When Fenty Skin showed a twist-to-slice eye patch dispenser and two beauty rivals surfaced with near-identical formats days later, the packaging itself became the joke. What could have turned into a fight over sameness instead became a shared social moment.
Glow Recipe and Huda Beauty followed with similarly presented eye-patch products, while Fenty Skin responded with humor. Huda Beauty founder Huda Kattan later said the brands had been “lied to on the exclusivity” by the same packaging supplier. The formulas, according to Glow Recipe’s founders, were different even if the containers looked remarkably familiar.
Table of contents
Jump to each section:
- Why the packaging overlap became content
- How brands outside beauty joined the joke
- What this means for marketers
Why the packaging overlap became content
Beauty packaging usually works hard to make products feel distinct. Here, the opposite happened. The repeated grinder-style format made the products instantly comparable, so the similarity became more interesting online than the individual launches.
Fenty Skin leaned into that visibility instead of trying to shut it down. The brand posted a meme placing the products side by side, while Huda Beauty joined the exchange in the comments. That made the packaging coincidence easy to understand even for people who had not been following the product launches.
The moment also had a useful ingredient for internet culture: it was simple enough to remix. A sliced eye patch coming out of a dispenser is a visual format that can be copied, parodied and transferred to other categories without needing a long explanation.
That is why the story quickly moved beyond a beauty-industry dispute. Once the format became recognizable, other brands could participate by changing only what came out of the dispenser.
How brands outside beauty joined the joke
Beauty of Joseon, Innisfree and Laneige stayed close to the skincare context, using the moment to reference their own products or to comment on the unfolding packaging drama. The joke became more revealing when brands with no direct skincare connection joined.
Burger King imagined honey mustard patches. Gillette turned the format into fresh-sliced shave patches. Poppi used a short “iykyk” response, while Australian beauty brand Quickflick paired the joke with its own pimple patch dispenser.
The best of these reactions did not need to explain why the original products looked similar. They relied on the audience recognizing the format first, then rewarded that recognition with a category-specific twist. That is what makes a social trend useful to brands: the audience does part of the decoding.
The packaging supplier issue also gives this moment a different texture from a planned meme campaign. The brands did not manufacture the coincidence together. The content opportunity emerged after a real product-development overlap became public, and the smartest responses treated that awkwardness as material rather than as something to hide.
What this means for marketers
This packaging episode shows how quickly an operational surprise can become a cultural format once people can recognize and remix it.
- A strong trend has a visual shorthand.People did not need a detailed explanation of hydrogel manufacturing to understand the joke. The dispenser format was distinctive enough to carry the story on its own. For brand teams, that matters because the easiest cultural moments to join are often the ones audiences can recognize in a second.
- Humor can lower the temperature of a brand conflict.Fenty Skin and Huda Beauty did not frame the similarity as a public feud. Their responses made room for humor while the supplier issue was still being discussed. That did not erase the underlying packaging problem, but it changed how the moment could travel socially.
- Cross-category participation makes a trend feel bigger.Burger King and Gillette had no need to sell eye patches. Their value came from showing that the format had become understandable outside beauty. Once unrelated categories can remix the same idea, the story is no longer only about the original products.
- Trendjacking works best when the brand has something specific to add.A generic reaction would have disappeared into the feed. Honey mustard patches made sense for Burger King because sauces belong to its world. Shave patches made sense for Gillette because grooming is already adjacent to skin. The joke traveled because each brand changed the format without losing its own identity.
The wider lesson is not that every awkward brand moment should become content. Some issues still need a direct operational or customer response first.
But when a moment is public, understandable and safe to play with, brands can sometimes earn more attention by acknowledging the joke than by pretending the overlap does not exist. The packaging may have been shared. The more interesting part was how many brands found a way to make the format their own.
