One of the standout panel discussions at the BeautyMatter’s Future50 event in NYC was Beauty’s Lost Generation: The Gen X Opportunity – cut through the noise with rare clarity.

Featuring Laura Geller, founder of Laura Geller Beauty; Erica Taylor, makeup artist, educator and digital creator; and Sarah Creal, founder and CEO of Sarah Creal Beauty, the conversation was defined by honesty. Not the polished, rehearsed kind the industry often defaults to, but an upfront, unapologetic perspective from three women who have spent decades inside the beauty machine, and are no longer interested in playing along with its blind spots.

Collectively, they didn’t just advocate for Generation X. They called out the industry’s failure to recognise its power.

Because the reality is simple: this is not a forgotten consumer. It’s a mis-served one.

Let’s be precise about the opportunity, Gen X and Boomer consumers are not a side segment. 

They are a high-margin, high-retention growth engine hiding in plain sight and they have discretionary income. Unlike younger consumers, they are not endlessly experimenting for novelty, they have formed habits. They are investing.

And yet, most brands are still structurally designed around a younger consumer – visually, verbally, and operationally.

That disconnect is where the opportunity sits.

The panel surfaced something brand leaders should take seriously: representation is being confused with relevance.

Swapping in a 45-year-old model does not make a brand “for” a 45-year-old consumer.

If your formulation is still built for 25-year-old skin, your UX assumes perfect eyesight and dexterity, your education is trend-led rather than problem-led, and your tone still speaks down or simplifies – then your brand architecture hasn’t shifted, only the surface has.

This is where most brands are misfiring.

They are designing campaigns for optics while leaving the product, experience, and system untouched.

Consumers see through that immediately.

In our studio, we rarely accept age as the primary organising principle for a brand.

Not because age is irrelevant – but because it’s reductive.

We work from a different lens: attitude, not age.

What does she value? How does she move through the world? What is her relationship with beauty – functional, expressive, indulgent, corrective? What does she expect from a brand in terms of respect, clarity, and performance?

A 42-year-old and a 62-year-old can share far more in mindset than a 28-year-old and a 32-year-old. Yet most briefs still arrive boxed into rigid demographic brackets that flatten nuance and limit creative thinking.

When you design for attitude, you unlock a much sharper creative brief. You move away from “anti-aging” tropes and toward identity, energy, and intent. You create brands that feel culturally fluent rather than age-coded.

And crucially, you avoid building work that dates as quickly as the demographic it was targeting.

One of the most important insights to come out of the discussion was just how fundamentally different this consumer is from both a formulation and usage standpoint.

This isn’t a case of incremental improvement; it’s an entirely different brief.

Skin behaves differently, which means the product has to respond differently. Texture becomes more critical, as does finish, weight, and ease of application. Even the way light interacts with the product starts to matter in a more pronounced way.

And yet, much of the industry is still trying to retrofit existing SKUs rather than rethinking them from first principles. From a brand perspective, that’s not just a product challenge,  it’s a positioning one.

Because if your product doesn’t truly perform for her, the brand promise doesn’t just weaken, it collapses.

There’s a persistent myth that older consumers are less digitally engaged, data shows this is outdated. This audience is buying across DTC, Amazon, Sephora, Ulta, TikTok Shop, livestream, and legacy channels. They are not channel-constrained and they are experience-driven.

They will go wherever the experience is clearest, the education is strongest, and the product delivers.

Education is no longer a support function, it is THE product experience.

Founder visibility is not a branding exercise in this segment, it’s a trust mechanism.

In a category saturated with paid voices and interchangeable campaigns, the founder (when credible), becomes the anchor, the translator and the proof.

But this only works if the founder is genuinely close to the product and the customer – if not, the gap becomes obvious.

For investors, this is worth paying attention to. In this segment, founder-market fit is not a soft metric. It is a performance driver.

If you’re a CMO, founder, or investor, the question is no longer whether this market is valuable – that has already been proven. What matters now is whether your brand is structurally capable of serving it.

Not visually. Not rhetorically. Structurally.

Because the brands that will win in this space won’t be the ones that simply acknowledge this consumer; they’ll be the ones that design for her, using attitude as the lens rather than age.

Right now, very few actually do.