The Emerging Subculture of Alien Beauty

The research aims to explore new territory for the cosmetic industry. The subculture of alien beauty is a potential and emerging market worthy exploring for makeup brands. The researcher undertook ten interviews with the members to inspect their motivation to create alien looks and debated how a cosmetic brand could become the brand they choose to purchase. Two personal interviews and one focus group were conducted with non-followers to comprehend general consumers’ perception of adopting the aesthetics of the subculture in a brand’s marketing strategy. Besides, participant observation, content analysis, and online observation were utilised to help the researcher have a holistic understanding of how social and cultural factors affected the members of the community. Based on the findings, the researcher categorised sixteen themes into four factors of influences. Through adopting the information-processing model, psychological theory and emotion-driven choice model, the researcher provided an in-depth interpretation of findings and further deduced the research questions. Eventually, the researcher made recommendations for cosmetic brands to build strong engagement with consumers of the subculture of alien beauty.