# Face makeup

Topic radar · 259 documents · 2021-01-01–2026-10-15 · updated 2026-10-15

Canonical: https://slate.greyb.com/radar/face-makeup/innovations

## In one minute

### Soft focus is an optics problem solved with particles
The finish the market keeps renaming is built from particles that decide how light leaves the skin. Avon's fractal-particle gels pair the particles with polymers whose refractive index matches them, so the gel blurs wrinkles and skin imperfections while smoothing the surface [1]. Sun Chemical coats 50 to 75 per cent of a substrate's surface with a metal oxide and mixes plate-like particles with other shapes; the coating limits direct reflection and spreads the light evenly, which is what blurs fine lines, wrinkles and spots [2]. L'Oréal claims particles with a refractive index above 1.6 and a median size between 100 nanometres and 5 micrometres for the same effect [3]. LG Household reaches it without powder at all, using diffuse reflection over the wrinkle area [4].

A second motive runs through the same filings. The silicone elastomers and PMMA spheres that have done this job for years are being replaced. Sun Chemical states the intent directly [2], and LVMH with Calyxia builds biodegradable acrylate microparticles that give the cushion and matte finish of a silicone elastomer [5] [6]. The blurring layer is being rebuilt on materials that biodegrade.

One filing aims the optics at skin tone rather than texture. A composition combining a soft-focus filler, a composite pigment and reflective particles is claimed to give optical correction adapted to all skin tones [7]. That is the technical form of the shade question the market treats as a range count.

1. [PL2109437T3](/?paper=PL2109437T3&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)
2. [JP2021143185A](/?paper=JP2021143185A&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)
3. [WO2025082981A1](/?paper=WO2025082981A1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)
4. [CN108883053A](/?paper=CN108883053A&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)
5. [WO2026159418A1](/?paper=WO2026159418A1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)
6. [FR3171588A1](/?paper=FR3171588A1&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)
7. [JP2022071125A](/?paper=JP2022071125A&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard)

### The category's growth has moved off the face
US prestige beauty grew 7% to $33.9 billion in 2024 and mass grew 3%, with fragrance the fastest-growing category at 12%. Face makeup did not lead that. In Q1 2025 prestige makeup held the top spot by volume while falling 1% in dollars, and face and eye lagged the stick formats that grew double digits. Chanel shows the same mechanism from the other side: with fragrance flat, makeup carried the beauty business and the face category was its main growth driver.


### The committed spend sits in a layer the public conversation never reaches
The category's coverage is about names and finishes. The money committed to making those finishes work sits in filings the consumer and trade press do not touch. Avon, L'Oréal, Unilever, Sun Chemical and Shin-Etsu have each filed on how particles control light at the skin surface, and the direction of that work is now a substitution: LVMH with Calyxia is building biodegradable microparticles that reproduce a silicone elastomer's cushion and matte finish, and Sun Chemical names the replacement of silicone elastomers as the point of its filing.


### The film that holds a foundation is the film that resists washing it off
Wear is a film problem. The base is a colourant and fillers held in a polymer film on the skin, and the film formers are largely trimethylsiloxysilicate and acrylate-silicone copolymers. A foundation for sensitive skin combines a hard film former that holds the makeup with a soft one that follows the skin, so the film stays flexible and breathable. Waterproof and sweat-resistant versions thicken the same film and add water-in-oil emulsifiers to stop it breaking down.


### The finish is the durable asset and the name is rented
Every finish now carries a name, and the names are coined by creators and editors who are credited for them. Each label earns its coverage by naming what the previous one got wrong: anti-iPhone face answers same-face glam and filler homogenisation, blurred skin is framed against last season's glossy, butter-like skin, and airbrushed skin as the end of the mega-glow.


### The answer to the shade problem is becoming a machine
Shade count was the category's competitive metric for a decade. The commitment now visible is to measure and mix instead of carrying more stock. DCYPHER opened its first physical counter at John Lewis on Oxford Street, mixing a bespoke foundation in under two minutes from a facial scan, with a national rollout through spring 2027 and a US launch planned for 2027. It sells the result at £39 for 30ml in three finishes rather than a shade wall. BoldHue has taken a standalone dispenser through grant in the US, with a scanner wand that reads skin tone and pumps pigments to a recipe, and L'Oréal holds a granted ecosystem patent for the same idea. Chromara is developing a counter-mounted unit that mixes a brand's own formula from six pigments, and Clarins sells the measurement half alone, turning a phone into a spectrometer for shade matching.


