“It’s very nice to be speaking with an industry that’s growing,” said Circana’s president of thought leadership, Don Unser.

After tracking declines in unit — and in certain cases, dollar — sales across several consumer goods sectors, beauty and its cross-channel resilience is a “glad place” for him, he quipped.

“You’re the one industry that has been growing by each units and dollars,” said Unser, while Circana’s vp of beauty, Larissa Jensen, added: “Whenever you take a look at the whole industry, inclusive of mass and prestige, it’s a really healthy market — it’s up 13 percent.”

While the industry’s performance overall is promising, the expansion of prestige beauty particularly — which is up in each unit sales and dollar sales, versus mass beauty which is up solely within the latter, largely as a consequence of rising prices — offers vital insight into shifting consumer purchase behaviors.

“The bifurcation that’s playing out in our industry implies that customers are trading up,” said Jensen, noting that amongst beauty shoppers who’re cutting back on spending as a consequence of inflation, 70 percent will not be reducing their beauty spending.

She has dubbed the phenomenon the “treat mindset,” which, just like the lipstick index, alludes to consumers’ ongoing desire to take pleasure in beauty goods during hard times.

Said Jensen of the higher-middle-income consumers propelling the trend: “They could not give you the chance to afford a Rolex watch, but they should purchase that luxury fragrance, and we’re seeing this play out not only within the U.S., but around the globe.”

Globally, the performance of luxury fragrance is outpacing that of total fragrance. In skincare, meanwhile, the other effect endures: “Apart from the U.K. and China, total skincare sales are literally outpacing luxury,” said Jensen, adding that makeup sales are up on all fronts. “The lipstick index is back, y’all — we’re makeup super strong across mass and prestige — it’s phenomenal.”

One other outstanding global trend is the dominance of brick-and-mortar versus e-commerce sales in each mass and prestige beauty. “There might be different drivers: On the mass side, it might be about convenience, and on the prestige side, it might be concerning the destination — going there for the experience, to experiment and play,” said Jensen.

Across industries, said Unser, the pandemic prompted a slowdown in innovation as corporations shifted funds from R&D to support their supply chains.

“[Pre-pandemic] we were getting about 4 to five percent, on average, of latest items across all general merchandise per thirty days. We’re now all the way down to about 1.5 percent, and the most recent data for the primary quarter is down about 1.3 percent, so an enormous reduction of latest products out there,” he said.

Beauty, nonetheless, is certainly one of the few industries where recent launches are rebounding, particularly in 2022, with Jensen saying that recent launches have sustained 6 to 7 percent share of overall sales.

“We’re an industry steeped in emotion, and that has been the catalyst to our resiliency,” Jensen said.