Why and How Personal Care Is Evolving from Efficacy to Relevance
Mildberry
December 2023
8 minutes
Beauty is a category of a deep private significance of all aspects of product and brand combined. Skincare and haircare consumers increasingly assess performance alongside a wider set of considerations: personal relevance, ingredient logic, sustainability, identity, and the quality of the overall brand experience.
This is happening in a market that remains both attractive and unforgiving. Global beauty retail sales reached $446 billion in 2023, up 10 percent year on year, while the category is expected to continue growing at approximately 5 percent annually through 2030. Growth, however, is creating more choice, not more loyalty. In McKinsey’s 2023 cross-market survey, 42 percent of consumers said they enjoy trying new beauty brands.
Global beauty retail sales in 2023 up 10 percent from the previous year.McKinsey
The implication is clear. Functional efficacy remains the price of entry. Preference is increasingly built through a brand’s ability to make care feel more relevant, intelligible, and aligned with the consumer’s life.
Consumers increasingly understand skin, hair, health, and lifestyle as interconnected. Climate, sleep, diet, stress, hormonal changes, and everyday habits all shape the way people experience their bodies and raise expectations for more responsive beauty solutions.
Brands such as Knours, "Skinsei" (Unilever's market concept test), and Clinique iD explored early versions of this model. Their approaches ranged from hormone-informed routines and diagnostic questionnaires to customizable combinations of base products and active concentrates.
The opportunity is not merely to offer a personalized formula. It is to create a clear system of care: helping consumers identify a need, select an appropriate solution, understand how to use it, and adjust their routine over time.
For brands, personalization is therefore as much an issue of portfolio architecture, service design, and communication clarity as it is of technology.
Share of consumers who expect companies to deliver personalized interactions.McKinsey
The conventional division between “men’s” and “women’s” beauty is becoming less useful. Consumers increasingly select care products according to their concerns, desired results, sensory preferences, and visual taste not according to legacy gender cues.
A Latvian clay-based skincare brand "For Two", designed its range for shared use. Agent Nateur extended a similar logic into personal care with unisex deodorants. In both cases, the proposition is built around performance and lifestyle rather than demographic convention.
This does not mean that gender has disappeared from beauty. It means that brands need a more nuanced framework for segmentation. Skin sensitivity, scalp condition, hydration needs, life stage, usage occasion, and desired experience can offer more meaningful routes to relevance than a binary label.
The brands that lead beauty will translate science into confidence, not confusion.
Environmental exposure has become a recognizable skincare concern, especially for urban consumers. Pollution, dry indoor air, changing weather conditions, and screen-intensive routines have expanded the category’s understanding of protection.
Of beauty-industry executives expect consumers’ demand for products that deliver on their efficacy promises to become increasingly important.McKinsey
Oskia developed concentrated anti-pollution products intended to address both outdoor and indoor stressors. Sisley Paris introduced a moisturizer positioned around defense from environmental pollution and exposure associated with digital-device use.
The strategic value of this territory is its connection to a tangible modern tension: consumers want products that help them feel prepared for the conditions of daily life. Yet brands need to avoid vague “urban defense” language. Protection must be supported by credible formulation, understandable benefits, and a clear usage context. Sustainability becomes valuable when it improves the product, not just the brand story.
Beauty increasingly borrows its codes from nutrition and wellness. Consumers want to understand what is in a formula, why it is there, and what role it plays in the final result.
Briogeo brought ingredients familiar from wellness culture such as kale, avocado, quinoa, and matcha into haircare. Sauce Beauty built its proposition around food-inspired language and “good-for-you” ingredients. The appeal is intuitive: natural cues make products easier to interpret and connect beauty to a broader culture of self-care.
But ingredient storytelling is becoming more demanding. “Natural” alone is no longer a defensible differentiator. Brands need to connect ingredient choice with meaningful proof: efficacy, sensorial quality, responsible sourcing, or a clear consumer benefit.
In beauty, product performance earns trial. Personal relevance earns loyalty.
Water is increasingly viewed not just as a standard cosmetic ingredient, but as a question of product efficiency and environmental impact. Waterless and water-reduced formats can decrease product weight, concentrate active ingredients, reduce rinsing time, and reframe sustainability as a better user experience.
