Whilst it was completely normal to neglect our personal looks and buying cosmetics during lockdown in the global pandemics, once the restrictions were eased, the global beauty market started to spruce up. It seems that people’s need for beauty products reaches it’s highs nowadays. When we were not allowed to visit brick and mortar shops, we were ordering our goods via e-commerce and this habit prolonged and extended, creating a new trend of increased traffic on online purchases. The beauty industry is thriving and the businesses are balancing their online and store purchases in order to match the consumer’s needs. This all led to increase of beauty industry sales which is currently worth £395.7 billion and the e-commerce sales account for 25.4% of the global beauty and personal care market sales in 2022.

Evolving beauty market

All of the changes that happen in the world during the global pandemics have affected people’s buying habits and this has brought evolution in the beauty market. A lot of research and studies were done to investigate how these changes effected the beauty market and how it will effect it in the near future. One such study was conducted in the UK between 1000 females who are regular buyers of beauty products. There were three distinguishable features of the research.

1. Adapting to the situation with changing habits. 46% of the respondents claimed that they did less hair cuts during the pandemics. 45% said that they washed their hair less. 37% were using more natural makeup, 24% were dying their hair less frequently, etc. In general, this is why the beauty market sales went down in this period. Consumers are more interested in DIY beauty products, products that have transparent ‘’clean beauty’’ labels so brands need to adjust creating products that are going to meet these needs.

2. Buying online took over. It was expected that the online sales are going to go up, even in the times before the pandemic, but during the pandemic online was sometimes maybe the only way we can get to the things we need to buy. In the conducted UK study, 54% of the women were preferring online buying even before the pandemic, but during and now after the pandemic, 7 out of 10 women opt for the online buying. This trend is still increasing. 39% of the responders said that they prefer to buy from broader retail sites and they said that this is because they have better offers, sell by lower prices or because they value their loyalty. Beauty sales are growing among the Generation Z which are slowly going into adulthood growing up in the digital era.  The B2B online platforms started to appear on the online market, connecting the wholesalers and the brands in order to please the consumers expectations. BeautySourcing is an example for one such platform, located in China. The wholesalers offer buying in bulk like bulk makeup for example, and this is buying with lower prices so it is a convenient option.   Businesses need to optimize their digital offers to the fuulest potential in order to keep the pace with consumers expectations.

3. Adjusting to social media trends in marketing products. In the conducted study 85% of the respondents aged 18-24 said that they are hugely influenced by the social media when making a decision to buy a product. And among the social media platforms which were listed as most influential were Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. This means that the brands in the beauty industry need to understand the impact of the social media in order to adjust their marketing strategies.