Cosmic Syrup Wants Beauty to Get Weirder

With its first product, Aether Veil, founder Ashley Jones is building a beauty universe around self-expression, sensory ritual, and the freedom to become more fully yourself.

Beauty has always offered us the possibility of transformation. A different lip, an unfamiliar color, or a scent can alter the way we carry ourselves through a room. Yet somewhere between the rise of highly optimized routines and the constant documentation of our lives, transformation began to feel increasingly like performance.

The industry’s version of aspiration became remarkably specific: the right face, the right body, the right products, the right aesthetic, and the right access. Beauty became another way to prove that we were moving closer to a life someone else had already deemed desirable.

After 19 years working across hairstyling, makeup artistry, corporate beauty, and skincare, Ashley Jones founded Cosmic Syrup to explore what beauty could feel like without that pressure. The newly launched brand is darker, stranger, and more theatrical than much of what currently fills the category, with a philosophy rooted in returning people’s attention to themselves.

“People deserve more from beauty than being taught to long for a person, a body, a life, or a room they are not in,” Jones says. “Beauty should give you more ways to become yourself, not more reasons to wish you were somebody else.”

The Pressure to Perform Beauty

Jones believes the beauty industry has confused aspiration with universal palatability. Celebrity proximity, exclusive trips, carefully orchestrated access, and endlessly polished imagery create a world consumers are encouraged to want entry into, even when that world has very little to do with their own lives.

The longing created by those images is often intentional, with exclusivity used to make consumers desire a person, lifestyle, or room they have been positioned outside of.

“You are supposed to look at that room, that trip, that lifestyle and think, ‘I wish I were there. I wish I were them. I wish I had access to that,’” she explains.

Cosmic Syrup proposes a different set of questions. What do you find beautiful when nobody famous has already identified it for you? What makes you feel strange, magnetic, louder, softer, darker, or more interesting? Who might you become if you stopped performing for everyone else?

For Jones, self-expression has always been one of beauty’s most compelling powers. Early muses like Kat Von D and Hayley Williams showed her that color, edge, contradiction, and theatricality could exist outside the narrow boundaries of traditional beauty. Their influence offered visible proof that the rules governing beauty were far less fixed than they appeared, opening the door for more artists, outsiders, and self-described weirdos to emerge.

“I don’t think we need permission from celebrities, influencers, brands, or anyone else to become ourselves,” she says. “Sometimes we just need to see proof that the rules we’ve been taught were never rules in the first place.”

Building the Universe Before the Product

Cosmic Syrup feels less like a conventional beauty line and more like a transmission from somewhere else. Jones built that sense of world-building into the brand from its earliest stages, developing the universe before deciding which product would introduce it.

The idea grew from the familiar feeling of being unable to find a place where she fully belonged. Over time, Jones began to wonder whether she could stop searching for the right place and create one herself.

Every element of Cosmic Syrup is designed to deepen that universe. Its language, photography, packaging, music, product names, rituals, and orbit_hour concept all appear to originate from the same mysterious frequency. Jones wants the first encounter to create curiosity, almost as though someone has intercepted an unexpected signal. Ideally, that curiosity develops into a feeling of recognition and the possibility that this strange place might be for them.

Even the brand’s name arrived through an ordinary moment at home. One night, while Jones and her husband were watching anime and decompressing after a long day with their children, she began talking through an idea centered on cosmic imagery, aliens, UFOs, and signals from somewhere unknown. She understood the universe she wanted to create, although she had yet to find the word that could connect its vastness to the physicality of beauty.

Her husband suggested “syrup,” a word that captured what he saw in the products Jones had spent years developing and experimenting with. Oils, serums, glosses, pigments, and other tactile formulas are viscous, reflective, and transformative. Paired together, Cosmic Syrup connected something enormous and unknowable with something sensory and touchable.

“That was the moment it stopped being just an idea in my head and started feeling like a place I could actually build,” Jones says.

The First Artifact

The brand’s first product, Aether Veil, is a dry shimmer body oil that sits somewhere between fragrance, body care, and adornment. It rolls onto the skin, releases scent, catches the light, and is blended across the body with an accompanying brush.

Jones wanted the first encounter with Cosmic Syrup to engage multiple senses. Aether Veil asks the wearer to physically interact with it, making the process of application central to the overall experience.

Fragrance gives the ritual another dimension. The profile draws from Jones’s scent memories of the early 2000s, with each note selected, tested, and adjusted to recover a particular emotional familiarity while evolving it into something that belongs within the present-day Cosmic Syrup universe.

Scent has the uncanny ability to transport us back to a former self. A single combination of notes can recall what we wore, where we went, who we loved, and what we once imagined our lives might become. Jones hopes Aether Veil will eventually become similarly encoded into the wearer’s identity, attached to a night, a person, a period, or a version of themselves they want to remember.