### Matching a shade to skin is a measurement problem first
Before a system can recommend a shade, it has to know the skin colour under whatever light the shopper is standing in. L'Oréal's method trains two models in sequence: the first estimates the illumination from a colour reference in the image, the second estimates skin colour from the image and that illumination reading, which is what lets it work outside a studio. Chanel measures each cosmetic under the conditions it is worn, then correlates those measurements with the person's skin on a shared colour map. MatchCo captures a calibrated image against a known lighting and colour standard and compares it with a reference dataset to derive a custom formulation.


### Two demand readings point to different briefs
CivicScience records a 20-point fall in daily makeup use among American women since 2019, with 49 per cent now preferring light, natural makeup. Reddit's Beauty Index, built from two years of beauty communities, finds conversation about experimental looks up close to 400 per cent while no-makeup makeup talk fell 81 per cent year on year.


## Overview


Face makeup's public conversation and its committed money have separated, and the gap between them is what the category's evidence says matters most. The visible layer is finishes and names, coined by creators and editors who are credited for them and retired as each new label names what the previous one got wrong. Underneath the churn the direction is one: a sheerer base and a softer finish, reached from different starting points by contouring, the natural look and Korean sheer coverage alike. The money spent making that finish work sits in filings the consumer press does not reach, where Avon, L'Oréal, Unilever, Sun Chemical and Shin-Etsu have each filed on controlling light at the skin surface.


## Research

### Try-on learned to render a face, then learned to choose a product
The rendering problem is largely solved in the patent record. Early systems transfer makeup from a reference image by separating the two things a face carries: its structure and the makeup on it. One filing feeds those in as independent conditions to a generative adversarial network, so the makeup transfers without the face deforming. Adobe's version trains the same transfer semi-supervised. Megvii fuses a makeup mask with the original skin colour so the result matches different people. Chanel builds it from a database of reference faces photographed with and without product. The newest filings use diffusion models and first classify the user's personal colour before generating.


### The talc test method was patented, and the rule that would use it was withdrawn
Guangdong's drug control institute patented a laser Raman method for identifying asbestos in talcum powder, aimed at large-scale screening. The capability to test the pressed powders, blushes and bronzers that rest on talc is claimed in filings. The US rule that would have required standardised asbestos testing for talc-containing cosmetics was proposed and then withdrawn, so no federal testing requirement sits behind the method.


## Market

### The channel that is growing rewards a few fast-turning items
In India, quick commerce took ₹938 crore of makeup in the year to July 2026 against Amazon's ₹418 crore, with face makeup the fastest-growing subcategory on quick commerce. Discovery moved with it: generic beauty search on Blinkit rose 236 per cent while Amazon's fell 76 per cent.


### The cost base is now set country by country
The 2025 documents describe a single shock landing at once: a 145% US tariff on most Chinese imports and a weighted average beauty tariff near 30% against 2.4% in 2024. That regime no longer describes the position. A US court struck down the emergency-powers tariffs in February 2026, and the administration replaced them with a 10% global rate under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, with a planned rise to 15% and a 150-day limit unless Congress extends it. That surcharge expired on 24 July 2026.


### Who owns the shelf changed hands
Boots, with 1,800 stores and about 70% of sales outside pharmacy, agreed to be sold to Wittington Investments and Fairfax Financial for $8.9 billion, closing in the first quarter of 2027, and the deal includes No7 Beauty Company. Boots had launched more than 50 new beauty brands and redesigned over 180 beauty halls in the run-up to the sale.


### Shade count is the visible metric and it is decoupled from coverage
Brazil and Mexico supply the market evidence. About 56% of Brazilians self-declare preta or parda, per IBGE as reported by Brazil Beauty News [[https://www.brazilbeautynews.com/criar-produtos-para-pele-negra-nao-e-um-ato,5319]]. Avon's #EssaéMinhaCor study with Grimpa found 70% of Black women dissatisfied with the makeup on the market, and 46% giving up on foundation and concealer for lack of matching shades [[https://www.brazilbeautynews.com/criar-produtos-para-pele-negra-nao-e-um-ato,5319]]. Boca Rosa's Stick Pele launched with 50 shades, 28 of them for Black skin, and Lancôme expanded its Brazilian Teint Idole Ultra Wear portfolio by 50% in the second half of 2025, tied to Afroluxo, a program aimed at racism in the luxury beauty market.


