The Ordinary, with The Markeup Marché, has transformed beauty into a supermarket And the result is more honest than many skincare campaigns

In beauty, we almost never just pay for the product, and that much is pretty clear by now. We pay for the way it’s told to us, the packaging designed to look visually appealing, the sophisticated name, the usual promise written well enough to make even what we don’t need feel essential. It’s a mechanism we know very well, but we’ve now normalized it to the point where we barely even notice it anymore. And that’s exactly where The Markup Marché starts from, the new campaign by The Ordinary, which takes this mechanism, places it inside a supermarket, and suddenly makes it look much more ridiculous than we usually admit.

The Ordinary has turned beauty into a supermarket

When the problem isn’t the product, but everything built around it

The Ordinary has created a space that at first glance looks like any supermarket, just more curated, more minimal, more aesthetic, very much in line with current trends. But as you get closer to the shelves, the mechanism becomes immediately obvious: a banana becomes an All-Natural Magical Energy-Boosting Bar priced at 85 euros, an avocado a Glow-Enhancing Vitality Orb for over 260, a roll of toilet paper a High-Retention Cleansing Cylinder for more than 80. The objects are the same as always, but they’re simply described according to beauty marketing rules. The point isn’t the provocation itself, but how quickly language can shift perception of what we’re looking at. Change the label, adjust the tone of voice, add a few carefully chosen words to elevate the description, and the perceived value of the object magically changes. And the issue isn’t even that this happens, because marketing is exactly about this. The issue is how normalized this dynamic has become. The Markup Marché works because it takes a now invisible mechanism and makes it just ridiculous enough for us to notice it again. If an 85-euro banana feels like a provocation, it’s only because outside beauty, this kind of excess is easier to see. Inside the industry, the same kind of construction is constantly presented as desirable and necessary.

The Markup Marché

The most interesting part of the campaign is that it doesn’t just criticize the system, it stages it and lets it run on its own, almost becoming a site-specific installation. None of the products in the Markup Marché are actually for sale and, once you reach the checkout, you don’t buy anything you’ve seen: instead, you receive The Ordinary products. A simple gesture, consistent with the brand’s idea of minimizing all unnecessary layers, emphasis, and storytelling used only to justify prices. The physical spaces are open for a limited time in May and activated in six cities worldwide: Toronto, Paris, London, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Melbourne.