Sephora Italia Reframes Beauty Rituals as a Battleground for Control

How Sephora's 'Getting Ready' Puts the Early Signs of Psychological Violence on Screen

Sephora Italia's 'Getting Ready' is a 2024 awareness campaign created by LePub Milan and directed by Juul Op den Kamp that reframes everyday beauty rituals — applying makeup, choosing an outfit, presenting oneself to the world — as acts of self-expression that controlling partners routinely use as instruments of psychological violence, urging Italian audiences to recognise these early signs as real forms of abuse.

The campaign launched on November 22, 2024, across Sephora Italia's own platforms, television, and social media, reaching its cultural peak on November 25 — the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The timing was deliberate. By anchoring the release to a globally recognised date, Sephora Italia positioned 'Getting Ready' not as a seasonal brand moment but as a contribution to ongoing public discourse in Italy around gender-based violence and psychological abuse.

The campaign's central argument is direct: psychological violence rarely begins with physical harm. It begins with control — over what a woman wears, how she styles her hair, whether she is permitted to leave the house looking the way she chooses. Sephora, a brand whose entire commercial identity is built on self-expression through beauty, used that identity as the moral foundation of the campaign. The partner organisation Fondazione Pangea ETS, which provides assistance to women experiencing psychological, physical, economic, and sexual abuse, was embedded in the campaign from the outset, lending institutional credibility to the creative ambition. Fenisia Cilli, Marketing Director of Sephora Italia, described the campaign's purpose as raising awareness of the importance of recognising early controlling signals as real forms of abuse, noting that these often invisible behaviours can cause profound harm.