The skin-care race is revving up.

The category’s rally, which got rolling roughly 18 months ago, is steadily gaining momentum. Sales of prestige treatment products are running 14 percent ahead within the U.S. for the newest 12-month period, resulted in May, based on the NPD Group’s total measured market. That compares with a 9 percent increase for 2017 and three percent for 2016.

Those figures make skincare beauty’s emerging growth engine, outpacing makeup. Color cosmetics remains to be a bigger category — with $2 billion in first-quarter sales versus $1.5 billion for skincare — but its sales gained just 4 percent within the latest 12-month period, based on NPD.

“Makeup remains to be booming in a number of the less-developed markets,” said Carol Hamilton, group president of the Luxe division of L’Oréal USA. “But the expansion of skincare is thrashing makeup in each market.”

The generational shift that has electrified makeup can be behind the surge in skincare. “What’s latest and different is you now have the Millennials incredibly interested, passionate and turned on to [the category],” said Jane Hertzmark Hudis, group president at Estée Lauder Cos. “Whenever you add the Millennials to the ageless [those over age 45] you get explosive growth.”

The U.S. isn’t the one market surging. Millennials across Asia, too, are showing an interest. “You have got young people who find themselves in a position to understand the trends from Korea, the cool products from Japan,” said Hertzmark Hudis. “So this can be a global movement.”

The growing popularity of health and wellness is a key driver for the category. Hamilton credits the inspiration for the wellness trend, a minimum of within the U.S., to the arrival of SoulCycle in 2006. “It took the drudgery out of understanding and made it far more about your mental health. It made it fun,” she said. But she also sees a deeper meaning at work. Skincare, within the context of well-being, is the tool shaping a “latest beauty standard,” she said, one which prizes the looks of healthy, glowing skin.

“It’s grow to be a latest status symbol,” she said. “The selfie makeup look that said you were cool and with it and had a certain stature was five years ago. Today the brand new beauty status symbol is that this glowing skin that appears such as you usually are not wearing anything.”

Hamilton muses that the move away from makeup is possibly reflective of a bigger change within the national zeitgeist as the general public discourse turns more serious. The population’s more responsible mood has affected even attitudes toward one’s appearance. “The shift from less frivolous values to deeper values is one which favors skincare, wellness and health over highly decorative makeup,” she said. “There may be this profound social trend of awareness. While established brands like Clinique, Estée Lauder, Lancôme, Philosophy and La Mer are posting healthy growth in skincare, the category — like makeup — has mushroomed  with the influx of indie and latest brands from the U.S., Europe and Korea.”

“It’s outside of the more traditional or legacy brands,” said Larissa Jensen, executive director and industry analyst of NPD Group, of skincare’s growth. “We’re seeing loads of brands entering skincare. As a category, it’s probably essentially the most fragmented. There’s just loads more players.”

Rising brands include Drunk Elephant, Tata Harper, Tatcha, Sunday Riley and Dr. Jart. As with makeup, Sephora has been a key driver of the category’s gains, posting double-digit increases, based on Artemis Patrick, chief merchandising officer. To accomplish that, it has leveraged its digital footprint, with initiatives like a Skin Care Aware Group, which launched on Sephora.com in 2017 and now numbers 314,237 people. “On this group there may be an enormous interest in self-care and wellness and that’s really motivating the interest in skincare,” she said. “Skin is a natural extension of wellness, nutrition and health. Those two worlds are absolutely colliding.”

Patrick cited the innovation and social media dexterity of indie brands like Drunk Elephant, Tatcha and Sunday Riley in discussing her top performers, whose brand founders are stepping as much as the camera and answering questions from their constituents via social media. “On Drunk Elephant, Tiffany Masterson is answering any questions people have,” Patrick said. “Sunday does the identical.

“After we really see success is after we mix the facility of those brand founders with our digital channel. For instance, Victoria Tsai from Tatcha participated in a live chat on our Beauty Insider platform. We saw a three-time lift versus our average comments,” she said.

Consequently, established brands like Kiehl’s and La Mer have quickly upped their games as well, “telling their story very well and continuing to herald latest consumers,” Patrick said.

Certainly one of the breakthroughs for Lauder, for instance, got here two years ago with Clinique’s Take the Day Off Cleansing Balm, a makeup remover launched at the peak of the selfie craze. Last October, before-and-after videos were shot, using influencers and celebrities — Kristen Chenoweth and Blake Vigorous — for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “We got over two-and-a-half million views during that point and raised $250,000,” said Jane Lauder, global brand president of Clinique, who shot and posted one among herself, as well.  “But the thought is that in skincare now we’re finally determining how you can connect stories visually in addition to being storytellers.”

When Lauder and others discuss storytelling, they’re not talking about traditional skin-care claims. The antiaging claims race that escalated over the past decade within the treatment category has grow to be a very different conversation. Today the stories which can be most resonant are founder stories, said Jensen at NPD. “It’s their ability to inform their stories — of their brand, their owner, their ingredients,” she said. “It’s not in regards to the facts, or the claims. It’s emotion.”

Candor and transparency are also an enormous plus, particularly by way of ingredients. The frenzy to transparency has gotten so strong that the most important houses are following suit by spotlighting key ingredients of their products. “They’re recognizing that that is the technique to communicate with consumers,” Jensen said.

In August, Sephora will look to drive the momentum of skincare with a latest area dedicated to scrub brands and wellness. “There will likely be quite just a few launches tied into that strategy,” said Patrick, noting that while hydrators are the most well liked category, emerging items like ingestibles are gaining in importance.

Wendy Liebmann, founder and president of WSL Strategic Retail, suggests that the long run of skincare lies in a mixture of products like these and services like Skin Laundry with its 10-minute laser facials.

There’s also a component of cross-breeding in the long run. “What’s becoming more relevant is a skin-care and makeup hybrid,” said Sarah Lee, cofounder of Glow Recipe, which recently launched its fourth product — a Watermelon Jelly sheet mask, and is claimed to be heading in the right direction to hit $30 million in retail sales this 12 months. “Quite than using one product after one other, consumers want products that may transcend traditionally what [products] used to do,” she continued. “Not only a foundation or makeup but [something that] actually hydrates and protects your skin with SPF and with antiaging properties.”

If brands can proceed to deliver on consumers’ ever-increasing expectations, search for the present growth surge to proceed. “It’s going to proceed to be about product performance, innovation and teaching,” said Patrick, adding the importance of social media for good measure. “Increasingly more brands are going to get on that movement.”