Target is making its biggest bid yet to blur the line between mass and specialty beauty retail, putting its Ulta Beauty breakup behind it. With the launch of Target Beauty Studio on September 10, the mass retailer is carving out space for a more elevated beauty proposition, bringing 90 prestige, emerging, and global brands and more than 1,600 products to over 600 stores nationwide and online.
The key difference between Target Studio and the former Ulta Beauty store-in-store is Target’s full autonomy: owning the brand selection and relationships and designing the shopping experience.
More than two-thirds of the brands entering Beauty Studio are new to Target, significantly expanding the retailer’s assortment beyond the accessible beauty staples and emerging names on which it has built its existing authority. The lineup stretches from established prestige players, including Sunday Riley and First Aid Beauty, to K-beauty brands like rom&nd, Purito Seoul, and Dr.Melaxin, as well as premium haircare, fragrance, suncare, and beauty devices.
Target Beauty Studio borrows many of the discovery and service mechanisms traditionally associated with specialty beauty retail. Dedicated Beauty Advisors will offer personalized recommendations, while product testing, minis, rotating Editors’ Picks and Most Loved features, sampling, and elevated brand presentations are designed to encourage shoppers to browse rather than simply replenish.
The move comes as Target looks to return to rapid growth, with the retailer identifying distinctive assortment and an elevated shopping experience as central to that effort.
The investment comes as beauty emerges as one of the strongest performers in Target’s Broader turnaround. The category generated $3.64 billion in sales during the second quarter of 2026, up 7.2% year over year and ahead of Target’s 5.3% overall net sales growth. Across the first half, beauty sales reached $7.04 billion, compared with $6.50 billion during the same period last year. Target is putting additional weight behind a category already outperforming the tier business.
While Target is positioning the concept broadly across prestige, emerging, and global beauty, the launch is particularly weighted toward haircare, skincare, and increasingly premiumized categories such as suncare and tanning.
Hair is the largest category represented in the brand list, accounting for 29 of the 89 brands currently identified in Target’s launch. The lineup combines specialty names, including Briogeo, IGK, BondiBoost, and dpHUE, with professional haircare players, Joico, Kenra, Nioxin, Ouidad, Paul Mitchell, Sebastian, and Wella.
Higher-ticket tools from Dyson and Shark extend that proposition beyond products. The breadth suggests Target is looking beyond the traditional prestige strongholds of skincare and makeup, bringing salon-adjacent treatments, styling, and beauty technology into an everyday retail environment.
Skincare is the second-largest category, with 20 brands spanning established specialty players and new discovery-led names. Sunday Riley, First Aid Beauty, Tula Skincare, and StriVectin lend the assortment immediate prestige recognition, while brands including Clearstem, Phyla, Minimalist, and Doré broaden the skincare offering across acne care, ingredient-led skincare, and newer independents.
For heritage prestige brand Borghese, which has nearly seven decades of luxury skincare history, entering Target reflects a changing definition of where prestige can live. “Today’s beauty consumer does not define prestige solely by where a product is sold,” Dawn Hilarczyk, COO of Borghese, told BeautyMatter. “She is looking at performance, ingredients, efficacy, innovation and, increasingly, the experience a brand can deliver.” Hilarczyk sees Target as an opportunity to increase accessibility without sacrificing the brand’s positioning. “Accessibility expands our reach; it does not change what Borghese stands for."
K-beauty is no longer a niche category that must stand alone or be relegated to the “TikTok famous” section. Asian beauty is another significant thread running through the assortment, across skincare, makeup, and haircare categories. Target has recruited Korean brands including Amuse, Aromatica, Dr.Melaxin, Eqqualberry, Kaja, Melixer, Milk Touch, mixsoon, Purito Seoul, Rom&nd, Sungboon Editor, and VT Cosmetics, alongside Japanese haircare names &honey, Fino, and Tsubaki.
The push also comes as retailers, including Amazon, increasingly compete to become major destinations for K-beauty discovery, making access to fast-growing Asian brands an increasingly important part of the beauty retail arsenal.
That reflects how dramatically the US retail conversation around K-beauty has changed. Daniella Jung, founder of Muskat Beauty Inc., which works with Purito Seoul and Aromatica, told BeautyMatter that when she founded the company in 2018, getting K-beauty brands in front of major US mass retailers was difficult. Today, buyers increasingly arrive already knowing which Korean brands and products they want. “The conversation is much less about ‘Why this brand?’ and much more about ‘How do we build this brand at retail?’” she said. Discussions have consequently shifted toward merchandising, hero SKUs, placement, launch strategy, and how brands will sustain consumer interest after launch.
