The Bedazzling Renaissance

Sep 2

3 min read

Maximalism, sparkle, and what glitter says about buying things in 2026

Phone cases. Water bottles. Hairbrushes. Vitamin boxes. People are covering ordinary, mass-produced stuff in rhinestones until you can't tell what it used to be.

Easy read: nostalgia. Y2K's back, Claire's is having a main-character moment, everyone's rediscovering the glue gun. Sure. But that's not really what's going on.

Design spent the last decade getting quieter. Clean lines, neutral palettes, everything a little interchangeable, "good design" that mostly meant invisible design. That wasn't a style choice. It was a symptom.

Bedazzling is the opposite of invisible. Loud, slow, covered in actual glue. Which is kind of the point, in a world where AI can make you almost anything in three seconds, doing something inefficient on purpose starts to feel like the last thing that's actually yours.

But I don't think this is really about AI. I think it's about ownership.

A water bottle can belong to a million people at once, same bottle, same tote bag, same subway car. Glue forty crystals to it and that stops being true. Nobody else's looks like that one. It's proof someone spent an afternoon on it.

That's the part worth sitting with: people don't just want to buy things anymore. They want to leave a mark on them. Ownership, quietly becoming authorship.

Which changes the actual job. Not "make the most beautiful, most finished version of this thing", but "where's the edge we left for someone else to finish."

A few ways that shows up, if you're building a brand right now:

Sell it unfinished.

The product that wins isn't necessarily the most polished one, it's the one with a blank edge left for someone to mess with. Blank packaging. Refillable everything. An "undecorated" SKU, sold as undecorated, on purpose. Beauty's already holding this card, a tube becomes a canvas the second you stop treating it like a finished object.

Embellishment isn't a gimmick. It's a channel.

A rhinestone kit, a charm collab, a decorate-it-yourself version of your bestseller, that's not a novelty drop, that's just listening. Your customer already told you what she wants: proof she was here.

Loosen your grip on "on-brand."

Whimsy-maxxing, performative imperfection, whatever you want to call it, it's allergic to anything that looks algorithm-smoothed. The messier, more obviously-made-by-a-human version of your content reads as more trustworthy right now. Not less.

Charge for the glue-gun hours.

This is lipstick-index behaviour, the small, hands-on indulgence people still say yes to when the bigger stuff feels out of reach. A $14 rhinestone kit or a $28 charm add-on sits exactly where "yes" still lives, even when the rest of the budget says no.

Chasing the aesthetic would be the actual mistake. Slapping rhinestones on your next launch because it's trending skips right past the opportunity, which was never the rhinestones. It's the authorship underneath them. What's "adding rhinestones" standing in for, in your category? Go build that instead.

When everything's mass-produced, the part your customer adds herself is the part she'll never stop paying for.

Hi I'm Paula, founder of H&F, and I work with wellness and beauty founders in a creative partnership. It’s not consulting in the traditional sense, and it’s not built for speed. It’s for founders who are thinking in years, not launches, and who care as much about coherence as they do about growth.

If this way of building resonates, you can learn more about how I work here.

And if you’d rather stay in the conversation, Hunter & Florence is where these ideas continue, through monthly founder conversations and reflections on building brands that refuse to be forgettable. Subscribe to stay up to date.