In the last two years, supplements have begun to shed the language of generalized "wellness" in favor of formulas targeting areas like the microbiome, metabolic function, or hormonal optimization.
The category is increasingly intersecting with longevity, gut health, skin performance, metabolic wellness, and beauty-from-within positioning—blurring the line between healthcare, supplementation, and beauty infrastructure. 64% of American women currently report taking some kind of supplement.
“The idea of personalization and targeted support is becoming more widely adopted by consumers,” Alicia Galvin, Head of Scientific Affairs at biotech and supplement company Microbiome Labs, told BeautyMatter. In response, companies are developing products designed for more specific needs rather than offering only general formulations.
Brands like LA-based Good Bacteria, which has raised $3.2 million to date to grow their business, and Haroutine, a Korean liposomal supplement maker, are two faces of the category’s repositioning. Both are selling specificity, but whether that niche can scale through two entirely different mechanisms is the more interesting question.
SPINS data puts the US women's health supplement category at $1.28 billion for the year ending April 2026, with condition-specific formulations up 915% year over year—a growth rate wildly out of step with the rest of the market.
Global market size estimates for women's health and beauty supplements vary widely across providers, depending on how "women's health" is defined and which categories are included. The Insight Partners puts the global market at $4.07 billion in 2025, forecast to rise to $9.25 billion by 2034 at a 9.55% CAGR; Research and Markets puts it at $66.38 billion in 2025, rising to $91.42 billion by 2030 at a 6.56% CAGR. What’s undisputed is that capital is flowing. Unilever acquired the supplement brand Grüns in April 2026 for close to $500 million, and Danone acquired the Belgian biotics brand The Akkermansia Company in June 2025.
Beauty‑from‑within products that contain collagen, biotin, hyaluronic acid, or antioxidants remain a high‑growth niche in the market, projected to grow from $3.7 billion in 2026 to $6.6 billion by 2033.
Dr. Ren-Hau Lai, PhD, Vice President of Product Innovation at supplement company Plexus Worldwide, which launched in 2008 with a focus on gut health, told BeautyMatter that "Consumers used to ask what a product was for. Now they ask what is in it, how much of [a particular ingredient], and why that particular form was chosen."
Claims must be clear and clinically proven. Yet many brands take a different approach. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled in March 2026 that three menopause-specific brands had breached advertising codes by making treatment-style claims, a trend known as "menowashing," confusing the category.
Part of why vague claims persist is that the underlying science is still catching up. "Women were underrepresented in clinical research for decades, so a lot of what was known about nutrition was learned in studies where most participants were men," Lai said. The backlog of unanswered questions left behind is a big part of why anything that speaks to them directly is growing fast now, he said.
Yet every woman is different. “Two women describing the same discomfort may be dealing with two different underlying situations, and a broad formula that tries to cover every possible cause at once will often deliver a diluted version of each," he said.
Lai’s test for a genuinely women-specific formulation is simple: can it name the stage of life it's for, and explain why those particular ingredients and amounts were chosen? Specificity, in other words, is easy to claim, yet hard to prove.
Good Bacteria and Haroutine are both responding to a category where standard supplements don’t work as well as advertised by taking two different approaches: one through formulation, the other through delivery.
Good Bacteria launched in September 2025 as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) probiotic supplement brand, currently sold at Happier Grocery and Pop Up Grocer, with Amazon distribution planned, and has 80% of its customers on a subscription model, 35% of whom opt for the three- to six-month boxes. Its founder, Anabel González, cold-called around 200 investors before landing her first investment check, a $1.1 million pre-launch investment from BrandProject, and subsequent raises increased the total to $3.2 million.
"The two biggest concerns from VCs were that gut health is already very crowded, and that microbiome science is still relatively new and unexplored," González told BeautyMatter. "Rather than treating the evolving science as a weakness, we made that openness part of our positioning: 'Curious minds, resilient guts,'" she said.
Its $64 Rotating Synbiotic swaps its probiotic strain formulation weekly rather than shipping a static blend: "Overall gut health is not determined by any single strain," González says. Good Bacteria's chief well-being officer and founding scientist, Dr. Leigh Frame, explains on the brand’s blog that the weekly rotation is designed to "rewild" the gut microbiome, mimicking the diversity of a varied, fermented-food diet. That validation is still in progress: strain-level data, stability testing, and the brand's first clinical trials are, per Frame, "already in the works."
To Dr. Lai, "Microbiome science is the clearest case of the research being ahead of what anyone can say out loud," he says. "This corner of the category tends to say less than it actually knows, which is an unusual position for any industry to be in." The opposite problem shows up on the delivery side. "Delivery technology is where the vocabulary has moved faster than the verification," he says. "The word describes an intention as much as an outcome."
Haroutine, by contrast, markets itself as South Korea's leading liposomal technology brand, now available in the US under a "K-health" positioning built around vitamin C, glutathione, and collagen products encapsulated in phospholipid shells. Wooree, Haroutine's Korean parent company, cites a case study finding that its liposomal vitamin C achieves 1.7 times greater absorption and 1.9 times longer retention than regular vitamin C; close to an independent finding of 1.77 times bioavailability, through a different, undisclosed methodology.
