a “technological advance” that marked “a tipping point in human prehistory,” Gilligan and the other researchers wrote.

The implication is that fashion and technology have been intertwined from the start. The relationship has often been symbiotic: Fashion in many ways wouldn’t exist as it does without technology, but technology wouldn’t be as it is today without fashion.

The need for faster ways to turn raw cotton into yarns and fabrics, for instance, powered much of the Industrial Revolution. A job that once largely entailed women spinning yarns at home on small wooden wheels or with a distaff and spinning bowl had evolved by 1860 into a mechanised industry where wage workers toiled on spindles powered by steam engines, as historian Sven Beckert detailed in his book “Empire of Cotton.”

“It was in cottons that the new modes of manufacturing first came about,” Beckert wrote. “The factory itself was an invention of the cotton industry.” (And as Beckert also noted, along with improvements in efficiency came problems like new kinds of labour exploitation that continue in much the same form to this day.)

Modern computing even owes a debt to the Jacquard loom, patented by the French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804. To produce his intricately patterned materials, Jacquard used punch cards that acted as a code controlling which threads were raised in the textile. The design inspired Charles Babbage, an English polymath, who borrowed the idea as the basis of his “Analytical Engine,” essentially a steam-powered computer capable of performing calculations. Babbage never built his machine but described its operations in great detail. It was with this framework in mind that Ada Lovelace, a friend and associate, wrote what is often called history’s first computer program.

Other creations such as nylon, used now in toothbrushes, seatbelts and much more, were initially applied to fashion. The material, created by DuPont researcher Wallace Carothers in the 1930s, was the first wholly synthetic fibre used in commercial items. The first product made from it was women’s hosiery. (Some small amounts were also used in toothbrushes.) The term “nylons” became synonymous with stockings.

Fashion isn’t known as the most technologically advanced industry today, but it’s among the fields quickly embracing generative AI (though customers aren’t always happy about it). It has adopted blockchain and augmented reality. It’s even been trying to get robots to sew clothing, though handling floppy fabrics has proved a difficult task for machines.

Against that backdrop we might not immediately think of eyed needles as a form of technology, but from an archaeological perspective, technology is any physical artefact that can be used to perform a function or manipulate objects. “It’s no different from us using a computer to communicate,” Gilligan said.

In that regard, the eyed needle is among humanity’s most enduring technologies. The earliest known examples appeared roughly 40,000 years ago in what’s today Siberia. A couple thousand years later they appear in the Caucasus, then show up in East Asia around 30,000 years ago. They made it to Europe by about 26,000 years ago.

They probably appeared out of necessity, according to Gilligan, as it’s unlikely hunter-gatherers would have spent the time crafting the delicate needles unless they served a useful function. Decoration of the body was vital to these groups. They would alter their appearances for ceremonies and other social purposes.

It was usually their skin that served as the canvas though. They would paint themselves and use tattoos and scarification to add permanent decorations to themselves. Clothes, meanwhile, appear to have come and gone over time. As the climate fluctuated, tools like hide scrapers appear in the archaeological record during glacial cycles when the climate grew colder but then disappear again as it warmed up, suggesting humans shed their clothes once the weather allowed. Then, around the end of the last ice age, something changed: Clothes didn’t go away.

“It was because clothing had acquired this necessary function of dress and that had never happened before,” Gilligan said.

As far as we know, clothes replaced adornment of the naked body. That’s also when eyed needles appeared.

Gilligan said this social function of clothing, which also came to include modesty, is the reason clothing has persisted and why we still wear clothes now. So next time you’re grateful to have clothes and not be delivering a presentation to a group or standing on a crowded bus or train naked, say a little thanks to the eyed needle.

Paris’ Musée des Art Décoratifs announced Wednesday that it will host a “grand ball” to celebrate French fashion and art de vivre, and raise funds for the institution. The ball will be held on July 6, 2025, and mark the centenary of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts which took place in Paris from April to October 1925.

Unlike the Met Gala in New York, tickets will be sold to individuals or families, and not brands. The evening will be divided into two parts: a smaller, exclusive fete, followed by a larger event that will be open to design and fashion students.

Learn more:

At the Met Gala, the Fantasy Was Intact

Despite threats of disruption from protests, the Condé Nast union and TikTok’s legal woes, the event continued as planned with attendees dazzling in bespoke and archival ensembles.