Can Marketing Stunts Breathe New Life Into Beauty’s Oldest Brands?

The plan was simple, if audacious: Send the comedian Chelsea Handler up in a hot air balloon over the New Mexican desert and ask her to riff on the merits of her body lotion. The goal? Make Gold Bond exciting again.

The 114 year-old body care brand, best known for its foot cream, is not lacking in name recognition — it’s safe to assume there’s some Gold Bond right now sitting in some dark and dusty cupboard in your parents house. What it lacks is relevancy. Today, the brand’s suite of moisturisers, which is owned by the pharmaceutical conglomerate Sanofi, is best known for their unsexy dependability, and not much else.

“When I’ve talked to retailers, I hear a lot of, ‘This is my grandmother’s lotion’,” Gold Bond’s chief executive Stefan Roehr, who joined the brand in 2025, told The Business of Beauty. “But is that really the image we want when you look at [the brand] today?”

Premiumisation has spurred much of the beauty industry’s growth of late, with customers — particularly younger ones hungry for trendy products — trading up for pricier, more elevated versions of basics like soap and shower gel. Broadly, the trend has benefitted new, sophisticated brands like Necessaire and Salt & Stone, but has also caused renewed organic popularity for established and otherwise unsexy brands like Aquaphor, Dove and Vaseline. That success has prompted other legacy brands to attempt to refresh their own images.

The stunts have been endless. Aside from Gold Bond’s tie-up with Handler, Unilever partnered with celebrity stylist Law Roach during the 2025 Met Gala, accessorising his Vaseline-lid-blue crocodile Hermés Kelly (costing upwards of $40,000) with a custom diamanté Vaseline pocket watch (limited-edition, priceless); Aquaphor has gifted creators industrial-sized tubs of ointment; Sunsilk recently distilled its decades-old conditioner technology into a fragranced hair mist.

Unilever-owned Vaseline, which has been around in some form since the 19th century, is also in the midst of a similar exercise, said Nathalia Amadeu, Vaseline’s global brand director. Over the past year, the brand has released new, trendy products like tinted lip gloss and shimmering body oils.

Neither Gold Bond or Vaseline is hurting for sales, however. Gold Bond’s moisturisers pulled in more than $30 million in November 2025; Vaseline became a billion-dollar brand in 2023. The hope, rather, is that these efforts will position the brands as part of modern culture, said Olivia Houghton, a beauty analyst at trends agency The Future Laboratory.

“[Vaseline] is present in more than half of households on the planet,” said Amadeu. “But we need to move from a household staple to a cultural icon. We want to be bought by desire, not by habit.”

Generating the Right Hype

Gold Bond’s marketing intervention occurred when parent company Sanofi took a look at the post-pandemic beauty landscape. Seeing that consumers were searching for valuable, effective skincare products, they realised they already had the perfect brand in their portfolio.

The Handler stunt was a part of the team’s plan to remind consumers of Gold Bond’s centuries-old moisturising promise, and marked one of a series of events intended to execute this vision. Its first stunt, in March 2025, brought Handler to Lake Tahoe to lead a Guinness World Record attempt for the largest swimsuit ski run, and was meant as a nod to its original lotion’s skin-protecting properties even in extreme climates. (The attempt didn’t work, as the 700 participants fell short of a record-breaking 1008.) Six months later, the brand celebrated its new launch, a Plumping Collagen Body and Face Serum packaged in a hot pink tube, by sending Handler in a hot air balloon at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

Gold Bond’s splashy product launch reflects a desire to think more like a beauty company than a CPG label. But fans of the brand think they have a right to play.

“The price point is perfect,” said Ramón Pagán, a cosmetic chemist, product developer and an ardent fan of the brand. “When you’re getting maybe 16 ounces of product for less than $15, and they advertise from-head-to-toe-to-face, collagen peptides, retinol, exfoliants, you’re feeling like you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck.”

The hope is that they’ll fall into the hands of younger consumers, who will then talk about them on social media. As Faran Krentcil wrote late last year, products like Aquaphor — the healing ointment produced by German conglomerate Beiersdorf — have become unlikely TikTok stars, with users fashioning their tubes into bag charms and staging Aquaphor “prom-posals.”

Unilever has been working to reinvent lines like Sunsilk, its oldest haircare brand — which recently introduced bright new packaging and stronger benefits claims, along with a fragranced hair mist that encapsulates the brand’s mission to connect with a younger consumer.

Low Risk, All Reward

Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trends agency Stylus said pulling off a sleepy brand revival is contingent on what type of brand it is, and what its values are. While cosmetics makers like Chanel and Clinique have successfully capitalised on the resurgent popularity of their Rouge Noir nail polish and Black Honey lipstick franchises by adding new products, they haven’t attempted to entirely remake their brand images to fit into the Gen Z or Gen Alpha zeitgeist.

“It’s a way for them to own a certain space without trying to own all of it,” she said, adding that no beauty shopper, regardless of age, will do all their shopping with a single brand.

For bigger, more functional brands like Vaseline and Aquaphor, they also have the luxury of not having such a rarefied brand image to protect. They are not seen as exclusive or elevated, so if a marketing campaign or product launch falls flat, they can simply move on. “They can really just do a bunch of things if they want to,” said Payne.

Of course, reaching younger shoppers is always a double-edged sword. Tween, teen and twentysomething customers have embraced and then deserted the likes of Drunk Elephant and Milk Makeup, leaving both companies needing to re-engage with core customers are viral peaks for trending products padded out.

The key is co-creation, said Houghton, which makes Gold Bond and Vaseline’s collaborations particularly resonant: Handler is a fan of Gold Bond just as much as Roach loves Vaseline.

Aquaphor’s TikTok virality may make the brand a household name, but it does little for Eucerin, the other century-plus dermatological brand that Beiersdorf owns, and its 50 other products.

And what happens if teens discover they like Vaseline better? Even a household name, it seems, can reach new heights.

“We felt in the past that our brand was already at the ceiling,” Vaseline’s Amadeu said. “Then we broke the walls.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on March 3 2026 to clarify that Eucerin, while owned by Beiersdorf, is not a sub-brand of Aquaphor.

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