What’s Next: Top trends in color cosmetics
Sarah Jindal, Mintel’s senior innovation and insights analyst for beauty and personal care, recently presented during a conference at Makeup in New York on the top trends in color cosmetics. After gathering sales data, conducting surveys and researching beauty trends globally, Mintel has found these to be some of the top trends impacting the cosmetics market.
The makeup/skin care hybrid
American women are taking their cue from Korea and rethinking their approach to beauty by putting skin care first. Instead of caking on the cosmetic products, women are looking for products that can give them a radiant glow and reduce the amount of color cosmetics they need. The “glowing mist” from Korean brands like Tony Moly and Innisfree are a product that is rising in popularity. These sprays are designed to give the skin a dewy, wet look while imparting long term skin care benefits such as anti-aging, sebum control and hydration.
It is also contributing to skin care brands like Perricone MD getting into the color game. Perricone MD has introduced their “No Makeup” range, a series of products that impart a hint of color while delivering skin care benefits.
Cosmetics brands embracing diversity
Women of color have long gotten the short end of the deal when it came to makeup designed for their skin tone — especially with foundation. The market is shifting and now brands that don’t cater to deeper skin tones are behind the curve rather than the norm – particularly with prestige cosmetics. Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita N’Yongo has been the face of a very successful campaign for Lancome. Mass market brands are starting to catch up as well.
The “selfie-ready” face
“HD makeup” is a beauty buzzword that implies skin that is camera ready at all times. This is achieved through makeup that employs “blurring” technologies and ingredients like silicone – products that give skin a radiant finish and fool the eye by blurring imperfections rather than masking them. It started with primers and is now moving into foundations and other categories. The L’Oreal Skin Perfection range promises “pixel perfect skin”.
The defining factor — brows and contouring
Social media is definitely behind the huge jump in these product categories with an estimated growth of 90% in the number of available products on the market for contouring. Where there may have been a few products available for defining the facial features with brow shaping and contouring in 2013, now the market is saturated with nearly every brand offering some form of contour stick or contour palette as well as a myriad of pomades, gels, pencils and waxes for the brows. Nearly 6% of global eye color cosmetic launches in 2014 were eyebrow products, compared with 3% in 2012.
What’s Next is a weekly feature of Drug Store News, written by consumer beauty blogger Lonni Delane. The goal is to help give beauty merchants the cutting edge they need to stay ahead of the latest and greatest beauty trends.