Harper Skincare

Decolonize the category. Reclaim the gaze.

Skincare conceptualized for a generation who shun borders and binaries.

Creating a skincare line for Gen Z meant shifting the very category’s branding paradigm. Yes, the legacy of French cosmetic standards had to be accounted for. Yes, the Neue Minimal style that balayaged the 2010s had to be leveraged. But also, because this audience had more information – and opinions – at their fingertips than any before, the ethical baselines needed firm grounding.

When Harper co-founders decided to work with Otherness, it was to ensure their D2C startup could really speak to an, unapologetically, other generation.

These digital natives would demand a totally seamless experience between the products’ physical and online offerings. And being expert image editors themselves, they would expect all the visual language to index their own moral imperatives: intersectionality assumed, tokenism shunned, transparency nonnegotiable.

Curator’s Insight

Botanical skincare usually leans on soft type and gentle illustration to signal natural ingredients. Harper avoids this by giving each element a different job. The heavy, rotated product names do the shouting, so the vintage-style plant illustrations can stay fine and quiet without losing shelf presence. The flat colour blocks sit between the two, holding the small functional copy and shifting from tube to carton so the system never feels like a copy-paste. The oversized name, set one letter per line on the NURTURE carton, also turns the word into a graphic element rather than just a label. The takeaway for designers is that when a brand needs both warmth and authority, it can assign each to a separate layer and let a neutral colour field connect them.