Glimmer
Tools
Branding
Packaging
Industry
Makeup
Year
2026
Description
A full beauty brand experience built across three separate checkpoints: digital, physical, and the product itself. Designed to guide teen girls into their first chapters of confidence and self-expression in the makeup realm.
ABOUT
Glimmer was built around one main idea: this is your moment. The project brief required designing a complete brand experience with three distinct checkpoints: a digital presence, a physical activation, and the product itself. Our team of three, two others and myself, chose to create a makeup brand for teens stepping into beauty for the first time. A space that’s often overwhelming, gate kept by expertise, or just not designed with beginners in mind. Glimmer was the answer to that gap. With our focus being preteen and teen girls navigating beauty for the first time. The audience is obviously young, expressive, and looking for permission to experiment not exactly a tutorial that makes them feel behind. The brand had to feel like it was made for them, not marketed at them. Inclusivity and joy were non-negotiable as well as not claiming they need our makeup to make themselves "glow up" in anyway, merely this is a way for them to express themselves even further. Glimmer makes getting ready feel like an experience rather than a task. The brand centers around three ready-to-go kits with each kit being portable, approachable, and designed to build confidence at whatever level you’re starting from. The brand extended across a website, an Instagram presence, and a physical pop-up activation plus a campaign collaboration with KATSEYE anchoring the brand in a cultural moment teens already care about.
ABOUT
Glimmer was built around one main idea: this is your moment. The project brief required designing a complete brand experience with three distinct checkpoints: a digital presence, a physical activation, and the product itself. Our team of three, two others and myself, chose to create a makeup brand for teens stepping into beauty for the first time. A space that’s often overwhelming, gate kept by expertise, or just not designed with beginners in mind. Glimmer was the answer to that gap. With our focus being preteen and teen girls navigating beauty for the first time. The audience is obviously young, expressive, and looking for permission to experiment not exactly a tutorial that makes them feel behind. The brand had to feel like it was made for them, not marketed at them. Inclusivity and joy were non-negotiable as well as not claiming they need our makeup to make themselves "glow up" in anyway, merely this is a way for them to express themselves even further. Glimmer makes getting ready feel like an experience rather than a task. The brand centers around three ready-to-go kits with each kit being portable, approachable, and designed to build confidence at whatever level you’re starting from. The brand extended across a website, an Instagram presence, and a physical pop-up activation plus a campaign collaboration with KATSEYE anchoring the brand in a cultural moment teens already care about.
The biggest challenge on this project was finding the visual identity. We started in a completely different direction which was a darker, moodier sixties-inspired aesthetic that, while interesting, wasn’t speaking to our actual audience which we hadn't yet discovered. It took a real reset to get to where we landed. Once we committed to the softer, dreamier direction with the pinks, purples, and blue gradient palette, the blackletter wordmark with the star detail, the pill-shaped UI elements and the other iconic features like the star as the tiddle everything else unlocked pretty fast. Color was the key that made the whole system legible and made it feel cute and simple. From there the work flowed: the website mockup, the Instagram presence, the product packaging, the KATSEYE collab content. The three-kit structure also came into focus once the visual tone was set — each kit got its own color zone within the palette while still feeling like one cohesive brand family. We could also make each product in the bag match the color bag which made it easy to keep track of. Working as a group added its own layer of complexity. Aligning on a direction early is easy to skip when everyone has a slightly different vision, and we felt that friction in the first phase. The pivot away from the sixties direction was the right call, but it cost time which definitely made the back half of the project more compressed.
PROCESS & CHALLENGES
FINAL THOUGHTS
The final system is cohesive, fun, and genuinely feels like something that could live in a real store like Sephora. The KATSEYE collab gave the brand cultural credibility, and the gradient-heavy visual language translates well across both digital and physical contexts which was the main goal of this assignment. A few things we’d revisit later would be the naming within the kit line needs refinement like having a kit called the Glimmer Kit inside a brand called Glimmer creates confusion, and we’d rename it to something that keeps the alliterative G-series structure while standing on its own. We’d also shift the physical activation away from a truck pop-up toward an in-store experience, something closer to a Sephora shop-in-shop moment since we think it’s a stronger fit for the brand’s world and more believable as a real retail play.
