Growth in beauty’s established markets is getting harder to find, and the industry’s center of gravity is shifting. McKinsey projects the global beauty market will grow 5% a year to $590 billion by 2030, with the strongest gains in Latin America and Southeast and Central Asia. Beauty in the Middle East and Africa grew 16% in 2025, against about 6% worldwide. In 2024, India’s market was valued at $21 billion and is forecast to reach $34 billion by 2028. Online beauty sales across six Southeast Asian markets (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore) rose 23.8% in 2025.
Trade is following the growth. South Korea’s cosmetics exports hit a record $11.4 billion in 2025. They reached 202 countries, up from 172 a year earlier, and shipments to the UAE rose 69.7%. French exports to the US fell 19% last year, while exports to the UAE rose 8%. Nigeria imported more than $1.1 billion of cosmetics in 2023, a bill large enough that the government is now pushing for local production.
These markets are no longer a side bet. For example, conglomerates like Shiseido were among the first to recognize India’s potential and launched NARS there through the retailer Shoppers Stop in 2023. However, each of these markets has its own beauty culture, retail system, and price expectations. A strategy built for Tokyo, Paris, or New York rarely works unchanged in those cities.
Ismail Zein El Dine, CEO and head of R&D at Mirai Group Japan, sees a genuine reranking of priorities but rejects the framing that often comes with it. “I don’t like the idea of describing India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa as ‘what is left.’ That is exactly the mindset that can cause international companies to underestimate these markets,” he said to BeautyMatter.
In markets such as Indonesia, more consumers are moving into premium beauty and are curious about brands from Japan, Korea, Europe, and the US. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest online beauty market, and its online sales grew 15.5% in 2025. Mirai began selling there in December 2025. Within months, it was in premium retail in Jakarta, had built a local team, and had developed a network of aesthetic doctors around the brand.
Not all of the shift is driven by opportunity. Lee Bryan, founder and CEO of Arcus Compliance, argued to BeautyMatter that “a good portion of this shift is push rather than pull.” He cited stricter enforcement of Europe’s product safety rules, tougher marketplace checks, and a new €3 duty on each item in low-value parcels. As a result, he said, “DTC into Europe went from quiet and cheap to visible and expensive in about a year.” When a brand calls India or the Gulf a strategic priority, he suggested asking how much of that is opportunity and how much is looking for somewhere with less friction.”
Either way, Zein El Dine warned that simply moving capital into an emerging market does not create growth, adding that a Japanese strategy moved into Indonesia unchanged will probably waste money because the market has to be understood on its own terms.
The regulatory barrier is higher than many brands expect. “The UK and EU are notification regimes. You take responsibility, you notify, you sell. India and Nigeria are broadly approval regimes, said Bryan. Before selling in these markets, a brand needs pre-market registration and a local agent who assumes its liability. “That is a structurally harder gate, not an easier one.”
Time to market varies widely too. Markets are usually selected based on consumer and channel data and then handed to regulatory teams. When that happens, “a brand can pick the option that looked strongest on paper and buy itself 12 months of nothing,” said Bryan, singling out the local agent agreement as “the one almost nobody negotiates properly and the one that causes the most damage when a distributor relationship goes wrong.”
Enforcement is getting stricter as well. In mid-2026, Indonesia’s food and drug regulator, BPOM, found more than 2 million units across 956 product lines, mostly unregistered imports sold online. Mandatory halal certification for cosmetics in Indonesia takes effect after October 17, 2026.
Culture and religion can also affect the formulation. Mirai’s technology relied on a human-derived ingredient, which raised both regulatory and halal obstacles in Muslim-majority markets. The company replaced it with an alternative based on recombinant peptides. “A global company does not export the same product everywhere. It adapts. Otherwise, you are not international, you are just exporting,” said Zein El Dine. “You can translate a campaign in a few weeks. You cannot necessarily reformulate, retest, and rebuild the regulatory pathway in a few weeks.”
The wrong price can sink a launch. Once import duties, taxes, distributor margins, and retail margins are added, a price that works in Japan or the US can become unreasonable abroad. Also, consumers are borderless, but the cost of entering a new market is high. Historically brands could take a few percentages off its domestic price and launch a market. Now, customers are not willing to pay more. “Consumers don’t see that entire supply chain. They just see your price,” said Zein El Dine. Consumers in these next-growth markets compare products extensively online before buying. There, Zein El Dine favors launching as a prestige brand first, building credibility before widening its customer base. Chasing scale early means competing on price with local companies that know the market better and often run at lower cost.
How people shop differs just as sharply. About 78% of Mirai’s Indonesian sales are online, even with listings in Sephora, SOGO, Seibu, and Boots. In Japan, more than 80% of its sales come through physical retail. In the Gulf, Saudi Arabia accounts for about 40% of beauty spending, and in the UAE, shoppers still value seeing a premium product in store before buying. In Brazil, beauty sales grew by 12.7% in 2024, and e-commerce is growing three times as fast as in-store sales. “So the same brand and the same products can have completely different sales structures in four markets,” Zein El Dine said. In countries like Indonesia, aesthetic doctors have become a key gatekeeper. Zein El Dine said Mirai’s network of doctors has been worth more to the company than any single retail listing.
China shows the cost of misjudging a market. Its cosmetics imports fell 0.9% to $16.18 billion in 2025, and Japan, its top supplier before 2023, now ranks second. Registering imported products can absorb significant time and money before any marketing begins. Geopolitics adds a further risk. After Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's remarks on Taiwan in November 2025, Beijing warned its citizens against traveling to Japan, and Shiseido shares fell 11% during trading. “There is also a level of geopolitical exposure that we cannot control,” Zein El Dine said. The lesson he takes is not to fear regulation, but to understand a market before committing serious capital.
Conclusively, and according to Zein El Dine, local brands are the sharpest threat to global and international brands. The former understand consumers, pricing, and distribution faster, and they build products for their own market from the start. “Being a global brand is not an advantage by itself,” he said. Being Japanese earns Mirai attention and meetings, but not the sale. Zein El Dine expects the winners to combine international technology with a real understanding of local conditions. “A large marketing budget without that combination can simply buy you a much more expensive failure,” he said.