A new year, a new set of trends (and trending moments) set to sweep the beauty industry. Trends drive sales and can even offer fertile growing ground for new brands to emerge. But in a time where the speed of launch is ever-quickening and viral products change the competitive landscape overnight, how are trends themselves changing in nature to adapt?
Amid shifting cultural values and social media acceleration, the traditional concept of trends is being challenged. As access to trends has been granted to all, thanks to the power of the online world, there are more voices than ever before determining the “it” brand of the moment or coining the term that will set the tone of industry launches moving forward. Subcultures and niche audiences continue to thrive and grow, creating new pockets of growth opportunities, but also a more discerning customer.
BeautyMatter spoke to three entrepreneurs with their finger on the pulse—Moj Mahdara, Managing Partner and co-founder of Kinship Ventures; Jennifer Carlsson, founder of Mintoiro; and Christopher Sanderson, co-founder of The Future Laboratory—about the stakes of trends in 2025, differentiating the quick hit from the slow burn, and how brands can successfully navigate these new complexities.
Given the current speed of the beauty industry, does the term “trend” still hold the same significance it did 10 years ago?
Moj Mahdara: Not at all. What still holds true are movements, communities, modalities, and education. The days of buying an audience and figuring out retention later are over. Today’s consumer—or prosumer—is way too smart for that; they’re demanding real value and a genuine connection to the brands they support. Trends aren’t dying—they’re just smarter, sharper, and harder to fake.
Christopher Sanderson: The answer is both yes and no in that if I think about the lifespan of The Future Laboratory as a business, which Martin [Raymond] and I set up 25 years ago now; our tools and legitimacy were based on our ability to define a trend and to share it with an audience. The desire that you could see coming from consumer groups as they increased in their voraciousness for product is part of this journey that we've been on around the notion of trend. This all ties in obviously at the same time with information communication technology (ICT) because we've seen that space speeding up of consumer engagement with product, facilitated by digital sales and social media sales platforms that change the way we think about our relationship with products and our ability to actually get them.
As a business, we have seen the shift whereby we're the custodians of trends because people didn't really understand how or where they came from or the process by which one could observe their growth in a market; that is now something anyone and everyone can do. Previously you had to look hard for it; you were either on the ground, attending trade shows, where you would actually see newness, going to people's studios and to product launches.
Your ability to be ahead of the curve was simply by being there and able to report on it. Whereas, of course, the moment all of that became digitized, relationships with trends changed because we placed that in the hands of a much wider constituency of people. It became democratized in the way that so many other things did. One's relationship with what a trend represents changes. It doesn't necessarily mean the trend changes; it's simply the access to it that has changed. There's been a lot of conversation recently around this idea of "Are trends still relevant?" "Are trends still out there?" Absolutely, of course they are, because all they are is a mathematical growth curve.
It's about the inclination to move towards something that previously you haven't found attractive or that hasn't had a large group of people interested in it. That's a natural process that just continues. It's a wave that comes and goes. The issue is how we're observing that wave and therefore how businesses and brands are choosing to harness the power of the wave or the information or what they can do with the wave itself. That's what's so different.
If you look at something like longevity, in one way you can argue it is a perpetual concern of the beauty industry because by its nature, so much of beauty is an obsession with youth, and therefore longevity is not a trend within beauty. It's an ongoing concern. But regardless of that, we have obviously seen, through the coalescing of all sorts of different forces, this focus on what you could describe as a new understanding of what longevity represents across industry sectors. That has been a long time coming, and that is not disappearing.
There are elements where we certainly see brands that come in and out of fashion maybe more quickly; that we respond to some social media settings maybe slightly quicker than before. But at the same time, the build, the precipitation that sits underneath or behind, that’s still taking often months or years to develop before it then reaches a climax.
Jennifer Carlsson: When I look at trends, I look at broader clusters of trend, like with the different brand archetypes I created. I always say that there's never just one track of “this is the trend for beauty.” There are those that are overarching, and there will be small trends within them.
For example, there'll be one trend in the category of people who are into in results driven, ingredient forward skincare. But there'll be completely different trends for people who are into fun, playful Gen Z skincare.
Have the levers for what constitutes a trend changed? Why or why not?