Lai's own framework for judging a claim like that is unforgiving in its simplicity. "The problem is rarely that a company has no evidence," he says. "It is that the language on the front of the package has drifted past what the evidence actually supports." His test for a bioavailability claim specifically: "More available than what? Compared to which form, at which amount, and measured how? If a company can answer those three questions, the claim is doing real work. If it cannot, the word is doing marketing work instead."
With its own Cryo-TEM imaging and testing laboratory, “Haroutine can both develop liposomal ingredients and verify their structure and quality," Haroutine creative director Jennifer Yun said, "helping establish a new standard for liposome validation in Korea." The brand and ritual that surrounds it make the science legible to consumers, in her framing, but the “defensible edge lies beneath them: validated delivery technology, formulation expertise, regulatory fluency, and end-to-end control that larger companies cannot easily replicate through acquisition alone.”
As more CPG and beauty conglomerates acquire brands in the ingestible wellness space, Yun noted that infrastructure matters more than branding.
Good Bacteria and Haroutine are two examples of different claims scaling through structurally distinct mechanisms.
González noted that it’s relatively easy to get someone to try a product in this market, but educating consumers and building ongoing relationships with them is much harder. “You have to know your customer deeply and keep them at the center of every product decision and point of communication,” she said.
However, Haroutine is riding on existing infrastructure. Wooree is one of Korea's leading liposomal manufacturers, already selling ingredients to other OEM brands and running its own Korea-market label, HA.routine. Haroutine US functions less like a startup finding product-market fit, and more like an export vehicle for capacity that was already built.
The global food supplement OEM/ODM market was valued at $150 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $270 billion by 2034, with Cosmax and Kolmar Korea (both South Korean companies) among its leading players. Korea's own regulatory body, the MFDS, requires functional health claims to undergo a formal evidence review before use—a stricter, more drug-like process than in America, where supplements are self-certified before market and only checked after the fact. Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, the FDA doesn't pre-approve or test supplements before they reach the market; they're regulated as a subcategory of food, meaning manufacturers are responsible for safety and labeling.
The FDA held a public meeting in March 2026 to reassess what even qualifies as a "dietary substance" under the law, specifically examining newer production methods (precision fermentation, cell culture, and recombinant and synthetic production) that the original statute never anticipated. The current landscape in the US offers optimal space for growth. Supplements scale because they're low-friction, ritualized, repeat-purchase products that can translate diagnostics and wellness beliefs into behavior faster than any wearable or clinical tool.
Wearables, diagnostics, and hormone health platforms are competing to build the personalized data layer, while supplements translate those insights into everyday consumer behavior. In this model, supplements function less like traditional wellness products and more like responsive biological maintenance systems.
The winning brands will not just sell ingredients; they will sell trust, evidence, and a habitual self-care that can sit atop diagnostics and hormone tracking.
Like women’s healthcare products in general, female-focused products are increasingly becoming more precise and personalized. And product innovation is shifting toward stackable, modular, and condition-specific formats, built around skin microbiome readouts, gut-skin-axis logic, and hormonal or dietary profiling.
Market reporting highlights that the microbiome and gut health are priority R&D and marketing areas for supplements in 2026, and that postbiotics, probiotics, and targeted prebiotic blends are seeing increased product launches and ingredient pipeline activity. Especially those designed to support the gut-skin axis—a mechanism linking intestinal health, immune regulation, and skin condition.
Postbiotics are emerging as a key beauty ingredient, specifically because they link microbiome science to skin-barrier and anti-inflammatory benefits without relying on live probiotic colonization. A 2025 randomized controlled trial found that an oral postbiotic improved skin elasticity in healthy 30-50 year old women, with stronger effects noted in those in their 40s. “In reality, the gut is an ecosystem,” Galvin said. “The goal is not to overpower the existing microbiome, but to help guide it toward a more balanced and resilient state.”
Galvin doesn't think probiotics are interchangeable building blocks so much as specific tools. "Probiotics are strain-specific, meaning different strains have different mechanisms and offer different potential benefits," she says. "It is more helpful to think of probiotics as targeted tools rather than a single category of products."
Beauty supplements remain one of the category’s fastest-growing subsegments, with market trackers estimating the global market at about $4.21 billion in 2026, rising to $7.35 billion by 2032, while collagen remains the category anchor, moving from single-ingredient beauty pills to multi-benefit stacks that combine collagen with hyaluronic acid, antioxidants, probiotics, and skin-barrier support.
That said, the future of beauty supplementation may not be “beauty” at all, but a skin-health layer built on microbiome modulation, hormonal awareness, and metabolic support. Lai believes that the future of the category will look “more modest than the word ‘personalization’ currently suggests, and that is not a bad thing," he said. Most of what gets called personalization today, in his view, still works by sorting people into groups based on what they report about themselves. “Useful, and I expect it will remain the backbone of it for a while,” he added, but in the future most brands will be utilizing AI-powered personalization tools. "This will make recommendations feel more personal without necessarily making them more accurate. Those are two different things, and they are easy to confuse,” he noted.
As women get more fluent in their own biology, the products they reach for get more targeted and tailored. Specificity sells. But whether it's accurate is yet to be determined.
