BeautyThe drug channel got smaller. Beauty got the shelf.
Rite Aid is gone, Walgreens is private and CVS absorbed the pieces. What is left is a channel with fewer doors, fewer buyers and a front end that needs beauty to justify its square footage.
Section
Beauty
The business of beauty retail: brands, channels, private label, and the science behind the shelf.
Beauty
BeautyTen minutes and two chairs: how a beauty brand actually reaches a mass buyer
NACDS seats the buyer at a table, sends the suppliers walking, and gives each pairing ten minutes with two more to move. More than 5,600 of those meetings happened last year. It is the least glamorous distribution mechanism in beauty and one of the most decisive.
BeautyThe five bets beauty is making for 2027, and who is actually making them
Cosmoprof's trend report picked twenty-three products out of hundreds of exhibitor submissions and sorted them into five directions. Ten of the twenty-three came from Korean exhibitors. Read the report as a supply map rather than a mood board and it says something harder.
BeautyCollagen leaves skincare: the ingredient is now in your foundation and your hand cream
A 7.4 billion dollar market heading to 11.8 billion, recombinant collagen grown in yeast rather than harvested from fish, and the same molecule showing up in makeup and body care. Cosmoprof's Colla-Genius trend is a supply chain story wearing a skincare label.
BeautyThe styling aisle is being absorbed by the treatment aisle
A 10 billion dollar hair styling market where the growth is going to products that style and treat at once. Cosmoprof's Style & Care trend is category convergence arriving at the shelf, and it is bad news for anything that only holds a curl.
BeautyScalp zoning: the shelf between hair care and skincare nobody owns yet
A 15.8 billion dollar category growing at 7.3 percent, exosomes in a daily mist, cooling serums sold as a spa ritual, and a demand driver almost nobody says out loud: GLP-1 drugs. The scalp is being rebuilt as skincare, and retail has not decided where to put it.
BeautySunscreen stopped being sunscreen: SPF is now a skincare format war
Prestige sunscreen is outgrowing mass, the scalp has become a sun care target and the innovation is no longer in the filter. Cosmoprof's Haute Sun trend is really an argument about texture, and it moves the category off the seasonal endcap.
BeautyNAD+ leaves the supplement aisle and lands in the serum
The longevity molecule that built a supplement industry is now being formulated into masks, serums and devices. Cosmoprof's trend report made it the first of five directions for 2027, and the delivery question is the one nobody at the showcase wanted to answer.
BeautyA gas station, a marketplace and a hotel group walk into a beauty show
Cosmoprof North America brought its Buyer Meetings format to Las Vegas and published the list of retailers attending for the first time. Read that list closely and it describes a category where distribution has moved to the front of the product brief.
BeautyA doll house full of makeup: character licensing and the new economics of beauty gifting
The most photographed object at Cosmoprof North America was a gift set shaped like a house, built around a Finnish cartoon family. Nostalgia was named one of the show's five trends. On the floor it looked less like a mood and more like a distribution strategy.
BeautyThe percentage sign moved to the shelf: beauty's claims arms race in Las Vegas
Exosomes, PDRN, NAD+ and two decimal places on an acrylic card next to the product. At Cosmoprof North America the clinical vocabulary finished its migration from the clinic to the trade stand, and the number stopped being a differentiator.
BeautyDefense before beauty: the K-cosmeceutical stand built as an airplane cabin
Dr.BRID C turned its Cosmoprof booth into a fuselage, complete with windows, a service trolley and an hourly turbulence alert. Behind the set design sits the most crowded positioning in skincare right now: the barrier.
BeautyCosmoprof North America 2026: the beauty trade stops paying for novelty
The 23rd Las Vegas edition drew more than 26,500 attendee visits and over 950 exhibitors to Mandalay Bay. More traffic across fewer stands, and a floor where the first question was no longer what is new but what does it actually do.
BeautyCosmoprof North America 2026: reading the beauty trade floor as a distribution signal
The Americas' largest B2B beauty show returns to Mandalay Bay July 13-15. The exhibitor mix and the buyer program say more about where beauty retail is heading than any single product launch.
BeautyWho actually makes your skincare: the contract-manufacturing layer under the beauty boom
The serum on a prestige shelf and the one at mass are often filled on the same line. As retailer own-brands expand, the contract manufacturer is quietly becoming the most important company in beauty.
