ASICS photographs faces straight after exercise

A sports brand shoots a skincare ad

On 12 May 2026 ASICS launches Get the Glow, which the company describes as the first beauty campaign to feature post-exercise faces. The subjects are photographed moments after a run, a walk, a game or a workout, with no filters, no skincare and no retouching.¹

The film opens in the grammar of the category it is addressing, in pastel tones and beauty style close ups, then pulls back to a tennis court and the Turkish player Zeynep Sönmez. The voiceover carries the line the company has used across this platform: "15 minutes of movement can help brighten your mood. Because when you move your body, you move your mind."²

The category it is arguing with

ASICS supplies the reason for entering the conversation in figures. It cites online searches for glow related skin terms up 43 per cent year on year and social conversations about achieving glow quickly up 375 per cent, both from Google Trends data via Glimpse comparing January 2025 with January 2026. It cites women spending an average of 22 minutes a day on skincare and 74 per cent of women running multi step morning and evening routines, from Drive Research. It puts the global skincare market at 162 billion US dollars, citing Mordor Intelligence.¹

The claim ASICS sets against that is one it has made before. The fifteen minute threshold is not new research. The release footnotes it to the company's Uplifting Minds study of 2021 and 2022, overseen by Dr Brendon Stubbs of King's College London, which is the same body of work the company elsewhere publishes as its State of Mind research.¹

How the company states it

Gary Raucher, Global Head of Marketing at ASICS, sets out the positioning: "ASICS was founded on the belief that when you move your body, you move your mind. Long before the beauty industry was bottling glow, people were achieving it naturally through movement. In a culture where glow is often manufactured, we want to spotlight something real. The most meaningful glow starts on the inside through movement."¹

Sönmez gives the athlete's version: "I love how I feel after playing tennis and moving my body. Sport has always been a huge part of my life, and I've been drawn to tennis ever since I was a child. I'm so excited to work with ASICS on this initiative because I truly believe that movement has the power to uplift you and help you glow from within."¹

No skincare product is announced and none appears. The campaign borrows the conventions of the category it names and applies them to an activity the company already sells equipment for. The shoe is not the subject of the film.²

The subject of the campaign is therefore not a product but a comparison. ASICS puts the outcome of movement beside the outcome the skincare category sells, and the figures it cites are all about that category rather than about footwear: search behaviour, routine length, market size.¹

What is not published

No creative agency is credited on the ASICS release, in the wire distribution or in any of the trade coverage checked, and neither is the photographer, the director, the production company or the media agency.^1,3

The campaign's own argument is that an unretouched face is more credible than a produced one, and the release makes that point in the language of authenticity. On the preceding campaign in the same platform, Campaign credits the work to Golin.⁴

The markets are not itemised either. The only published indication of spread is the wire release having been distributed in Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Turkish.³

The coverage comes from the category the campaign addresses rather than from the design press. Beauty and retail trade titles pick it up within two days of the release, among them TheIndustry.beauty and Retail Gazette, while no Tier 1 or Tier 2 design or branding title covers it.⁵

Where it sits in the platform

Get the Glow is the fourth application in twelve months of the same threshold. A campaign of May 2025 applies it to dog owners, one of October 2025 applies it to people returning from wellness holidays, the global campaign of January 2026 applies it to an office worker on a run, and this one applies it to skin.^1,4,6

In none of the four is the research itself the announcement. It is carried as a premise, and what changes between them is the category the comparison is drawn against. Beauty is the first of the four that is not a form of leisure or exercise.