Key Takeaways:
• A New Fashion Statement: Once a tool for discreet acne treatment, pimple patches – especially those from brands like Starface – have become bold, collectible fashion accessories among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, often worn even without acne.
• Promotional Application: With massive social media traction and celebrity endorsements, pimple patches have the opportunity to become a lucrative promotional product.
• Branding and Market Opportunity: Collaborations with fashion brands like Marc Jacobs highlight their branding potential and appeal for repeat sales in retail and wholesale markets.
Pimples aren’t the social death sentence they used to be, thanks to a small adhesive accessory that has won the hearts and faces of Gen Z.
It’s called the pimple patch. And if you have a teenager in your life, you’re probably aware of it. Or you saw a teenager with a sticker on their face and wondered what that was all about.
The pimple patches are pretty much exactly what they sound like: small stickers that go over acne spots. But rather than blending in with a simple circle shape in a skin color tone, they’re meant to stand out with designs like shimmering purple stars.
Yes, the hottest accessory right now among the young people is a print product, and an incredibly simple one at that.
According to Vogue, a search for “best pimple patch” on TikTok will show 434 million videos. There are 54.7 million posts that mention “Starface pimple patch,” referencing one of the biggest names in the brand.
Starface started in 2019 with its colorful star hydrocolloid stickers, and soon had celebrities like Hailey and Justin Bieber, Willow Smith and Florence Pugh rocking them. People started asking what they were, and of course kids asked their parents for some.
Suddenly, it was fashionable to have a pimple.
“We’re really, really lucky because I feel like it’s one of the only skincare brands that you can tell people are wearing,” Starface President Kara Brothers told Vogue. “That’s certainly helped on social media. It has become a community.”
The social media effect has propelled Starface to the point where it now sells an estimated 200 packs of stars per minute. The brand’s key demographic has shifted younger too; its Gen Z and Gen Alpha customer base has grown from 44% of sales to an estimated 60% since 2021. Meanwhile, the company’s overall sales grew 93% year-over-year in 2023.
“The popularity of pimple patches is really a side-effect of a more meaningful shift,” Suzanne Scott, global associate beauty director at the beauty consultancy agency Seen Group, told Vogue. “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].”
Kids love them so much that they wear them when they don’t even have pimples. As the Washington Post’s Ashley Fetters Maloy wrote, “On a cheek, though, or in that alluring Marilyn Monroe mole position, above the lip? That’s just fashion, baby.”
This brings us to where we are currently, where Starface is now a premium brand that other companies want to collaborate with for products – one being Marc Jacobs.
The designer recently launched a line of tattoo-inspired pimple patches with designs like hearts, flowers, spiders and more.
Pimple patches have reached collectible status, with students trading them like they would other cafeteria commodities like trading cards or, lately, energy drinks.
A brand like Marc Jacobs knows the power of good branding and fashion, obviously. So for it to partner with something like Starface shows it understand the appeal of the product among young buyers.
This is, after all, the same brand that created the “it” tote bag of 2023.
The Promo Opportunity
For print and promotional products distributors, this feels like a no-brainer for the right audience. Much like pickleball took over the world and suddenly everyone was asking for sets of their own, pimple patches have a clear customer base hungry for them. The beauty of them, too, is that they are perfect for repeat orders. Kids and young people will need more periodically. Distributors can potentially stake a claim in the trend while it’s still relatively young.
Look at the Marc Jacobs collaboration for inspiration. The branding is visible not only on the stickers, where little logo motifs are used to show off the brands subtly, but also on the carrying case that the patches come in. This creates even more branding opportunity for packaging and long-lasting brand visibility even when the stickers have all been used.
Personal care is big in promo, and this is a rare breakthrough moment where a product from that space becomes a must-have on the same level of an apparel item or a drinkware piece. (It’s also worth noting that Starface sells to the wholesale market, a move it made in 2020.)
“We 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,” Brothers told Vogue. “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.”
That same idea applies to potential end-buyer customers like schools, gyms, spas and other businesses that have young clientele or self-care missions.
The potential for repeat orders is important for distributors. Something “disposable” like a pimple patch creates that opportunity for continued orders. And, it’s not like teenagers are going away any time soon. This trend, however, will. So, it’s best to hop on now while the kids are still interested in it.
But, who knows? Maybe brands like Starface have fundamentally shifted the way the young people think about something as timeless as a pimple.
