Jenni Gilbert As befits the beginning of a new year, team SPA+CLINIC has been casting far and wide for the experts’ forecast of forces that will chart our business course over the next 12 months and beyond.
We’ve read some pretty powerful stuff but The Beauty Futures Report from our friends at The Future Laboratory* in the UK has really stood out.
Hey folks, we’ve not been imagining what’s been brewing over the last couple of years: It’s time to get real. Or, should we say, get back to being real.
This insight from the report pretty much sums it up for the aesthetics industry in 2017+:
“Waving aside old certainties about ethnicity, age, geography and gender with one perfectly manicured hand, the global beauty industry is in a progressive mood,” it says.
“The beauty sector is ready to put past flirtations with eternal youthfulness and perfection behind her, and instead is embracing positivity, confidence and self-acceptance alongside the pursuit of natural efficacy and psychological and emotional health.”
Following is a synopsis of The Future Laboratory’s analysis of how and why the latest beauty trends are unfolding around the world, and what they will mean for your business:
The global beauty sector seems to have caught sight of itself in the collective bathroom mirror and decided that the time has come to be more gentle and forgiving, perhaps even realistic, about what can be achieved with the tools at hand.
‘Today’s beauty landscape is still a mass of contradictions as we continue to debate science versus nature and digital versus realness,” says Future Laboratory trend analyst and in-house beauty specialist Victoria Buchanan.
‘”But one thing is for certain – consumers are fed up with relentlessly chasing perfection and are recalibrating their expectations of what beauty can, and should, deliver to prepare themselves for 21st-century living.’
This doesn’t for a second mean that tomorrow’s consumers will be any less interested in innovative beauty product ranges and regimes that help them present their best face and body to the world at large.”
That’s why the global premium cosmetics market alone will expand at a healthy Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 4 percent to be worth more than £87bn ($126bn, €112.5bn) by 2019, according to Technavio.
So a year of transformation lies ahead, nuanced and sometimes contradictory for sure, but one that can still be summed up by one note of caution: keep it real.
