Chuck Bass and the Commodification of Toxic Nostalgia

On Lancôme’s new Chuck Bass ad, nostalgia marketing, and the glossy return of toxic charm.

This just in: you can take the boy out of debauchery, but you can’t take the de-boy-chery out of the boy. Word on the street is that everyone’s favourite teen TV predator is back and this time, he’s selling more than just his soul. If the rumours (and e-blasts) are true, Lancôme might see a spike in sales, and not just among the Gossip Girl rewatch crowd.

And Chuck Bass isn't working alone here. He's one of eight faces selling these Juicy Tubes, alongside Paris Hilton and other Y2K royalty—proving this isn't just about Gossip Girl nostalgia, but about resurrecting an entire early 2000s aesthetic. The question remains: of all the fictional characters they could have chosen for this Y2K moment, why specifically Chuck Bass?

The Campaign That Shouldn’t Work, But Does

Ping. The gold elevator doors slide open, and there he is: Chuck Bass, stepping out like it’s 2007 and consent culture never happened. Ed Westwick, reprising his most infamous role, moves towards the camera in full smoulder and asks if we can “indulge” him and let’s face it, many will. He declares that the Upper East Side runs on three things: scandals, secrets, and Juicy Tubes. A nod to “a certain limo,” a wink to “I’m Chuck Bass.” Kisses taste better, he tells us. More memorable. More scandalous. More everything we shouldn’t want but absolutely do.

For the Gossip Girl-illiterate, the “certain limo” refers to the scene—the final moments of “Victor, Victrola” where Chuck and Blair hook up in the back of a moving limousine. This was the scene that split Gossip Girl’s timeline into before and after. Blair was still with Nate Archibald at the time—sweet, golden-boy Nate, for whom she had literally sewn a heart onto her sleeve—and he was Chuck’s best friend. Until this moment, Blair and Chuck were frenemies at best—he’s sleazy and sexually abusive, she’s undeniably Queen Bee.

The whole sequence in the limo is cut together in these vintage-style film reels, which come out in messy, fragmented bursts. It doesn’t come to viewers smoothly, and that’s the point. The scene is meant to feel like a rupture, like something that wasn’t meant to happen is happening anyway. On black leather seats, Chuck and Blair in that moment become endgame despite every red flag screaming for you to root against them.

And this is exactly the moment—season one, unredeemed, predatory Chuck—that Lancôme chose to sell us lip gloss. (Yes, he evolves later in the series, but this campaign isn't selling us character development; it's selling us the original bad boy). The fact that they chose unreformed Chuck over any other cast member tells you everything you need to know about what they're actually selling.

The Troubling Genius of Selling Femininity Through Toxic Masculinity

Now here’s what makes this campaign so fascinating and deeply unsettling: Lancôme has found a way to repackage toxic masculinity as luxury branding in 2025, revealing the complex and regressive ways gender dynamics still operate in contemporary marketing. We have a fundamentally feminine-coded product—lip gloss, beauty, the ritual of getting ready—being sold through the lens of Chuck Bass’s male persona and sexual conquests. It’s a weird gender reversal that somehow still manages to center the male gaze entirely.

Chuck Bass isn’t just toxic in the abstract sense that makes for good television. He’s an incredibly toxic and divisive character who, for the most part, is genuinely a horrible person. While most of the Gossip Girl characters are problematic in their own ways, Chuck casually assaults and rapes girls throughout the series. And yet he’s also positioned as hot, charming, the quintessential “Chuck Bass” —and the heterosexual and bisexual girls watching the show, who are clearly the target audience for him, are meant to want him and desire him. He embodies that dangerous bad boy archetype that’s supposed to be irresistible.

The nostalgia being marketed is about wanting to be desired by Chuck, to be worthy of his attention, to inhabit the fantasy of being the kind of girl who fits into his world. Lancôme is essentially saying that even our most intimate beauty rituals should be filtered through male validation and desire. The toxic masculinity isn’t being challenged or subverted—it’s being rebranded as aspirational, as something that can elevate your beauty routine into something more sophisticated and desirable.