Target is also making a sizable play in skincare, suncare, and tanning. The category includes 11 brands: Bask Suncare, Coola, Dune Suncare, Supergoop!, Standard Procedure, Isle of Paradise, Loving Tan, Peta Jane, St. Tropez, and Tan-Luxe. Their presence reflects the premiumization of categories that have historically sat firmly within the mass or functional beauty aisle. Sunscreen in particular has become increasingly differentiated through formulation, branding, and lifestyle positioning, allowing retailers to merchandise sun protection as part of a prestige skincare routine rather than a seasonal necessity.
More established specialty names provide an important layer of credibility across the wide assortment. Consumers have probably already encountered brands like Beautyblender, TULA, Supergoop!, IGK, Tan-Luxe, St Tropez, and Boy Smells in specialty and prestige beauty environments. Their arrival at Target makes Beauty Studio more than an incubator for unfamiliar emerging brands; it gives shoppers recognizable reference points alongside newer discoveries.
At the same time, Target’s interpretation of “elevated beauty” extends well beyond conventional skincare and cosmetics. Eight fragrance brands include celebrity scents from Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, designer brands Coach and Dolce & Gabbana, and contemporary brands such as Boy Smells, Lake & Skye, and Nemat.
Fragrance also provides a useful test of Target’s attempt to bring specialty-style discovery into mass retail. Lake & Skye President Roxann Blasz said the retailer gives the brand access to an existing community of Target shoppers who may be looking for more premium, wellness-driven brands but have not discovered Lake & Skye. “I've never seen accessibility and prestige as opposites,” Blasz told BeautyMatter. “For me, prestige is about the experience and the intention behind the product, not about being hard to find.” That distinction is particularly relevant because Lake & Skye will be the first brand featured on Beauty Studio’s rotating center table.
Elsewhere, Fur and maude bring intimate and bodycare into the proposition, while Slip and Machete represent premium accessories and Jolie brings beauty-adjacent hardware into the bathroom. Emerging makeup brand Glamazon Beauty, meanwhile, is using Target’s scale to bring its Makeup’s First Roadmap concept, designed to guide consumers between corresponding foundation, concealer, and powder products, into physical retail after building its business across DTC and television. Founder Kim Baker said Target provides an opportunity to simplify complexion shopping “at scale,” with success measured not only in sales but in whether the concept can earn consumers’ trust and encourage repeat purchases.
Target is combining recognizable specialty brands with K- and J-beauty, and high-ticket devices—categories whose boundaries increasingly overlap in consumers’ routines. Beauty Studio’s concept is not simply that Target can sell more prestige beauty, but that the retailer believes discovery itself can happen within mass retail.
Target is not taking prestige brands away from Sephora or Ulta Beauty. Several of the brands entering Target already have meaningful distribution elsewhere, reflecting an industry in which prestige brands are less likely to be defined by a single retail partner or channel. Increasingly, the opportunity is to reach consumers across specialty, mass, marketplace, and DTC simultaneously, provided each channel offers something additive.
Target Beauty Studio also retains an advantage that beauty-first retailers cannot fully replicate: Consumers are already visiting its stores for groceries, fashion, household products, and other everyday purchases. CVS has similarly been expanding its approach to prestige and elevated beauty with brands such as CeraVe, La Roche-Posay, and Olay, using its vast physical footprint and convenience positioning to introduce consumers to brands beyond the traditional drugstore assortment. While Target leans more heavily into discovery, trend authority, and an elevated in-store experience, CVS competes through accessibility and ubiquity. Sephora and Ulta Beauty retain their beauty-first authority, breadth, and service, while Amazon competes through selection, convenience, and digital discovery.
For decades, where a beauty brand was sold helped define what kind of brand it was: drugstores signaled mass, while department stores and specialty retailers signaled prestige and luxury. Target Beauty Studio is another indication that those distinctions are becoming less powerful. The same brand can increasingly sit across Target, Sephora, Ulta Beauty, and Amazon without diluting its positioning.
As Target and CVS move further into elevated beauty and Amazon expands its K-beauty proposition, access to sought-after brands alone is becoming less of a differentiator. Instead, retailers are being pushed to compete on what surrounds the product: discovery, service convenience, merchandising, and exclusivity. Beauty Studio may bring more prestige to mass retail, but its greater significance lies in what it says about a beauty retail hierarchy that is rapidly flattening.