Of global consumers say sustainability matters more to them today than it did two years ago.Nielsen IQ
L’Oréal and Unilever have introduced initiatives to reduce water use, while Unilever developed faster-rinse haircare formats under "Love Beauty & Planet". Glosslab also introduced waterless manicure services, linking the model to hygiene as well as resource efficiency.
The challenge is to make sustainability desirable rather than demanding. A waterless format must offer a clear consumer advantage, greater portability, faster use, better performance, or reduced waste. Responsibility becomes more compelling when it is designed into the product’s value, rather than added as a separate claim.
Beauty is opening conversations that were previously avoided: intimate care, body confidence, sexual wellness, hormonal changes, and other highly personal concerns. Independent brands have often led this transition by making the tone more direct, informed, and culturally fluent.
Fur and Anese show how intimate care can be positioned as a legitimate and positive part of self-care. They replace euphemism and embarrassment with approachable language, thoughtful packaging, and products that acknowledge needs long underserved by mainstream beauty.
For larger brands, this space cannot be approached as an opportunistic extension. It demands a real understanding of the consumer tension, a credible product role, and a visual and verbal identity that creates reassurance without becoming clinical.
The next competitive advantage is not another claim . It is a clearer system of care.
In a category shaped by retail displays, unboxing, bathrooms, handbags, and social content, packaging has become a highly visible part of the brand itself. It must communicate function quickly, establish a recognizable point of view, and reward consumers for choosing it.
Glossier demonstrated this principle through a restrained but distinctive packaging system, recognizable pink pouches, and collectible stickers that encouraged consumer participation. The brand made packaging an extension of its community rather than a purely functional layer.
The lesson is broader than social media. Packaging should operate simultaneously as a navigation tool, a signal of quality, and an object consumers are comfortable displaying. In beauty, product design often becomes the most frequently experienced expression of the brand.
Packaging no longer contains the product. It carries the brand into culture.
The skin microbiome has introduced a new language into skincare: balance rather than correction, support rather than stripping, and long-term skin health rather than immediate intensity.
Brands such as Esse helped bring probiotic and microbiome-supporting skincare into consumer awareness. Their underlying proposition is that the skin functions as an ecosystem and that care products can help protect its natural balance.
This shift responds to growing consumer fatigue with overly complex routines and aggressive active ingredients. The opportunity is to translate scientific concepts into simple, useful guidance: what the formula supports, who it is for, and what a consumer can expect from consistent use.
In beauty, product performance earns trial. Personal relevance earns loyalty.
For more than a decade, K-beauty and J-beauty shaped global expectations around routines, textures, product formats, and innovation speed. C-beauty has emerged as another powerful force, driven by fast-growing local brands, digital commerce, and greater confidence in Chinese design and product development.
This matters beyond China. Beauty innovation no longer flows from a small number of Western markets to the rest of the world. Brands now need to understand multiple centers of consumer culture—and identify which ideas are globally transferable versus locally specific.
The category’s future will be shaped by brands that can combine global awareness with genuine local relevance.
Projected share of global beauty sales conducted online by 2030, compared with 26% in 2024.McKinsey
After years of elaborate multi-step routines, consumers are returning to more edited forms of care. Multifunctional products and “skip-care” routines offer a different promise: fewer products, less friction, and no loss of effectiveness.
Brands such as Peach & Lily developed all-in-one formats that combine multiple skincare steps in a single product. Their appeal is not only convenience. They respond to a wider desire for routines that are easy to understand and realistic to sustain.
For brands, simplicity is a strategic discipline. It means clarifying the role of every product, reducing unnecessary portfolio complexity, and making it easier for consumers to choose with confidence.
As routines become more complex, simplicity becomes a premium proposition.
Beauty brands are no longer competing only to create the next ingredient story, product format, or visual trend. They are competing to become the most relevant system of care in a consumer’s everyday life. The strongest propositions connect several dimensions at once.
Delivers a credible outcome.
Reflects real, evolving needs.
Turns complexity into confidence.
Makes sustainability practical and desirable.
Gives the brand a distinctive place in the consumer’s world.
The category is moving from products that promise results to brands that organize a more intelligent relationship with care. Performance drives trial. Meaning creates preference. The brands that can integrate both will be best positioned to sustain relevance as beauty becomes more personal, more informed, and more competitive. Which of the three data callouts—market growth, personalization, or sustainability—best captures the central business tension you want the article’s opening screen to establish?
Beauty is no longer about efficacy. Care combines meaning, performance and experience.
Beauty demands attention