MM: The levers have completely shifted. Social media’s speed, empowered consumers, and data-driven insights have totally redefined how trends are born and validated. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram can make something viral in hours, and we’re seeing multiple generations shaping trends together. At the same time, affordability and the move toward clean, science-backed products are driving what sticks. But let’s be honest, the heart of a trend still lies in its ability to make people feel seen—and that’s timeless.
CS: Within our social media context, we can look at how certain trends have been facilitated by influencers who can really precipitate the growth and crescendo of a trend. We see that really regularly, obviously, in terms of how a brand can suddenly go from being a very small brand that very few people recognize to something that then everyone wants. That measure of popularity is something that we've seen time and time again in terms of how certain products become really popular. But again, this is something that brands have been manipulating and doing very strategically and very cleverly for the last 20+ years, if not longer, which is: how do we actually ensure that we're creating a demand for our product that will exceed our ability to deliver? Because for so many brands that are product based, that's the ultimate that you want to achieve, which is that people can actually no longer buy this brand because there isn't enough of it to go around. Whether it’s a shade of Chanel nail polish that becomes the color of that season or the idea that suddenly a fragrance becomes the only thing that a woman wants to be wearing.
What we feel is that we now see things through a different lens and that the speed and the way in which the news drop of a new product that we suddenly find out about on TikTok is so different from picking up a piece in Vogue. Or even further back, the idea that something arrived in your city, and it’s come from Paris and is therefore something that you must have. We're talking about 150 years worth of trending culture that still defines the way we think about our desire and our aspirations to consume certain types of product.
JC: If you think about it on a longer timeline, there are so many different options that there can be full categories that cater to a very niche kind of audience. I'd rather have 100 small brands creating different products that suit different audiences than have one big brand creating a generic middle-of-the-road thing.
You can't just create what's already out there. It also has an extra factor to it that makes it interesting to a specific kind of audience because otherwise who's going to be excited about it if you're not doing something very specific and intentional.
In your own forecasting work, how do you decipher what is a trend versus simply trending—what differentiates a quick blip on the radar from a longer-lasting movement?
MM: For me, the difference between a trend and something just trending is simple: one sticks, the other fades. A trend taps into something deeper—it’s tied to cultural shifts, spans generations, and builds over time. A blip might go viral, but a trend has the receipts. I look for consistency and alignment with bigger values like sustainability, science, or affordability. My instinct is my modality and driver, but the algorithms help me spot what’s real—and what’s just noise in a crowded room.
CS: Through our Trend and Foresight Frameworks, we would consistently evaluate whether we thought something was just an interesting idea or whether by studying it and finding those examples across two or three different markets, by using that sense check, you were able to start to question it. Behaving like a scientist, seeing a blip there and another one here. By looking at those in terms of market and opportunity, I can look at the relative scale of growth or the opportunity of this as a larger market and how it's tracking.
Look at, for example, at the shift in color palettes within beauty packaging. That's now being copied by discount supermarket brands; we're quickly seeing upmarket and niche brands being copied in terms of their bottle or canister tops colors and shapes. You begin to see how something that starts within one particular brand and is seen as an oddity. Then that becomes the brand that is peaking within a certain independent beauty boutique with a certain type of beauty customer, and then it works its way into a supermarket shelf as a dupe brand.
Then you maybe start to see how that moves out of beauty and gets picked up by the food industry, fragrance, or another category completely and becomes a new model for how you create a method of communicating freshness or newness out of category and into a cross-sector appeal. Part of what we and other organizations like us do—it's why we're still relevant—is that there's still money to be made as a business in understanding what it is that piques the interest in a consumer that suddenly makes a massively, global, successful business.
JC: I think it's better to think about it as what is the broader desire that the trend is appealing to? Those things will be longer, and then the trending thing is a way to satisfy a specific want or need.
When I write my annual trend reports, I look at, within the different brand archetypes that I have as my model of tracking trends, which ones are generally high in the rankings, moving up in their trajectory, and very prevalent. That's how I pick out which different things are trending and not.
Another thing too is to think about the different phases of trends. There are niche trends, emerging trends, rising trends, mainstream trends, maturing trends, a decline in trend. Where you want to draw the line depends on where you want to put your cutoff line for what you're focusing on.
