I’m feeling a little gaslit. You remember Marc Jacobs Beauty, right? I distinctly recall, way back in 2013, being so excited to experience the makeup vision of one of my favorite fashion designers. And the line didn’t disappoint—until it went away in 2021. The brand’s return has been fantasized for years and ecstatically anticipated ever since Marc Jacobs Beauty was credited for the makeup in Jacobs’s spring 2026 New York Fashion Week show. So why does the press release say, “INTRODUCING MARC JACOBS BEAUTY”?
In fact, there are precisely zero mentions of the original Marc Jacobs Beauty—which launched in August 2013—in the five-page announcement. Not so much as a nod. I’ve been looking for Easter eggs, some sort of quintessential Jacobs wink. But this press release would have you believe that the Marc Jacobs Beauty you’re about to meet is the first installment.
I get it. There are parts of my past I would prefer to pretend didn’t happen. But unlike micro bangs and shitty exes, Marc Jacobs Beauty was celebrated and collected. (I still have an unused mini Le Marc Lip Crème from a decade ago, its glossy, black case hardly ever opened.) The buzz around this launch is fueled by more than just the typical excitement for newness from a famous person; it’s partially powered by nostalgia, even if it wasn’t all that long ago.
Photo: Courtesy of brand
But with the exception of its name and a familiar font on the package you’ve always found on his apparel and handbags (shoutout to my Marc Jacobs The Sack bag in my peripheral vision as I write this), Marc Jacobs Beauty is, for all intents and purposes, an entirely new, fully reborn makeup line, with a new yet trusted parent: Coty. The same company Marc Jacobs fragrances call home.
“I do trust the people at Coty, because obviously that is very high on their priority list—making something that is safe, that meets all codes and all that stuff, but also delivers on its promise,” Jacobs told attendees at a media preview for Marc Jacobs Beauty in New York City in April. And he’s quick to admit that he left the formulation of the new products up to the experts there. “I mean, I’m not scientific, I’m not working with the labs or the places that develop the actual product … I didn’t go around from place to place and work with some person in a lab saying, like, ‘Well, it needs to be creamier and the dry down,’ whatever. I just didn’t know about that.”