The decision to begin with the body was equally deliberate. Traditional beauty lavishes attention on the face, while the rest of the body is frequently approached as something to correct, minimize, or prepare for public visibility. Cosmic Syrup treats the body as a place worthy of adornment, scent, and ceremony.

Within the wider shimmer-oil category, bronze and gold formulas, beach-centered imagery, and gourmand fragrances remain dominant. Jones wanted Aether Veil to create a different visual and sensory experience, one that felt celestial rather than sun-kissed and appeared at home beneath moonlight.

Coded for Every Skin Tone

Aether Veil’s visual effect was custom sourced and developed, with Jones repeatedly pushing for greater shimmer payoff and longevity throughout the formulation process. She had seen too many oils that looked captivating inside the bottle before nearly disappearing when applied, so Aether Veil needed to deliver its full effect on the body.

At first swipe, the product leaves an intense concentration of shimmer. Once blended with the brush, it transforms into a translucent starlight effect that can be layered until nearly blinding. The brush was an essential part of the development process because Jones wanted to give customers the proper tool to experience the formula’s color, dimension, and build-ability.

Testing across a range of complexions was also central to the product’s development. Some of the deepest skin tones displayed the shimmer most dramatically, eliciting enthusiastic feedback from testers who were accustomed to shimmer oils disappearing on their skin.

Aether Veil, Jones says, was “created and coded for every skin tone.” That promise is supported by decisions involving its pigment, color, payoff, application, and testing.

The sentiment is also personal. Jones spent much of her life absorbing the message that fair skin existed in opposition to the bronzed beauty ideal. For years, she tanned, spray-tanned, and highlighted her naturally black hair because she believed moving closer to that expectation would make her more beautiful.

Her experience taught her how easily someone can begin reshaping themselves around a dominant beauty standard that has little connection to their authentic identity. Aether Veil was developed to celebrate the skin of the person wearing it, allowing the product to transform across complexions without treating any of them as a problem requiring correction.

“I wanted to create something that celebrated the skin you already have,” she says.

Making Time Mean Something

Within Cosmic Syrup, ritual begins when an ordinary action is given personal meaning. It can take the form of applying fragrance before leaving home, taking ten uninterrupted minutes to get ready, listening to an album from beginning to end, or sitting quietly without immediately reaching for a phone.

“We live in a culture that treats every open second like unused inventory,” Jones says. “If we are not producing something, improving something, documenting something, or consuming something, we almost feel guilty.”

Cosmic Syrup is designed to push against that urgency. The brand’s orbit_hour offers a guided hour away from the noise, allowing participants to spend time with their thoughts without needing to convert the experience into content or productivity. Jones has already received messages from people who say an orbit_hour helped guide them through a personal breakthrough.

Those responses matter to her more than many of the conventional metrics used to measure a young brand’s progress. Having personally experienced anxiety and depression, Jones believes that anyone fortunate enough to build a platform should consider what good they can leave behind through it.

Every Cosmic Syrup purchase contributes to To Write Love on Her Arms, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. The contribution gives material weight to the brand’s language surrounding hope, mental health, and human connection.

“If one person finds genuine personal value in something we create, then there is a ripple from that,” she says. “Maybe it is tiny, maybe we never even see where it goes, but it exists.”

Protecting the Weirdness

The pressure to make Cosmic Syrup more easily digestible has existed throughout the process of building the brand. Jones understands the temptation to smooth away a brand’s sharper edges in pursuit of greater commercial viability, especially after nearly two decades in an industry heavily guided by the language of “best practices.”

Her relationship with the phrase is complicated. Best practice often describes something that worked before or a pattern the rest of the category has already agreed to follow. Understanding those patterns can be useful, but relying on them too heavily leaves little room to create something the market has yet to validate.

“You cannot create something genuinely new while being terrified of doing something that has not already been validated,” Jones says.

Cosmic Syrup’s weirdness sits at the center of its identity and will continue to guide its growth. Jones would rather inspire curiosity, obsession, confusion, or even rejection than create something people encounter without feeling anything at all.

As the brand expands, every decision will be measured against one question: Does this feel unmistakably Cosmic Syrup, or could another beauty brand have done it?

“If anyone else could have done it, I’m not interested,” she says.

During its first year, Jones plans to prove that the universe has gravity. That means cultivating a core community, expanding the assortment thoughtfully, and continuing to experiment across scent, body, ritual, and sensory beauty. She plans to resist the expectation to launch a high volume of products at speed, favoring fewer objects that feel considered and collectible.

Within five years, she imagines the ritual moving beyond the body and into makeup, fragrance, and other categories suited to transformation. Each release should feel like the discovery of another piece of the universe, continuing a larger narrative rather than appearing as an isolated product launch.

The ultimate ambition is to make Cosmic Syrup recognizable before its name appears. Its imagery, objects, language, philosophy, and products should share a distinct fingerprint, allowing the constellation to grow while maintaining the strangeness that gave it meaning in the first place.

“The goal is not to become more normal as we become bigger,” Jones says. “The goal is to earn the ability to become even stranger.”