BeautyShade-matching and virtual try-on: what beauty's AR layer actually converts
Every beauty retailer now offers a virtual try-on or an AI shade finder. The interesting question is not whether they work as demos, but where they measurably move conversion and returns, and where they are theater.
BeautyThe algorithm will mix your perfume now: bespoke fragrance goes retail
One of the most crowded corners of the Shoptalk Europe floor in Barcelona was a machine blending made-to-measure perfume from an AI conversation. Behind the demo sits a real, and quietly radical, retail model for fragrance.
BeautyThe dupe economy and what it does to beauty retail pricing
Consumers now shop beauty with the assumption that a cheaper near-equivalent exists, and they are usually right. That assumption is quietly rewriting how the category is merchandised and priced.
BeautyNadine Graf has twenty minutes: Estée Lauder at the speed of the consumer
The Estée Lauder Companies' president for Europe, UK & Ireland and Emerging Markets took Shoptalk Europe's Headliner Stage in Barcelona to explain how a 79-year-old beauty house plans to move as fast as its customers. We were in the room.
BeautyPLMA 2026: private label crosses €387 billion, and beauty is its next frontier
The 39th World of Private Label at Amsterdam's RAI gathered 3,200+ exhibitors from 75 countries as own-brand share across Europe hit 38.8%. Food built the private-label machine. Beauty is what it wants to make next.
BeautyCosmoprof Bologna 2026: longevity eats the beauty industry
The 57th edition drew more than 255,000 professionals and 3,104 exhibitors from 68 countries to BolognaFiere. The word doing the most work on the floor was not clean, not natural, not even AI. It was longevity.
BeautyExpo West 2026: clean beauty grows up, moves in with wellness
Natural Products Expo West marked its 45th edition in Anaheim with 3,000+ exhibitors and around 60,000 attendees. In the beauty and wellness halls, the category stopped selling an absence of bad ingredients and started selling a presence of function.
BeautyWhat IMCAS Paris 2026 tells beauty retail: the clinic is writing next year's shelf copy
Some 20,000 practitioners, 370 exhibitors, and 1,000 speakers gathered at the Palais des Congrès for aesthetic medicine's biggest annual congress. Beauty retailers should read the agenda closely, because its vocabulary lands on their shelves about eighteen months later.
BeautyCosmoprof Miami finds its job: the beauty trade's door to Latin America
Three editions in, the January show at the Miami Beach Convention Center has stopped being an experiment. With 800+ exhibitors, 19,000 industry professionals, and conspicuously strong Latin American attendance, Miami is settling into a role Las Vegas cannot play.
BeautyBeautyworld Middle East 2025: Dubai is done being a regional show
A record 85,297 visitors from 178 countries and more than 2,500 exhibitors across 22 halls at the Dubai World Trade Centre. The Gulf is now beauty's fastest-growing market, and its trade fair just started acting like it.
BeautyCosmoprof North America 2025: the beauty trade holds its breath over tariffs and bets on Korea
The 22nd edition at Mandalay Bay drew more than 26,000 attendee visits and 1,000 exhibitors from 44 countries. Under the launch gloss, the two stories that mattered were a 51% jump in Korean participation and a trade floor openly worried about tariffs.
BeautyCosmoprof Bologna 2025: the year the clinic moved into the beauty aisle
The 56th edition drew more than 255,000 attendees from 150 countries and 3,128 exhibitors showing over 10,000 brands. The ingredient on everyone's lips was salmon DNA, and that tells you where the category is headed.
BeautyExpo West 2025: natural beauty gets its own pavilion, and a tallow problem
A record 64,000 attendees and 3,000+ brands filled the Anaheim Convention Center, where the show debuted a dedicated Conscious Beauty pavilion. The natural channel is formalizing its beauty ambitions, right as its fringe goes ancestral.
BeautyIMCAS 2025: exosomes, GLP-1, and the aesthetics agenda beauty retail will sell next
Aesthetic medicine's flagship congress drew some 20,000 practitioners from 140 countries to Paris. Three days of science produced a clear preview of the claims, ingredients, and anxieties heading for the beauty shelf.
BeautyCosmoprof Miami's second edition answers the only question that mattered
A year after its debut, the January show at the Miami Beach Convention Center grew its exhibitor base 28%, to roughly 900 companies from 49 countries. The experiment phase is over: the Americas' beauty trade wants a winter meeting point, and it wants it in Miami.