In 2020, Morphe reinvented itself as Forma Brands, a beauty “incubator” that would both make its own cosmetics and buy other brands. That year, the newly formed company introduced three brands in rapid succession: Morphe 2 in July; Such Good Everything, a line of vegan gummy vitamins, in September; and Bad Habit, a skin-care label with the influencer Emma Chamberlain as creative director, in December. In 2021, Forma Brands got into celebrity with Grande’s R.E.M. Beauty, which came out in November.

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Changing its name and model wasn’t as simple as putting out a new eye shadow palette, however.

Forma Brands experienced a string of setbacks. Such Good Everything is no longer for sale on its website or on morphe.com, and Chamberlain is no longer involved with Bad Habit. Her one-year contract as creative director ended in 2021, a Forma Brands spokeswoman confirmed via email. R.E.M. Beauty, which wasn’t publicised as being part of Forma Brands, was met with mixed reviews.

By January, Myles McCormick, the chief executive of Forma Brands, was out of the role. Earlier this month, Eric Hohl joined the company as chief executive.

“When Morphe came up, their whole point was about being something really original, but the minute you start to say, ‘Let’s do Glossier’ or ‘Let’s do this, let’s do that,’ you’re becoming a follower,” Hana Ben-Shabat, the founder of Gen Z Planet, a research firm, said of Morphe’s evolution into a beauty incubator.

Controversial content creators

Morphe’s founders, the siblings Linda and Chris Tawil, started the company in 2008 as a line of make-up brushes. Selling their products mostly online and at trade shows, the two expanded into make-up and opened their first store in Burbank, California, in 2013. Together, they transformed the label into a major player in online make-up, forging relationships and creating make-up collections with up-and-coming and established make-up artists and YouTubers that attracted attention online.

In late 2017, Hill tweeted a milestone: 1 million of her $38 (A$54) Morphe x Jaclyn Hill eye shadow palettes were sold that year. She became extremely valuable to Morphe, along with Charles and Star, who helped propel the company’s success through promotion of product collaborations and the many feuds that populated their social media channels. Hill got her own brand under the Morphe umbrella, Jaclyn Cosmetics, in 2019.

“At one point Tati Westbrook, James Charles and Jeffree Star were among the top channels in the beauty space,” Johnson, the podcast host, said.

“When Jeffree and James were partners in crime, their videos were constantly shading people and shading brands,” she said. “They may not have been ‘problematic’ at that point, but they were still doing things just to create drama.” (A video from January 2019 is titled Destroying the Makeup We Hated in 2018.)

Charles’ and Star’s convoluted drama with fellow YouTubers reads like a plot line plucked from Andy Cohen’s Bravolebrity playbook. And drama drove sales — to a point.

Charles had a falling out with Tati Westbook, who is nearly twice his age, over gummy vitamins. Star took Westbrook’s side, creating a rift in the friendship between the two men. Then Westbrook spoke out against Star and blamed him for turning her against Charles in the first place.

Morphe eventually distanced itself from its biggest stars.

How Morphe lost Gen Z

The appeal of beauty YouTubers with their ring-lit videos and high-profile friendships — and feuds — that helped Hill, Star, Westbrook and Charles amass millions, or in some cases, tens of millions of followers, while entertaining, hasn’t inspired Gen Zers (or millennials) to spend.

Talia Turner, 18, said she isn’t influenced by “traditional influencers” like Charles, nor does she trust them.

“They are getting paid to do this,” Turner said. “They aren’t going to say it’s a bad product.” She stopped watching his content, as well as others who were “getting into a lot of controversial things.”

Turner started taking her beauty cues from TikTok. She bought Maybelline Sky High mascara after a “random girl” on TikTok with “really nice eyelashes” posted about it.

Clara Schloendorff, 18, also buys make-up because regular, or “real,” people post about it on TikTok. The shorter the video, the better.

This is how Morphe 2, a Glossier look-alike that sells more “natural” make-up, was born. Morphe’s sleek black packaging was replaced with clean white tubes and compacts, and instead of richly pigmented hot pink eye shadow, Morphe 2 sold skin tints and lip oils.

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Also, instead of collaborating with top YouTubers, Morphe 2 hired Charli D’Amelio, the most followed account on TikTok at the time, and her sister, Dixie, as the faces of Morphe 2.

Schloendorff and Turner said they’ve never bought a Morphe 2 (or Morphe) product. They haven’t tried R.E.M. Beauty either.

“Everybody wrote the same exact article about it,” Johnson said of R.E.M. Beauty, which is affordable (a plumping lip gloss costs $17) and “feels very Ariana.” But she hasn’t heard much, if anything, about the make-up since it went on sale in November — until several days ago, when Grande posted a teaser video revealing that her latest collection, Chapter 2: Goodnight n Go, would come out this week.

Before that teaser, Grande’s last Instagram post on the line was weeks ago, and the one before that, a tutorial on how to achieve her “signature” make-up look, was in early February, which is a dog’s age in social media marketing.

“It feels very much like Ariana kind of licensed her name out,” Johnson said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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