Nostalgia as a Commodity in THIS ECONOMY

This campaign works because it taps into something larger than just Gossip Girl fandom. We’re living in such a nostalgia-driven time right now, and I think we have been for a while. As we get older, we find ourselves constantly reflecting back and rewatching our favorite shows for comfort. But there’s something more desperate about our current moment of nostalgia consumption.

Lancôme understands that millennials and Gen Z are drowning in uncertainty about the future—economic instability, climate anxiety, political chaos—so they’re selling us a luxury-wrapped time machine back to 2007, when everything felt possible. They’ve turned our youth into a product—our memories, our formative experiences of desire and aspiration, all packaged in a sleek tube with Chuck Bass as the salesman.

This represents nostalgia as commodity in its most ruthless form. That fantasy of being seventeen again, sprawled on bedroom floors watching Gossip Girl and dreaming about Manhattan penthouses. That memory of when Chuck Bass seemed like but daddy I can fix him no I really can rather than a predator? Lancôme has found a way to monetize it all.

Reading the Room: Regression as the New Normal

What makes this campaign particularly audacious is its timing. In 2025, we’re supposedly living in a post-#MeToo world where consent culture and media literacy are mainstream conversations. We’ve spent years deconstructing the very tropes that Gossip Girl popularized—the romanticization of wealth inequality, the glamorization of sexual coercion, the idea that women want to be desired by toxic men. And yet here’s Lancôme, betting millions that we’re ready to throw all that progress away for the right shade of nostalgia.

But maybe they’re reading the room perfectly. Cultural regression is the defining trend of our moment, and Lancôme has found their place in it. Reproductive rights are being systematically dismantled, skinny culture is back, tradwife influencers are monetizing domestic submission, and Lancôme’s advert is beauty’s contribution to our cultural regression.

Lancôme’s Chuck Bass campaign is the luxury beauty industry’s version of asking: how far backward are you willing to go if we make it pretty enough? And in a moment when women are losing bodily autonomy, when political discourse is being dominated by white men who think abortion isn’t a choice, maybe selling lip gloss through the lens of a fictional rapist isn’t tone-deaf marketing—maybe it’s perfectly on-brand for where we are as a culture.

The Cost of Glamorous Regression

By anchoring this campaign in Chuck Bass, Lancôme is not only selling beauty products—they’re selling nostalgia for a time when sexual assault was consequence-free for men like Chuck. The Juicy Tubes offer transport back to an era when wealth and charm were sufficient armor against accountability, when women’s bodies were another commodity in the luxury marketplace.

At $28-35 a tube, the lip glosses aren’t impulse purchases, they’re investments in a fantasy that costs more than minimum wage workers earn in one hour. Lancôme has found a way to make us complicit in our own regression, charging premium prices for the privilege of being transported back to a time when we didn’t question why our beauty ideals were so thoroughly defined by male desire. It’s marketing that’s both brilliant and deeply troubling, revealing how luxury brands can take the most regressive gender dynamics and make them feel empowering simply by wrapping them in nostalgia and high-end packaging.

But what’s most unsettling is how willingly we participate. We share the campaign on social media with crying-laughing emojis, we quote Chuck’s lines ironically, we buy the lip gloss ‘for the nostalgia’. We’ve created a sophisticated vocabulary of ironic consumption that lets us have our toxic cake and eat it too. We can purchase the fantasy while maintaining plausible deniability—we’re not really endorsing Chuck Bass, we’re just being nostalgic, right? This kind of knowing consumption doesn’t make us less complicit; it makes us more so. We’re not naive teenagers anymore; we’re adults with credit cards, choosing to fund the repackaging of our own oppression because it comes with good marketing and premium packaging.

Lancôme is pushing Upper East Side advertising with a scent of 2007 and a budget to match. In 2025, our most intimate beauty rituals are still being sold back to us through the male gaze of a fictional rapist. If that’s not the perfect metaphor for where we are as a culture, nothing is.

XOXO. Gossip Girl.