Beauty Brands Were Writing Ai Slop Before Ai Heres How Uncommon Won A Dad Black Pencil For Calling It Out

Creative Boom: Beauty brands were writing AI slop before AI: here's how Uncommon won a D&AD Black Pencil for calling it out Nils Leonard explains how painstaking craft turned a collection of annoying buzzwords into a parody of the periodic table, a campaign that's now won design and advertising's biggest award. Nils Leonard, co-founder of Uncommon Nils Leonard, co-founder of Uncommon It's difficult to think of a snappy phrase that's ever summed up a cultural phenomenon as neatly as "AI slop". You don't need to be technical to immediately grasp its meaning. We've all seen it, read it, maybe even listened to it.

We all instinctively know when we've encountered it. But it's worth remembering that AI didn't invent slop on its own. Unfortunately, our world was already dripping in human slop, and the beauty industry was one of the prime offenders. Personally, I've got nothing against the beauty industry. I know a number of good people who work there, and its products generally make people happy and give them a sense of control over how they present themselves to the world. I've even drawn an income from it myself, in another life when I worked on high street women's magazines.

But even its biggest adherents would have to admit: the beauty industry has long had a slop problem when it comes to its copywriting. Look at a beauty product blurb from 2016, and it feels uncannily like something written by ChatGPT in 2026. On the one hand, it sounds impressive and well-written on the surface. But if you start to analyse it closely, it turns out to be abject nonsense. The good people at Uncommon, working with skincare brand The Ordinary, had been thinking about this very issue. Their response was simple yet brilliant. And it's just won them a coveted D&AD Black Pencil.

I chatted to co-founder Nils Leonard to learn more. A dream client The Ordinary is, ironically, no ordinary beauty brand, but one founded specifically to turn industry norms on their head. For Nils, that's made it a dream client to work with. "You're not working out how to nicely sell a block of cheese," he enthuses. "You're constantly looking at a category that really does need a poke in the eye." Uncommon had already worked on a number of campaigns with The Ordinary, so how did this one come about? "We just started talking about all these made-up words, like elixir and age-defying," remembers Nils. "Age-defying is a literal lie.

We started to pull at that thread, and we started wondering: how many of these words are there? We were just pissing ourselves laughing, because we kept coming up with more." So what to do with them? "We said to ourselves: what if there was a system that we could use to host them all, and then just pop each one and talk about the realities of each one?" The idea of doing a parody around the periodic table felt perfect, because The Ordinary's whole identity is rooted in science. Along with the empty buzzwords Uncommon uncovered, The Ordinary's team added plenty of their own, and the brand worked with scientists to check that each term definite

ly had no scientific or regulated basis. For the final table, they settled on 49, ranging from "Flawless" to "Crushed Diamonds". Nils' personal favourite? "I'm obsessed with elixir; I think that's such a hilarious word to use," he laughs. "It's kind of King Arthur, bubbling in a pot." Minimalist design The design of the table itself is stark, monochrome, and highly legible, and I'd argue that restraint is what makes it work so well. Some might have been tempted to make, say, the typography more "scientific" looking.

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The article highlights a significant win in the branding space by addressing the critical issue of authenticity in marketing, making it highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.