Amazon launched its fourth Summer Beauty Event Monday, with discounts to 30 percent across Charlotte Tilbury, Estée Lauder and Laura Mercier, plus 48-hour flash deals reaching 50 percent off makeup. The press release foregrounds the premium names; the percentages give the game away.

A beauty retailer has two levers: positioning and price. Amazon has decided to pull both this week, which is interesting given the twelve months it spent explaining why it would pull neither.

Camille Nordby, Amazon’s premium beauty lead, told Glossy that the company tries to “position our brands in a premium way” and that discounting “shouldn’t be the primary way they’re telling the story.” She is correct. The Summer Beauty Event tells exactly the story she said brands should not tell.

You cannot sell discovery on a fifty-percent-off sticker.

The data argues against Nordby’s hope. NIQ recorded Amazon at 41.6 percent of online beauty during the most recent Cyber Week, a 6.8-point gain in twelve months while Sephora slipped to 6.4 percent. The shoppers leaving Sephora are not leaving for editorial curation. They are leaving because the same Charlotte Tilbury is cheaper inside the Amazon app.

NielsenIQ’s panel attributes roughly a third of Amazon’s beauty share gains to defectors from Sephora, Ulta and mass; the remaining two-thirds come from Amazon’s own customers buying more beauty inside an account they already keep open. Both flows reward the cheaper basket. Neither rewards the premium identity Amazon now insists it is selling.

The customer logic is unromantic. Replenishment beauty is where price difference compounds across the year. The buyer who once visited Sephora for a sensory purchase has not abandoned the chain; she has abandoned the part of her basket that did not require the visit.

Sephora has noticed. The posture — hold the premium line, don’t follow the price — takes nerve when the competitor is taking your share. It also depends on the competitor continuing to behave like the discounter you have declined to acknowledge, which Amazon’s flash-deal carousel confirms.

Each markdown on Estée Lauder restates Amazon’s beauty edge as a number, not a feeling.

Premium brands have been willing to sit on Amazon shelves on the assumption that the channel would graduate from deal-hunting. Ralph Lauren Fragrances appears in this week’s carousel beside La Roche-Posay and Sun Bum. The graduation is not happening.

Amazon’s bet is that the customer will eventually decide which kind of beauty store this is. The customer already has.