Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) Beauty announced its latest NFT campaign today, “Black Opium: The Night is Ours”. The campaign release involves a two-part NFT series. Chapter one contains 2014 NFTs and will be provided alongside purchases of the Black Opium fragrance, starting from January 30 in the UK, US, France and Australia.
While the initial NFTs are a reward that includes a gift voucher, it also provides access to purchase a second tranche of NFTs, the Night Masters. Proceeds will go towards the Abuse Is Not Love charity program.
The company officially announced its entry into web3 in June 2022 when it released the Golden Block NFT series. It involved the creation of a token-gated page in collaboration with Arianee web3 solutions and musicians Agathe Mougin and Kittens. The proceeds went to the same charity.
YSL Beauty’s latest initiative in web3 follows closely on holding company L’Oréal Group’s interest in the sector. In October 2022, HEC Paris business school announced a startup accelerator program with Meta and L’Oréal Group, which aims to support creativity and inclusivity in the metaverse and blockchain ecosystem. In June 2022, L’Oréal’s cosmetics subsidiary NYX partnered with The Sandbox metaverse and People of Crypto (POC), a blockchain lab looking to increase diversity in Web 3.
Makeup brands often use web3 as a community platform to celebrate diversity: for example, Estée Lauder’s makeup brand Clinique introduced an NFT initiative to increase female participation in digital artist communities. Another trend is to leverage NFTs as a reward, as in this case.
However, there is also a growing trend in luxury retail to add value to their digital products. Specifically, there is an increasing importance placed on providing digital goods alongside ownership of a physical product, a case in point being YSL’s latest Black Opium fragrance.
According to a report from Mckinsey, while NFTs provide value through their uniqueness, fashion creators are also finding audiences for their apparel being authenticated by NFTs. In fact, the web3 company Arianee, which earlier teamed up with Loreal, also partners with other luxury fashion brands to build “digital product passports” for supporting authenticity and traceability of products.
