We’ve all been there: you find something that actually works, and for one fleeting, selfish second, you consider not telling the group chat. Estée Lauder is turning that exact moment of temptation into its newest Advanced Night Repair campaign, and it recruited two of comedy’s finest to act it out.
Guilty as Skin, starring Emmy-nominated Bowen Yang alongside Emmy-winning, Tony-nominated Ana Gasteyer, follows Bowen through his evening routine as he clocks the visible results from Advanced Night Repair ($88) and immediately spirals over what to do with the information. Should he hoard it? Or does he owe his group thread the truth? Enter Gasteyer as his therapist, dryly pushing back on whether gatekeeping a serum this good even counts as friendship. Bowen, appropriately shamed, drops the link in the chat with an urgent “buy immediately.”
It’s a funny premise, but it’s built on something real. A 2025 survey from GIPHY and Censuswide found that 85 percent of people consult their group chat before major life decisions, while 77 percent turn to it for smaller everyday calls like what to wear or eat. Skincare, apparently, lives in that second category now too.
“Advanced Night Repair has 40-plus years of science behind it and is one of the most extensively tested formulas in the Estée Lauder portfolio,” says Fiona Sainty, senior vice president and general manager of Estée Lauder and AERIN Beauty North America. “But beauty doesn’t live solely in the lab or at the counter. We discover products that we love, think about who needs to know about them, and share our best finds with the people we trust.”
Yang backs that up: “My group chat is where I go for the important stuff: advice, gossip, unsolicited commentary and links to things I suddenly can’t live without. Beauty recommendations are serious business.”
The serum itself is backed by more than 1,700 clinical tests and built around Tripeptide-32, which Estée Lauder markets as its “Night Peptide”—a compound the brand says helps support skin’s natural renewal process overnight, an idea rooted in circadian rhythm research (the science of the body’s internal clock, which also happens to apply to skin cell repair). All of which is to say: Bowen’s group chat had good reason to trust him.
Guilty as Skin rolled out this morning across digital, social, connected TV and retail, meaning the next tempting beauty secret to leak into your own group chat might just be this one.
