8 Things That Will Reshape Beauty in the Next 12 Months

2025 ended on a split note for the industry. On one hand, global beauty sales grew 10%,

and in the UK the health and beauty category marked its sixtieth consecutive month of

growth. On the other, the post pandemic surges in fragrance and skincare have finally

tapered off. Business of Fashion calls 2026 a year of balance and evolution, not

acceleration.

The implication is clear: the winners won’t be the loudest, but the ones who read the

direction of the market before everyone else. The editors of Beauty Professional have

identified ten shifts that, in our view, will rewrite the industry’s agenda over the next twelve

months  from the pharmacy shelf to the Cosmoprof floor, from the injection clinic to the

TikTok feed of a teenager in Ohio. Some will accelerate growth. 

Others will quietly bury

business models that looked untouchable eighteen months ago. 

1. Beauty fully merges with health

Mintel’s headline prediction for 2026 is “metabolic beauty.” Skin and hair are no longer

treated as isolated cosmetic concerns  they’re being read as biomarkers of overall

physiological state. Brands are repositioning themselves not as sellers of creams, but as

partners in prevention: from skin screenings to personalized care protocols.

What this means for the professional: the aesthetic cabinet, the cosmetologist, even the

barber will increasingly be the first to spot signs of iron deficiency, hormonal imbalance, or

early-stage diabetes in a client. Demand will rise for specialists who can read skin as a

medical symptom, not just a problem to retouch away. Brands that can’t articulate in 2026

how their product fits into a health-and-wellness system will be pushed toward the mass-market margins. closed deals for.

2. Anti-aging is dying. Longevity takes its place

In parallel, the anti-aging era is ending. Longevity is the industry’s new north star, according

to Beauty Independent. The distinction matters: anti-aging fought symptoms (wrinkles,

pigmentation), while longevity works on mechanisms (mitochondrial function, cellular

communication, barrier resilience).

The result is an avalanche of new actives: NAD+, resveratrol, spermidine, PDRN, copper

peptides, exosomes. The global exosome skincare market is already valued at around a

quarter of a billion dollars and growing in double digits.

The bad news for the industry: legacy brands built on “anti-aging” rhetoric can’t rebuild

their portfolios in a year. Beauty Independent forecasts a wave of “fake longevity” — a

marketing-term swap with no underlying formulation change. By the end of 2026,

consumers will have learned to tell the difference, and regulators will start asking questions.

3. The Ozempic effect spawns a new beauty category

GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro) have stopped being a medical news item and

become a structural shift for the industry. Ulta Beauty CEO Kecia Steelman has publicly

linked her network’s sales growth to GLP-1 side effects  hair thinning and loss of skin

elasticity. The global GLP-1 market is growing from $62 billion toward a projected $157

billion by 2035, and every new patient is a potential new beauty client.

The implications are multi-layered. First, an entire product category is emerging around

“Ozempic face,” “Ozempic mouth,” “Ozempic butt.” Second, demand is surging for firming

procedures, biostimulators, and volume-restoring fillers. Third, WGSN is forecasting “Faux-

zempic”  a counter-trend of pharma-skeptical consumers turning to natural supplements,

lymphatic tools, and systems-based wellness. Both waves are commercial opportunities.

The cabinets, clinics, and retailers that build a coherent GLP-1 protocol in 2026 will secure

clients for years ahead.

4. Biotech ingredients go mainstream

What sounded like a clinical setting in 2024 will be on the Sephora shelf in 2026. Salmon-

derived PDRN, plant exosomes, AI-designed peptides, bio-fermented ceramides, upcycled

stem-cell factors  all of it is migrating from niche formulations into the mass-market tier.

Exosomes are particularly symptomatic. What five years ago was reserved for post-laser

protocols is now being embedded in at-home serums. This creates two industry problems.

First: the stability and true bioavailability of the active in an open jar at room temperature is

substantially lower than in a clinic. Second: the marketing is running ahead of the science.

