Skin Care Spoons Are ‘So Annoying.’ Here’s Why Luxury Brands Want You to Use Them Anyway.

As far as I’m aware, there is no Oscars-tier awards program dedicated to the fine art of packaging cosmetic products. There isn’t even a Golden Globes-tier one. There are the Beauty Design Awards , which are more like Independent Spirit Awards of packaging (the 2024 honorees are being deliberated as you read this) and one can only pray they choose to honor the most gorgeous jar of cream I have ever laid eyes on, a mint-colored cube called Haguro.

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Haguro sits in the palm heavily, like a jewel, but is small enough to close both hands around, like a jewel you can steal. It’s the last and moistest step in the Abé and Mason skincare collection, dressed in a striking combination of frozen clover and candied carmine. Details are rendered in gold, like the embossed lettering on the jar—a winking reminder that Haguro’s price point, $210, isn’t high enough to prevent it from selling out. Also gold: its minuscule application spoon. It’s the ultimate luxury, in that it is lovely to look at, pleasant to wield, and otherwise totally useless.

Haguro’s spoon is slightly curved, made of a satisfyingly hefty zinc oxide, and sits languidly atop the moisturizer’s mint pack. Such a component might be selected over a process of years, and only after poring over endless mini-spoon catalogs and visiting mini-spoon factories and auditioning little spoons, all for the lifetime achievement of resting on top of a cream in perpetuity, ending up in the garbage, or joining other members of its species in the forever prison of an empty Diptyque candle jar, like the one I plunk mine into.

Richard Manville, the Los Angeles-based designer who forged Haguro’s jar, took inspiration from the brand’s ancestry, which blends the natural colors of Southern California with those found in northern Honshu, Japan’s main island. The product’s signature and serene blue-green references the painted skies of yamato-e scrolls. Every part was labored over for months. “The component aspect of the project was very painful for us,” Manville said—except for one: “My recollection of the spoon choice was very fast.”

If there was a time in human history prior to the tiny cosmetic spoon, it’s hard to remember. In the ’90s, ads for Estée Lauder Nutritious were foregrounded by a spoon carrying a dollop of cream. Linda Wells, the skin care expert and founding editor of Allure , said they’ve been around for as long as she knows, “but only with the super expensive creams,” she specified. “They’re so annoying.”

“I’ve always seen them,” said Richard Bradley, a designer at Stephen Gould, which has made packaging for brands including Fenty and Burt’s Bees. In Bradley’s work, cosmetic spoons or spatulas exist primarily for hygiene reasons, but also lend an ineffable sense of… something. “Maybe it’s to make it feel more luxurious, or have that storytelling portion to it,” he wondered. “But do they actually get used? You know, that’s a whole different story.”

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As Rob Robinson, cosmetic chemist and founder of the spoonless skincare brand BeautyStat, explains, the chief purpose of these tools is to minimize opportunities for the fingers to dip directly into the jar, where they can introduce bacteria and mold. Today’s skincare formulations, including Haguro and every other moisturizer on the shelf, make use of chemical preservatives as a first defense against such pathogens Robinson says that spatulas “can further make the application process more hygienic,” or can make it easier for those with long fingernails to apply product.

But despite these invisible threats, no dermatologic authority recommends parceling out dollops of moisturizer with a tiny metal spoon. People have been applying moisturizers with their hands for decades without contracting cream-borne illnesses. A few Redditors who self-identify as “Skincare Addicts” take issue not with the instruments but the jars they come in, which aren’t airtight and cede a bit of their chemical power every time the lid comes off. One hot take: “I would go so far to say that anyone that is actually interested in skincare is throwing their money away when buying things that comes in a jar.” Another user sensibly agreed: “Wash your hands, discard if the product changes, and mind the expiry date,” they advised, but “there’s no reason to invent all sorts of scooping devices.”

There is evidence in the historical record that we’ve scooped skincare for thousands of years. Some Egyptian artifacts have been classed as “cosmetic spoons,” including a travertine carving of a swimming goddess, her arms outstretched to carry a lidded container that “would have held some sort of cosmetic,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s description .

But when I spoke to Diana Craig Patch, the Lila Acheson Wallace Curator in Charge of Egyptian Art at the Met, she couldn’t be sure that the term “cosmetic spoon” wasn’t an archaeological misnomer. “For me, it’s a container,” she said. “I don’t consider spoons to have lids.” The cosmetic spoons in the Met’s collection are often high-end, and their iconography indicates they were used for ritual purposes. “They come from temples,” Patch explained. “If they’re not clearly funerary.”

In fact, there is evidence that ancient Egyptians used cosmetic applicators, which looked like sticks made of wood or bone. “Eye makeup is something we know has been around since 3500 B.C.,” Patch said because statues have been unearthed with malachite shadows around their eyes. Unlike “cosmetic spoons”, makeup pots were found in homes and believed to be worn by every tier of the social strata, from girls to goddesses. Patch described applicators that looked like “one-sided Q-tips,” that could be dipped into pots of pigment. Egyptians also wore moisturizers, fats blended with scented oils. “But you wouldn’t need a spoon to apply,” she said. “You put your finger in the pot, and you rub it right on.”

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