While most beauty brands dress their holiday collections with red, fir trees and snow, ILIA Beauty is going the opposite way. With California Flora, the clean beauty pioneer unveils its new year-end campaign along with a limited-edition collection of six gift sets — and deliberately turns its back on the traditional codes of the holidays.
“California is the birthplace of ILIA, and its landscapes have always been a source of inspiration in how we approach colour, nature and beauty,” explains Sasha Plavsic, the brand’s founder. “There is a real optimism to it: the light, the landscapes, the way everything keeps blooming, even in winter.” With this collection, the brand says it wants to move away from the usual winter settings and offer, in its own words, “a winter in bloom”.
The campaign was shot during a self-produced road trip along the central California coast, staging the collection amid local flora and fauna. The visual identity was entrusted to Marleigh Culver, an artist and designer based in Los Angeles, whose watercolour floral compositions slide from recognisable botanical forms towards something more abstract and intuitive. “Californian landscapes give off an energy that is both wild and controlled, and I wanted my creations to convey that duality,” says the artist. Entrusting the visual identity of a holiday collection to an artist rather than to an in-house design agency remains a rare choice in the beauty industry, where the tight launch calendar generally leaves little room for a genuine artistic collaboration built over time.
Making a holiday beauty campaign through a self-produced road trip rather than in a controlled studio is, in itself, a strong editorial choice: the brand trades total control of the image for the unpredictability of a real landscape, even if it means letting a grain more documentary than advertising show through in its visuals.
This identity runs through the collection’s six gift sets. The Ethereal Palette (62 euros), the house’s best-seller — a palette sold every eight seconds last year, according to ILIA — returns with a new design and new blush shades. It is accompanied by the Mini Eye Stylus Trio (38 euros), the Limitless Lash Duo (34 euros), the Mini Eye Essentials Set (39 euros) and the Mini Overglaze Lip Gloss Trio (29 euros), each presented in the graphic universe of the campaign.
The ILIA Holiday 2026 collection has been available since 27 September on ILIABeauty.com, with a selection also offered at Sephora — the Ethereal Palette and the Mini Eye Stylus + Limitless Lash Mascara duo already being online at Sephora.com before arriving in stores on 2 October. This staggered rollout, with online ahead of physical shelves, reflects a practice now common among independent beauty brands: testing the reception of a collection online before committing the more costly space of partner stores.
By betting on light rather than snow, ILIA Beauty is wagering that a holiday imaginary does not need to look like winter to convince — provided it stays faithful to the identity the brand has cultivated since its beginnings. It remains to be seen whether this counter-move, repeated season after season, will remain a recognisable signature of the brand or whether, by refusing the expected codes of the holidays, it will end up becoming a new code itself.
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