Beautycounter's founder let 25,000 women name her new lip gloss. That's the smart part.

Gregg Renfrew built Beautycounter into the brand that made “clean beauty” a mainstream phrase. After that company’s closure and her buy-back of the IP, she relaunched it as Counter for an older customer. Now, Forbes reports, she is going after the younger one: beecee, positioned as the Gen Z sister brand, is launching a Jelly Gloss whose name was chosen by a community of more than 25,000 women.

Forbes frames the brand as the next Gen Z disruptor. We’d be a little more cautious about the “disruptor” part and a lot more interested in the community part.

Is “clean” still the hook?

The honest question hanging over beecee is whether Gen Z shoppers care about “clean” the way their mothers did. The category has matured: the term never had a regulatory definition, many of the ingredients it demonised were never dangerous, and younger buyers have grown up with ingredient-literate creators explaining exactly that.

That doesn’t make the brand a bad idea. It means the “clean” label is table stakes rather than a differentiator. A 20-year-old is not choosing a lip gloss because it’s free of something; she’s choosing it because her friends use it, because it feels good, and because the brand feels like hers.

Which is why the naming vote matters

Letting 25,000 community members name a product sounds like a marketing stunt, and it partly is. But it’s also the right instinct for this customer. Gen Z buys from brands it feels it participates in. A vote on a product name is a small, concrete form of participation, and it generates exactly the sense of ownership that a “clean” claim no longer does.

It’s also cheaper and more honest than most celebrity endorsements, which is the other lever brands in this space usually pull.

What we can’t judge yet

Forbes’s piece confirms the Jelly Gloss launch and the community count, but we haven’t seen independent testing of the products or a full price list from a source we’d rely on, so we’re not going to pretend to review the gloss. What we can say is that a founder with Renfrew’s track record, a defined customer, and a mechanism for listening to that customer is a stronger starting point than most beauty launches we read about.

The takeaway for shoppers

If you’re the target customer, the useful question isn’t whether beecee is “clean.” It’s whether the products are good and whether the brand keeps asking you what you want after the launch buzz fades. The first is a matter of trying them. The second you’ll know within a year.