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When Ed Westwick resurfaced as the face of Lancôme’s Juicy Tubes anniversary campaign this September, lip gloss wasn’t the story. Chuck Bass was. A whole generation who once watched him brooding across the Upper East Side now watched him blowing glossed kisses into the camera. At almost the same moment, Kama Ayurveda tapped Rohit Saraf for its Bringaras haircare line in India—a move that made ancient rituals look less like duty and more like date-night prep. Globally, Felix from Stray Kids became Hera’s first male ambassador in six years, while Maluma leaned into heat for Hugo Boss.
These campaigns look like they’re about men in beauty. But the real play is subtler—and more provocative.
The Female Gaze Reimagined
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Traditionally, beauty has always been marketed through women to women. By inserting men into the picture, brands are flipping the lens. These campaigns are not designed to make men rush to buy Juicy Tubes or Ayurvedic oils. They are designed to let women see men in beauty — and by extension, see themselves differently.
Ed Westwick is not selling gloss. He is selling the fantasy of Y2K romance, repackaged as nostalgia marketing. Rohit Saraf is not selling hair oil. He is embodying the boyfriend who actually understands wellness rituals. Felix is not telling men to buy cushion compacts. He is drawing on the digital intimacy of K-pop fandom, where millions of women project desire, aspiration, and loyalty onto their idols.
This is the female gaze in motion: beauty products framed not just as tools for women to use, but as currencies of attraction, intimacy, and cultural belonging.
How History Explains This
This trend doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Historically, men’s products — from razors to colognes — were often sold through women. Campaigns showed men shaving so that women would approve, or leaning on taglines like “the man your man could smell like.” The subtext was always that male grooming mattered because it appealed to the female gaze. Fashion, too, has played this game. Tom Ford built his empire on provocative portrayals of men styled through a woman’s lens, while countless watch and fragrance ads used women as props to validate male allure.
Seen this way, today’s male ambassadors in beauty are not radical. They are a reversal. Instead of women as props in men’s advertising, men are now the props in women’s beauty advertising. The gaze hasn’t shifted — it’s still female-centred. Only the frame has flipped.
Case Studies
Lancôme Juicy Tubes & Ed Westwick
By placing a male icon at the heart of a lip gloss campaign, Lancôme wasn’t selling function. It was selling fantasy, humour, and memory. Nostalgia through a male face makes Juicy Tubes aspirational again for the women who once idolised him.
Kama Ayurveda & Rohit Saraf
Saraf’s casting places Kama in the orbit of India’s new-gen heartthrob. He is wholesome enough for Ayurveda, aspirational enough for modern India. His presence reframes traditional rituals as lifestyle, not obligation.
Felix & Hera
K-pop star Felix becoming Hera’s first male ambassador in six years isn’t about recruiting men into cushion compacts. It’s about women’s fandom. It’s about the magnetism of K-pop idols who command digital obsession and convert it into beauty sales.
Maluma & BOSS Fragrance / Shai Gilgeous-Alexander & YSL
Fragrance has always borrowed men, but in 2025, these choices are less about rugged masculinity and more about sex appeal as performance. Maluma makes scent dangerous, YSL’s NBA star makes it aspirational—both engineered for the female gaze as much as the male.
Indian Crossovers
Beyond Saraf, Indē Wild roping in Ishaan Khatter and smaller grooming brands signing actors like Neil Nitin Mukesh reflect the same playbook: familiar male faces not to educate men, but to entertain and reassure women consumers.
What Brands Think They’re Achieving
Brands are chasing three things with male ambassadors:
Attention through surprise: Men in beauty still feel unexpected, which makes the campaigns instantly shareable.
Emotional hooks: Nostalgia (Ed Westwick), fandom (Felix), or modern boyfriend charm (Rohit Saraf) create storylines around otherwise familiar products.
Theatre: Beauty campaigns today are stunts. A male ambassador adds friction and spectacle without needing to reinvent formulas.
The real genius is that these campaigns let women consume beauty as fantasy. It’s no longer just “here is a product for your skin” but “here is a man you know, want, or trust, handing you that product.”
Why Women Respond
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Consumer psychology explains the effectiveness:
Nostalgia: Westwick taps memory and longing.
Fandom: Felix activates loyalty networks where desire is communal.
Attraction: Saraf and Maluma embody green-flag and red-hot fantasies.
Validation: Women buy not just products but the way these men make the products feel — playful, desirable, culturally alive.
Men remain secondary audiences. The campaigns may normalise beauty for them, but the spending and the shareability still belong to women.
What Brands Are Really Chasing
At the core, these campaigns are not diversifying for the sake of equality. They are stunts. They inject surprise into a market where sameness has dulled attention. They hijack the timeline by offering audiences something slightly absurd, slightly indulgent, and instantly shareable.
Male ambassadors also signal risk. They challenge who belongs in beauty advertising and in doing so, they create theatre. The payoff is not men suddenly storming Sephora. It is women reposting, laughing, swooning, and remembering the product again.
But there are dangers. If a stunt feels too disconnected from the product, it veers into parody. If the male ambassador overshadows the product, the brand loses focus. And if women feel the fantasy is out of touch with their reality, the campaign collapses into cringe. Authenticity is the difference between Ed Westwick charming us into nostalgia and another actor making us wonder why he’s in gloss at all.
What’s Next?
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If beauty continues down this path, the stunts will only escalate. Expect more men cast in women’s categories, more idols turned into beauty avatars, and maybe even women fronting men’s shaving campaigns to underscore the female gaze. The next frontier is not gender balance but cultural provocation — who belongs where and who doesn’t.
Male ambassadors in beauty aren’t about men buying gloss or oil. They are about women seeing men differently — as fantasies, as green flags, as nostalgia triggers. Beauty has become theatre, and women’s gaze is the spotlight.
Ed Westwick blowing glossed kisses. Rohit Saraf embodying Ayurveda. Felix turning fandom into sales. These aren’t random stunts. They are the blueprint for how beauty sells itself in 2025: not through formulas alone, but through moments, desire, and the men we never expected to see holding the products we already loved.