YISE Beauty and Jones Road Both Launched a Wide Awake Concealer—With Undeniably Similar Marketing Strategies
A definitive timeline of the unfolding drama.
On Saturday, September 19, Molly Sims, the founder of YISE Beauty, posted a reel to her personal Instagram account, calling attention to beauty industry IP drama that had been bubbling behind the scenes. Following the March 2024 launch of YISE Beauty's Wide Awake Concealer, Jones Road Beauty, founder and makeup artists Bobbi Brown’s no-makeup-makeup line, launched a Wide Awake Brightening Concealer last week.
Over a clipped, to-camera delivery, Sims wrote: “This isn’t about a name. It’s about ideas and the work that goes into bringing something to life. I’m not mad. I’m just incredibly disappointed.” She tagged her brand YISE Beauty in the caption.
Within a day, the video had more than 900,000 views and over 18,000 likes with a thousand comments—and multiple celebrities and other founders, including The Rock, founder of Papatui, swapping similar stories. Shoppers in the comments were pledging to stay loyal to YISE, and brand followers were running to Jones Road's latest Instagram to call out the identical product name.
Sims's reel doesn't explicitly mention Jones Road or point fingers at specific copywriting, but it strongly hints at a collision with the brand's marketing campaign. For background: YISE promoted a Hotline campaign tied to their Glow Peptide Serum launch earlier this year; Jones Road used a Hotline campaign for its concealer launch, where customers could call makeup artists for advice on shade selection and undertone consults. Now the "disappointment" appears to be less about a product name overlap and more an insult to the brand's originality.
Jones Road first appeared to prune the comments thread on the Hotline Instagram posts. Then, two of the campaign posts disappeared from the brand's feed altogether. Only one Hotline Instagram reel remains at the time of publishing.
Yesterday, Brown responded to Sims from her personal account, @justbobbidotcom. That matters. A founder speaking in her own voice is meant to feel human, not corporate. However, her statement did not address the part of the squabble that is actually about the campaign's marketing architecture: the wake-up-call and hotline language Jones Road wrapped around the launch (“Your Wakeup Call for Dark Circles Is Here”). She spoke to the name. She did not speak to the sell.
That omission is the interesting part. Sims’s reel was explicit: this is not only two words on product packaging. It is the feeling that the marketing idea got recycled with a bigger megaphone. A statement that stays on nomenclature leaves the marketing complaint unanswered. Regardless, Brown's statement included that the brand would be changing the name of the product—an expensive repackaging and rebranding decision.
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On the legal point, Sims’s “this isn’t about a name” is emotionally true and doctrinally incomplete. U.S. trademark law is stingy with descriptive phrases. “Wide awake,” used for a product whose entire promise is looking less tired, is the definition of descriptive. The Patent and Trademark Office does not hand out exclusive rights to ordinary English that tells the customer what the product does. You can sometimes acquire protection if a descriptive phrase becomes so associated with one source that consumers hear a brand, not a benefit. That is a high bar, expensive to prove, and even then it does not freeze the whole vocabulary around tired eyes.
This isn’t about a name. It’s about ideas and the work that goes into bringing something to life.
Molly Sims, YISE Founder
For example, Dominique Cosmetics has sold a Wide Awake Full Cover Concealer for de-puffing featuring caffeine and a cold tip applicator since May 2022. YISE has sold Wide Awake as a tinted brightening eye cream, with shade extensions after an early sell-out for two years. Jones Road then launched the Wide Awake Brightening Concealer. Three uses. Same two words. That is crowded language, not a slam-dunk infringement fact pattern.
It's also important to note that the products underneath the pile-on are not identical. Jones Road’s pots are a classic Bobbi Brown move: color-correct first, then conceal, and hydrating enough not to crease. YISE’s cream is the treatment-first hybrid Sims sold as the cheat sheet for women who skip eye cream. Dominique’s wand is the cooling, caffeinated concealer play. Different formulas; same two words.
The optics aren’t clean. Trademarks are not a vibe check. They also are not a permission slip to ignore that a smaller brand already taught customers to say those words at checkout.
When your campaign is built around a wake-up call, a hotline, and a product named like someone else’s hero SKU, you do not get to be shocked when people start calling out the similarities. I might have late-night dark circles from keeping up with this drama—but there are at least three eye creams claiming they invented faking a good night's sleep.
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A Russian-American girl, Tanya Akim is a New York City and Los Angeles–based journalist who covers beauty, wellness, culture, and the slightly unhinged things people will do in the name of looking (and feeling) better. Her words have appeared in Architectural Digest, Byrdie, Coveteur, The Cut, Eater, Forbes, Marie Claire, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
A longtime student of the skin’s ecosystem, she has a particular fondness for the microbiome, caring for her and other people's personal dermatitis, and any treatment that sounds faintly medieval until it works.
When she is not on a plane, reading medical journals for fun, or talking to strangers about their skincare routines, she can usually be found with a horse or on a beach. She has never had social media and never will.