How relevant are demographics given the universal platform of social media and its reach across many age groups?
MM: Demographics still matter, but psychographics are where the magic is now. It’s less about age and more about values, interests, and identity—because let’s face it, identity today is as much created as it is inherited. Social media has blurred generational lines; TikTok trends might start with Gen Z, but they pull in older audiences who share the same values, like sustainability or wellness. The key isn’t just knowing who’s watching, but understanding what makes them care—that’s where the real work happens.
CS: In 2024, we launched our series of Generations: Now and Next reports, which is where we look very specifically at age-based demographics to start to think about how valuable they are in terms of understanding and determining the way certain constituencies of consumers are choosing to behave and how they might choose to consume. Moving away from more traditional demographic constituencies is really important for brands to actually embrace and look at.
This is something we've been through, again, over the last 10 or 15 years, where we've moved away from demographics based purely on location and income, towards looking at mindset. When we start to look at age-based demographics, we often find a much more accurate understanding of the nuances that we can see within particular groups. Part of what we'll be doing is revealing the similarities that work across an age demographic as well as those differentiators that cause people to behave in a different way according to their life stage, which as we know is based both on that natural idea of and how inclination changes as you age and experience life but also that are part of what it is you've learned according to the age in which you grew up. It's that combination of factors that starts to create these delineations.
We're never going to escape from the idea that we need to delineate, when it comes to our audiences; that as professionals involved in trying to determine a focus, we're going to try and use every trick that we can to understand why this group of consumers is going to be more important to us than this other group. What are those determining factors that help us to better understand the motivations and the requirements of the particular group on which we choose to focus? That will continue to change according to the way we use our media, choose to spend our money and engage with other products, goods, and services.
Obviously age is going to be hugely important in that as a process. The work we've done recently has continued to show that one of the big shifts that many brands (and certainly within beauty) have started to appreciate and embrace is that while it's important to look at a younger consumer demographic, increasingly the spend might sit with a 45+ or 55-65+ consumer. So what other messages can we use that binds that consumer together? Because the mindset and the attitude is similar, but what are the need states that are driving a 24-year-old consumer to a certain type of BB cream as well as a 55-year-old consumer?
We all know how some brands have managed to really make themselves successful by having a clear focus on who exactly it is they're targeting. They do that in a very narrow frame of reference. Calvin Klein has always been a really good example. Across its product categories, it has really tight target demographic groups that it believes is its focus because it also understands there is an appeal that a wider group of us have to feel that we belong to or share some of the same attributes, which that tiny group they focus on, have.
Whereas other businesses do look at the idea that the wider their focus, obviously the more opportunity they've got to hit a much bigger demographic. There are all sorts of different ways from a marketing perspective of how we communicate what we represent or how it is that we're hoping to appeal to a particular demographic. The issue here is the fact that increasingly digital marketing enables us to understand that we should be talking to an audience of one; that we have the opportunity to address each and every consumer as if they were the only consumer that mattered to us.
Interestingly, when we did The Fragrance Lab project with Selfridges 10 years ago—the whole methodology and foundation of that to create an experiential journey into the world of scent in which you discover your personality and you are matched with a fragrance that best represents your personality—all of that was done by creating an algorithm that allowed for over 90 different personas that could be communicated to within that project. Instead of the idea that you were talking to maybe a group of four or five different consumer types, that process we created understood there were 90 different fragrance typologies that we were appealing to within our project. And each of them we could address in a different way.
You can times that to a factor of 100 now in the way that we can communicate digitally, which means we can find ways in our marketing and communication to address each consumer with information and detail, which is going to appeal uniquely to you as an individual. That's why to some extent, demographics have both become increasingly important but then also valueless. When you believe that demographics is about five different ways of thinking about how to dissect a population, the moment that you do anything like that, you're lost. The moment that you begin to understand that the future of successful demographic targeting is to break that group down into its smallest possible constituent, that's what it's now about.
JC: If you're talking about the split of Instagram versus TikTok between generations, TikTok skews a little bit more Gen Z. If you talk about an Instagram audience, they're going to skew a little bit more millennial. But there are still a lot of millennials on TikTok and Gen Z on Instagram. Bubble is a skincare brand that clearly targets a Gen Z, young teen audience, but there's tons of millennials that really like it.