By the end of 2026, expect the first public scandals around claims that don’t match actual

activity. The brands that can produce genuine in vivo data  not just attractive in vitro

charts  will become the category reference.

5. TikTok Shop goes from experiment to primary channel

The numbers speak for themselves. Per NielsenIQ, TikTok Shop became the #4 Health &

Beauty retailer in the US in 2025 with sales exceeding $4.4 billion and household

penetration approaching 10%. In the UK, it’s also the fourth-largest beauty retailer, with

60% year-over-year growth. Global TikTok Shop GMV is projected to reach $112 billion in

2026, and beauty already accounts for over 22% of platform turnover.

This isn’t “another sales channel.” It’s a rewiring of distribution logic. The algorithm replaces

the buyer, the creator replaces the shelf, and the product-demo video replaces the

magazine review. For indie brands, this is an opening  the entry cost on TikTok Shop is an

order of magnitude lower than landing in Sephora. For traditional retail, it’s existential. By

the end of 2026, brands that ignore TikTok Shop will find themselves roughly where the

Instagram skeptics were ten years ago.

6. M&A accelerates  but the targets have changed

After a slowdown in 2025, beauty M&A is entering an acceleration phase. Capstone Partners

and DC Advisory are openly forecasting a surge in 2026 deal activity. The premium on

beauty assets is real: deals averaged 14.9x EV/EBITDA, more than 1.5x the consumer-sector

average.

The year has already started with force: Henkel is acquiring Olaplex for $1.4 billion, Estée

Lauder took full ownership of Forest Essentials, and a potential Estée Lauder–Puig mega-merger is being discussed. In 2025, L’Oréal closed deals for Creed (€4 billion in the Kering

alliance), Color Wow, and Medik8; e.l.f. acquired Hailey Bieber’s Rhode for $1 billion.

The pace hasn’t changed as much as the object. Strategic buyers are now hunting biotech

assets, proprietary ingredient IP, wellness crossovers, and clean-beauty brands with real

scientific grounding — not just another DTC launch. Creed (€4 billion in the Kering

alliance), Color Wow, and Medik8; e.l.f. acquired Hailey Bieber’s Rhode for $1 billion.

The pace hasn’t changed as much as the object. Strategic buyers are now hunting biotech

assets, proprietary ingredient IP, wellness crossovers, and clean-beauty brands with real

scientific grounding  not just another DTC launch.

7. Male grooming is the fastest-growing segment

WGSN values the global male grooming market at $115.3 billion by 2028; male skincare is

growing at a 10.5% CAGR through 2035. That’s faster than the female market, which has

already normalized post-pandemic.

The structure of demand has also shifted. Teenage boys have become meaningful buyers of

luxury fragrance for the first time  they now make group purchases at Sephora, a behavior

that was unthinkable two years ago. The share of men seeking injectable procedures has

climbed, from Botox to preventative fillers. Barbershops are quietly turning into full beauty

clinics: shave plus facial, face massage, beard pigmentation. The takeaway for the professional is straightforward: the 2026 male client is no longer a

“just the haircut, thanks” walk-in. He’s a target audience willing to pay the same as a female

client  if the service is packaged correctly.

8. AI becomes a tool, not a myth

In 2025, AI in beauty was hype. 2026 is the honest phase: it’s becoming clear what it can

and can’t do.

What it can: personalization (64% of UK adults already use AI tools for beauty purchases,

per Barclays), skin diagnostics in apps, formulation optimization at the R&D stage,

recommendation engines in e-commerce. The beauty-tech market has reached $18 billion.

What it can’t: replace the expert. Beauty Independent puts it bluntly  AI without genuine

human expertise produces flat, generic content that consumers have already learned to

spot. Brands that replaced copywriters, art directors, and chemists with unsupervised AI

assistants will dissolve into the general noise.

The winners of 2026 will be the ones combining AI speed with human expertise  and solving that at the team level, not in an investor deck.