July 14: Indian skincare brand d'you has launched embrace, its first retinoid product - and with it, a campaign that does something the beauty industry rarely does: cast people who actually look like the audience the product is made for.
There are no 22-year-old models fronting a retinol serum meant for someone twice their age. Instead, embrace's campaign features people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s - visible lines, visible age, nothing retouched away - anchored by actor, author, and cancer survivor Lisa Ray, one of India's most outspoken voices on aging without apology.
A category built on fear, flipped
The anti-aging category has run on the same convention for decades: sell a product meant for older skin using a model who doesn't have any. d'you's position is that the "anti-aging" framing was never really about skincare - it was about fear, and fear is easy to keep selling because there's always something new to be afraid of.
embrace takes the opposite position: pro-aging, not anti-aging. Aging is natural - something to be grateful for, not fixed or feared. The product exists to support skin through every decade, not to promise an escape from any of them. The campaign line - "Not to erase. To embrace." - reframes what a retinoid launch is supposed to say: not a reversal of time, but support through every year you're actually living.
"The easier path was to sell embrace the way every retinoid gets sold - as a nightly correction, a defence against your own face. We chose relief over fear. There is nothing about aging that needs fixing," said Shamika Haldipurkar, Founder & CEO, d'you.
Since launch, the social response has centred on one recurring reaction: relief - that a brand finally showed people their own age group as the subject of the campaign, not the cautionary tale they're usually being sold out of becoming.
The product
embrace is a dual-retinoid serum combining liposomal retinaldehyde and encapsulated retinyl propionate, formulated to solve the category's oldest trade-off: real results without the redness, dryness, and irritation retinoid users have come to expect and dread.
The formula is backed by a 56-day clinical study conducted across Indian skin tones, in which:
- 100% of users reported no irritation
- 100% of users reported brighter, firmer, and more even-toned skin