A lot of people are afraid of niching down too much because it's creating too slim of an audience. You want to have a broad appeal, but it's always that the market is wider than the target. It's good to have a specific type of person in mind when you're creating your product and think about what they would want. I think it's more about a general target person but don't think about it as limited to only one demographic. People have different things they like and gravitate towards. They can be a lot of different things for the same person.
It takes a long time to develop a brand or to develop products. Rather than trying to follow trends, have a clear idea of what type of brand you're trying to create and what type of person. Trends will change, but they're still going to be the same audience that has certain wants and needs. Find what itch you're trying to scratch rather than duplicating somebody else's solution to the same problem.
Do beauty trends still matter in 2025, or will the waves of product/aesthetic movements become something less definable over time?
MM: Beauty trends absolutely still matter, but they’re more personal and layered now. The market’s bigger than ever, and consumers are hungry for newness, variety, and science-backed innovation—but they also want real connection. We’re not seeing one-size-fits-all trends anymore; it’s all about micro-movements shaped by communities and shared values like sustainability and inclusivity. AI is rewriting the playbook, but in the end, the trends that matter are the ones that feel like they were made just for you.
CS: My main thesis and area of explanation of exploration at the moment is hinging on this idea that beauty is to luxury what fashion was 15 years ago. I actually believe beauty is on a real ascendance in terms of its importance and its growth opportunity within not just luxury but consumer product market categories.
It displays all the qualities that make it really important to consumer attitudes, mindsets, and requirements right now in the way that we've seen the consumer market shift away from a focus on core fashion collectibles. Belts, sunglasses, handbags, and shoes do not convey the same value or meaning as they did 10 years ago. Of course we're still wearing them, but the amount that we're prepared to spend on them and the value we place on those as objects has less relevance now to other things we're choosing to spend our money on. We all know the shift within those key product categories has already gone to experience. All the data shows us that we'd much rather invest in an experience.
But what we've seen coming out of Covid in a period of continued inflation, consumer uncertainty about ongoing spend, and a cost of living crisis is beauty becomes the most accessible platform for indulgence, engagement, aspirational spending, and also an inquiry into transformation of self. Whereas so much of what our luxury spend, which beauty is innately tied up in, previously was about aspiration, it's now all about transformation and trend. Beauty sits at the heart of this collective and more holistic appreciation that we now have around this notion of transformation and what is now being seen as the transformation economy. This idea that as people, as consumers, we're not just looking for these products that elevate our lives through this idea of status. We're actually looking for products that transform our lives by helping us to become better versions of ourselves.
That's a very different journey that the 21st century consumer is now going on. The desire to actually have those products that engage with them in a transformative way is of course also the journey that the beauty industry is going on because it's now a business that's based on verifiable transformation.
We now have a whole generation of consumers who can act proactively, engage with products that are going to ensure that their skin stays healthier and that they stay looking younger for longer. All of those factors tied in with this consistent approach that we have—which hasn't changed as we move towards more equity, more equality, a better understanding, primarily, of female consumers—that actually the desire and the need to transform how you look is as integral a part of your existence as it was throughout the ages. Makeup and beauty perform an enormously important role in that.
There is nothing to indicate that a woman in 10 years time is going to care any less about her looks than she has over the last hundred years; nor is there any indication that she's going to suddenly stop wearing less makeup than she has over the years. The desire to manipulate and transmit through transformation key messages about who you are and what you represent, is becoming more and more focused at this point in time, rather than part of just a hierarchy of needs where maybe the handbag you carried was as important as the lipstick you wore.
JC: Looking more at the broad, long-term, larger slopes of trends rather than stuff that's trendy for a few weeks; that’s more helpful because the development timeline is what it is. Looking at the underlying desires that different smaller trends are trying to satisfy is probably going to be the more important thing that sticks around.
I've released 17 brand archetype reports and for the majority of brands, I can't even place them in one because I don't think they know what they're trying to do, honestly. It’s too broad or too unclear. I generally see it as probably being better to fit within a certain trend. Those brands that have a clear point of view do better, and it can often make them more recognizable.
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