This week we’re diving into tasteful speed and where acceleration helps, and where it quietly erodes differentiation.

If you’re attending MakeUp in Los Angeles this week, stop by booth #F53. We will have samples, snacks, drinks, and a few gift cards to give away.

AI has made speed cheap and accessible.

Companies of all sizes are striving to move faster and make their processes more efficient. In beauty, the need for speed typically surfaces when brands and manufacturers try to go from product idea to customer. When new trends or ingredients emerge, the companies that release first often capture the lion’s share of the market.

The advent of AI-native tools allows businesses to rethink how they approach nearly every function. Marketing copy, content, and campaigns can now be automated end to end. AI agents can manage customer service tasks that previously required entire teams.

Does this help them move faster? Sure. But not all speed creates advantage.

Tasteful speed is the discipline of accelerating what customers do not see, while intentionally protecting what they do.

Optimizing backend processes such as regulatory review, logistics, accounting, and production planning makes sense. For example, the faster a regulatory review is completed, the sooner production and other critical downstream functions can start. Speed in infrastructure compounds over time.

Customer facing initiatives operate differently. Marketing, community engagement, product development, packaging, and customer success are imperfect, human processes. The work of refining messaging, building trust, and creating a distinct brand experience simply cannot be compressed without consequence.

Research show that pure AI generated content significantly underperforms human written content. In one dataset spanning 1.2 million posts, human pages generated 5.44x more traffic and 41% longer sessions than unedited AI content.

From our own experience, AI generated posts received materially less engagement than comparable human posts, and AI first visuals drove significantly fewer clicks. The direction aligns with broader research. When automation produces content at scale, it often produces sameness at scale.

You can already see this happening across social platforms. Posts follow similar tones and structures, optimized for engagement but increasingly indistinguishable from one another.

An example of tasteful speed that I love is the handwritten note included with each order from Tatcha. Since the brand’s founding, these notes have been written by its five person customer care group known as ‘Team Love’. The note is inefficient by design. A handwritten message communicates time, attention, and intention. The human touch becomes noticeable precisely because it does not scale.

Deliberate inefficiency communicates commitment.

For us at IRI-Sys, speed is also paramount. We aim to build the best regulatory software for beauty brands, manufacturers, and consultants, and maximize our impact by working with as many clients as possible.

Our core team handles customer success directly. We spend a significant portion of our checking-in with clients, answering questions and staying close to their day to day challenges.

The benefits of doing customer success ourselves is undeniable: we have never lost a client who has purchased our full software suite. Word of mouth and referrals from existing clients is the biggest source of new business for us. Most importantly, having close relationships with our clients makes the work we do much more fulfilling.

We also invest heavily in systems to support this work. Our CRM tracks detailed client history so no information is lost. Internal workflows prioritize customer communication and ensure follow up. These systems make us more efficient, but they exist to support human interaction, not replace it.

People want to buy from people. If customer facing functions can be executed entirely autonomously, then they can also be replicated just as easily.

As AI proliferates throughout the industry, the human touch becomes scarce. The companies that win will not be the ones that move fastest everywhere. They will be the ones that move fast where it compounds and remain deliberate where it signals care.

That is tasteful speed.

In this week’s finance section of Beauty Bytes, I am humbly presenting you with a new format: Beauty Bytes Pulse.

Out of a basket of 27 publicly traded beauty companies, I wanted to highlight the top and bottom five movers of the last 30 days, while reserving the right to make some key commentary.

As always, I value your opinion, so if you have any feedback (good or bad), please email me at [email protected].

If you’d like, you can download the market snapshot here:

Now, back to the regular program of recent finance news in the industry. In the last two weeks, there were some highly interesting funding announcements and acquisitions. Let’s dive in:

Starface, the pimple-patch brand founded in 2019, closed a $105M minority investmentled by Astō Cosnumer Partners and Align Ventures, with co-founders Julie Schott and Brian Bordainick retaining control, Business of Fashion reported.

The round is a step-change versus its prior funding (under $20M); it values a business that was profitable for four years, did about $110m revenue last year, and is expected by insiders to approach ~$150m in 2026. Proceeds are primarily earmarked to deepen performance in existing channels rather than aggressively chasing new retail doors, even with broad distribution already spanning mass, prestige, and specialty.

Glo Skin Beauty has been acquired by KYT Group, a new consumer investment fund founded by industry veterans Kurt Kober and Michael Yanover; terms were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Kober will step in as CEO and Yanover will join the board.

KYT Group is positioning Glo as a professional-channel, clinically rooted brand built for an overlooked Gen X consumer, with plans to expand distribution and go deeper in select geographies rather than treating it as a pure digital play. Learn more.

Solabia Group has agreed to acquire Switzerland’s Mibelle Biochemistry from Persán, creating a larger, science-led actives supplier spanning beauty and health, with closing expected in the coming months.

Mibelle sells biotech-driven actives used in skin, hair, and healthy aging across more than 50 countries. This deal lands less than a year after Persán acquired the broader Mibelle Group, showing how quickly strategic owners are rotating toward core priorities in home and personal care. Learn more.

L Catterton Management has completed its acquisition of a minority stake in Parisian haute perfumery house EX NIHILO from Eurazeo. The exit delivered a 2.7x gross cash-on-cash return for Eurazeo, with about €55m of proceeds returning to its balance sheet, per Eurazeo.

Cutting Horse, a boutique operator-led growth equity firm, closed an oversubscribed $75m debut fund, up from a $50m target, per a company release. The firm will write $1m–$10m minority checks into founder-led consumer products and services businesses doing roughly $1m–$20m in revenue, and says it has already made four investments.

The team is led by Chris Protasewich and Michael Wystrach, the founder of Freshly, which was acquired by Nestlé for $1.5B. Learn more.

Good Light Cosmetics, the skincare brand founded by David Yi, will cease operations in April, Yi wrote in an article for Allure. Launched in March 2021 with a positioning around inclusive, gender-expansive skincare, the brand initially gained traction at Ulta as one of a small number of K-beauty offerings.

Yi cited intensified competition in K-beauty, aggressive pricing from larger and viral entrants, and the absence of additional funding as key factors behind the decision.

EQT has completed the sale of its remaining ~10% stake in Azelis Group NV (EBR: AZE), the Belgian chemicals company, for gross proceeds of around €190m. Learn more.