Earlier this week, Selena Gomez collaborated with Demi Lovato for her Rare Beauty brand. And for Gen Z, this is a big deal. For context, the two went from best friends during their Disney Channel days to experiencing a very public friendship breakup, which was nothing short of tragic to nine-year-old me.
For the Rare Beauty campaign, they recreated a photoshoot from the Princess Protection Program, the Disney Channel original movie they starred in together back in 2009. Naturally, it’s been all over my feed, with friends sending it to me left and right. For those of us who grew up watching Selena and Demi, seeing them together again is a pretty iconic full-circle moment.
I’m all for using nostalgia as a marketing tool, but when does it start getting old?
I feel like this particular wave of nostalgia marketing really started gaining momentum around 2020. During quarantine, when everyone was stuck at home and looking for comfort, celebrities started reuniting with castmates of television shows that had ended years, sometimes decades, earlier. Boy Meets World did it. Malcolm in the Middle did it. And audiences ate it up. There is something so comforting about revisiting the shows and people who had been such a big part of our childhoods when the present felt so uncertain.
But since then, it feels like we’ve been on a never-ending nostalgia tour. We’ve had a Hannah Montana reunion, spin-offs and revivals of shows we grew up watching, and countless campaigns set on recreating moments from our childhoods. It’s almost as if nostalgia has become an instant selling point. And why wouldn’t it? The emotional connection is already there. Companies don’t have to introduce us to something new or convince us to care about it. They just have to remind us of something we already love.
Maybe it’s easier to sell us a version of the past than to create something that makes us excited about the present. It made sense at first, but six years later it feels like we’re still being sold the same feeling, just in different packaging. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for nostalgia, but the way it’s presented is too predictable for me to enjoy fully. I want to see new ideas. I want to be reminded that the people making these decisions actually have creativity and talent, rather than feeling like my friends and I could’ve come up with them over drinks.
This isn’t a criticism of Rare Beauty or the campaign itself. I actually like some of their products, and I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with brands tapping into nostalgia. What I’m questioning is the growing reliance on it across all forms of media. At some point, it starts to feel like an easy way to generate attention and revenue. And I think as an audience, we are a lot more perceptive than the industry gives us credit for. We can recognize when something has genuine creative value versus when something is being brought back simply because it has an established fanbase and is a guaranteed money-making opportunity.