NEW YORK — Day Two of the 2025 Beauty CEO Summit, held Thursday, covered subjects impacting today’s beauty industry, which is morphing at warp speed.

Speakers at Casa Cipriani South covered subjects including artificial intelligence, tariffs and teen spending – all contributing factors to what’s forming the brave new world of beauty. They included David Greenberg, chief executive officer of L’Oréal USA; Priya Nair, Unilever president of beauty and well-being; FundamentalCo’s Jenna Lyons, and Peach & Lily founder Alicia Yoon.

Here are the top nine takeaways that emerged on the final day of the summit.

Wrong Is the New Right: “Our education system teaches us to get the right answer the first time,” said James Dyson, founder of Dyson. “But life simply isn’t like that. Change the education system and give the people who [have] the most wrong answers more marks, because they have to go through a process of experimentation and work their own way to the right answer, to discover the right answer.”

“The challenge we all face is to use AI in a way that brings true value to the business by either making the lives of our teams easier or by helping to unlock new growth opportunities,” said Greenberg.

“Scale — you can reach millions and even billions of people with Al, with the organization or the employee base that you have,” said Tsedal Neeley, the Naylor Fitzhugh professor, business administration and senior associate dean for faculty development and research at Harvard Business School, who suggested focusing on scale, speed and scope. “Speed — smarter, faster decisions because of the ability to predict in the right ways — and scope — new products, new services and new innovation.”

From Reactive to Preventative: As beauty and wellness continue to blur, the customer is focusing on overall longevity. “Health is no longer the absence of disease. It is living a better life. It is the idea of better living. It is no longer these categories which were separated. Beauty, well-being and nutrition are no longer separate. The categories are blurring [and] intersecting,” said Nair. 

Cut Through the Noise: “There’s a lot of noise around tariffs — candidly, probably more noise than real impact at this time,” said Emily Essner, Saks Global’s president and chief commercial officer.

Control the Controllables: As uncertainty surrounding tariffs rises and consumer confidence falls, the importance of controlling what you can grows, said iLabs founder David Chung, E.l.f. Beauty chief financial officer Mandy Fields and Peach & Lily’s Yoon. Offering value beyond price — for instance, via an increase in educational content — and approaching potential price increases on a product-by-product basis versus via blanket policies are examples of this.

Don’t Let Fear Rule: “Don’t pull back too hard,” Lyons, the recently appointed executive creative director at FundamentalCo and former J. Crew creative director, advised summit attendees about navigating times of tumult. “When the world starts up again, you won’t be prepared.”

Teen Beauty Spending Is Nuanced: Teen beauty spend isn’t one-size-fits-all. Boys outpace girls in prestige fragrance buying at 60 percent versus 23 percent, data from Boston Consulting Group shows. Meanwhile, teen girls over-index in prestige skin care versus their male counterparts and overall teen beauty spend grew 23 percent versus last year, far outpacing the total market’s 9 percent gains.

Results Matter: “[Consumers] don’t just want hope in a jar. They want results from that jar,” said Maly Bernstein, CEO of Bluemercury.

Represent Yourself: “We’ve transcended people buying products [to] people buy people,” said Stormi Steel, founder and CEO of Canvas Beauty. “Let them know who your brand is and how you want to be represented, having not just one face.”