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Nars’s new beauty ambassadors, Maxine, Chelsea and Sissi, all have distinct looks, personalities, and backstories. Called the Power Players, they’re also fully virtual.
The “meta-humans”, digitally rendered avatars, are inspired by three of Nars’s Powermatte Lipstick shades (Dragon Girl, a candy apple red; American Woman, a dusty rose; and Too Hot To Hold, a maple red) and will serve as virtual spokespeople for the beauty brand’s digital projects as Nars invests further in metaverse technologies. It’s a future-facing project, says vice president of global digital strategy Dina Fierro. Nars is introducing its Power Players through its own social channels (including Instagram, TikTok and, in China, Douyin) and the Nars website this year, with the view of further character-building in 2023.
“We are doing our best to think strategically rather than opportunistically, about where the opportunities lie as we look at the near future,” Fierro says. In July, Nars launched a Colour Quest experience on Roblox, which Fierro says was worthwhile because of Roblox’s “compelling scale” (it has more than 41.8 million visits at the time of writing). Similarly, virtual influencers offer opportunities for heightened digital engagement at the global level. In addition to the US and UK, Asia is a key market for Nars. “Within Asia, there has been widespread adoption and acceptance of virtual avatars,” Fierro says. “Having a trio of branded influencers unlocks a new level of creative execution for us.”
China’s virtual idol industry is becoming increasingly lucrative (its virtual people market is forecast to reach RMB 270 billion ($40.47 billion) by 2030, according to artificial intelligence tech platform Qbit-AI). Also, over half of Gen Z social media users plan to get fashion or beauty inspiration from digital avatars or influencers in 2023, according to a recent trend report from Instagram.
Nars’s approach to avatar development was twofold, taking inspiration from the lipstick shades themselves, and the personas of the individuals who might wear them. “There’s a wealth of inspiration to be found in shade storytelling,” Fierro says. “They’re best-selling shades that people have a really strong emotional connectivity to.” And, when you wear a shade, she says, you’re embodying a persona: “There’s something that you want to bring forth and express to the world in that moment, on that day.” After dissecting these two aspects (product colour and individual persona), the team created loose character sketches that became the three Power Players, developed in Epic Games’s Unreal Engine 5 (whose high-fidelity aesthetics were a draw for the brand). Each character has a future-facing career, such as digital artist or recent fashion school graduate, paving the way for further projects.
Creating virtual humans from makeup shades offers a new solution to the question of how best to translate beauty into digital form. Byredo and Rtfkt created wearable virtual “auras”; and digital-first makeup brand Bakeup released AR filters and NFT wearables before physical products. The non-playable characters (NPCs) in Colour Quest helped to inform Nars’s approach to embodying shades through characters. Fierro recalls the NPC on Blush Island, which was shaded according to Nars’s physical colour offerings. She was also floating, mimicking the effects of blush application and representing the fantastical possibilities with virtual influencers.
Virtual influencer Miquela has been around since 2016, created by LA-based software company Brud, originally via Instagram, and signed to CAA as their first virtual talent in 2020. She and her virtual peers offer an appealing option for brands looking to tap into the avatars’ social followings, as they would a human influencer. Pacsun partnered with Miquela for a multi-season partnership that began in August in-part due to her existing online presence. “When you create a new digital avatar, you have to work on creating that personality,” Pacsun president Brieane Olson told Vogue Business at the time. Whereas Miquela’s positioning as Gen Z tastemaker with a “long-standing fashion history and social consciousness” made her a “natural fit”, she said.
Virtual influencers have higher engagement rates than humans (over twice the amount across all but two follower counts studied, based on average engagement data), according to research from VirtualHumans.org and Hype Auditor. This is, in part, due to avatars’ strong fan communities — to the point where 35 are now verified with a blue tick on Instagram. Whether Nars will be able to cultivate these same followings remains to be seen. However, the brand will be able to better control its influencer marketing spend and strategy — and, it hopes, the outcome. The Power Players’ personas, looks and backstories, for instance, were all developed to push a specific brand narrative.
Other brands have created their own avatars. Prada created computer-generated Candy to promote its Candy fragrance collection. LVMH created its own ambassador named Livi (for LVMH Innovation Virtual Insider) to represent the group’s innovation strategies, earlier this year. Yoox launched Daisy in 2018 to make clothes feel familiar and personal, brand and communication director Manuela Strippoli told Vogue Business last year. LA-based modelling agency Photogenics launched an avatar division, where virtual renderings of their physical talent are available for brands to licence out.
Nars had been keeping an eye on virtual influencers for some time, Fierro says, and intentionally chose to create its own meta-humans from scratch, instead of tapping existing virtual talent. The brand wasn’t interested in the pre-existing identity that an established virtual influencer offers. Instead, the goal was to imbue its own brand identity into its ambassadors. “We felt that there was so much to build from with the identity of these shades,” Fierro explains. “We were creating characters from the ground up.” The avatars are the product of this branded tailoring.
Creating from scratch comes with its own set of challenges. One is that, creatively speaking, anything is possible, says Fierro. This means careful consideration of what can be executed realistically with timeline and budget restrictions. This was a key learning for the brand: due to the persistent technological limitations of digital design, compromises sometimes ought to be made, especially when it comes to styling. Chelsea’s oversized blazer, for example, posed complications. “To get an oversized garment rigged to an avatar, to move in a way that feels real, is technically very challenging,” Fierro says.
The brand describes this next step as a “response” to virtual landscape expansion. The plan is for the Power Players to represent Nars and interact with users across a host of electronic environments (expanding into new metaverse environments and introducing more 3D capabilities to its own channels are under consideration). The avatars will evolve: “While we have developed these characters, these bodies, these faces that have some degree of permanence, it’s exciting to think about how we can continue to refresh them,” Fierro says.
For instance, the women’s careers are future-facing (two are entirely in the digital realm), which leaves room for partnerships down the line. Chelsea is a digital artist who could conceivably create her own collection of NFTs — for which Nars could collaborate with a female digital artist. Sissi is a recent graduate of fashion school — Nars might dress her by partnering with physical or virtual fashion designers, Fierro says. Or, she could partner with digital designers building their own careers for a Sissi collaboration collection.
Additional plans, or even more “simple” considerations on if the characters should age, are still being worked out, Fierro says. “We really wanted to ensure that what we were building had legs for future activations. Especially when we think about re-animating these characters — which we will in 2023 and onward.”
Correction: Too Hot To Handle lipstick name has been updated for accuracy.
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