### The evidence for try-on is vendor-reported, and the sizes disagree
Market estimates vary by an order of magnitude depending on what is counted. One research house sizes the AR virtual try-on solution market at 1.74 billion in 2025 growing to 3.17 billion by 2032, about 9% a year. Another puts the broader virtual try-on market at 15.18 billion in 2025 reaching 48.10 billion by 2030, about 26% a year. A third sizes AR beauty try-on at 1.8 billion in 2025 reaching 10.2 billion by 2034, about 22.5% a year. The boundaries differ, between software licences and whole retail deployments, so any single figure is directional.


### The people who name the trends now sell the products
Artist access is a paid product in its own right, with masterclass tickets running into the hundreds, and the session one publication attended arranged through a retailer. Consumer bookings for a full-face look in London start from £80 through a booking platform. The features themselves are commerce content: publishers disclose affiliate commission on the items readers buy.


### Attention without a product
Yarn faces, optical illusions and henna makeup generate views without a shelf. The henna version carries a burn risk with no one accountable for it.


### The critical research left the public conversation
Five studies published between 2021 and 2023 locate the standard against which appearance is measured in whiteness, across Mexico, Peru and the working-class Afro-Brazilian suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. Krozer and Gómez put the cosmetics industry itself inside the production of whiteness in Mexico, and Urrutia Gómez traces how Chinese and South Korean appearance ideals get racialized inside the Mexican and Peruvian makeup industries. Novacich supplies the fieldwork record from Rio, where cosmetics practices construct and negotiate racial meaning.


### The gate to market is a registration number, and it does not test the product
Facilities that manufacture or process cosmetics must register with the FDA and renew every two years, and the responsible person for each marketed product must list it, including ingredients, with annual updates. The law requires no specific safety tests, and facilities that registered in the 2024 window come up for renewal in 2026. MoCRA exempts certain small businesses from parts of the regime. What a firm owes the agency is information about itself and its products, which is cheap for a large brand and costly for a small one.


## Strategy

### The base is being rebuilt around skincare actives
The most concrete product commitment is what goes into the base rather than what it is called. According to trade reporting citing Market Defense, search demand for "foundation with skincare" outperforms "foundation with coverage" at virtually every price point, and lines anchored by niacinamide, hyaluronic acid, peptides, ceramides and squalane are registering triple-digit year-on-year sales growth, with Tarte BB Blur up 368% and The Ordinary Serum Foundation up 212%. L'Oréal Paris entered the format with an 80% skincare base in 12 shades.


### Compliance investment is following automatic enforcement, and Korea is funding it
China's customs measures take effect 1 December 2026, with registration status verified by automatic electronic comparison and non-compliant goods returned or destroyed at the port, and its product-standard requirement follows on 1 January 2027. Korea has gone further and made cosmetics policy: the Act on Promotion and Support of the Cosmetics Industry, passed in August 2026, creates five-year plans and certifies companies for preferential access to state research grants and investment funds, alongside a plan pairing AI skin analysis and robot-assisted cosmetics with regulatory reform. The US holds the registry but issues no certificate confirming it, so the checkable evidence sits with platforms and retailers rather than the agency.


### A line that stopped, and the liability that replaced it
The one mandatory testing rule for a face-makeup ingredient is not on a schedule; it sits in long-term actions. What has moved instead is liability. L'Oréal is reported to be weighing an exit from talc exposure while lawmakers press Revlon on asbestos testing.


### The supply base and the brand base are consolidating in Asia
Macquarie agreed to buy the colour-cosmetics contract manufacturer Hwasung Cosmetic together with Nowcos, and Proya took a 51% controlling stake in Flower Knows. Capacity is being committed on the same side: Cosmax runs a Guangzhou plant with China's Yisen Group at a claimed 400 million units a year, and Florasis operates its own smart factory in Hangzhou.


### The try-on suppliers are committing to the layer that chooses the product
Rendering a face is settled ground. The filings that have accumulated since are about what happens after it. SoftBank has filed a run of applications for a system that generates an ideal face for a scene, measures the gap to the user's own, and recommends products, brands and salons, with advertising attached. Snap puts the same idea inside a messaging app, where a completed look surfaces the product set behind it with a shopping cart. Flipkart and Baidu build product selection into the try-on flow.


## Areas

- Product Innovation & Category Shifts · 79 documents
- Consumer Demand & Cultural Trends · 71 documents
- Channel, Commerce & Market Structure · 60 documents
- Regulation & Compliance · 33 documents
- Technology & Digital Experience · 9 documents
- Societal & Equity Dynamics · 5 documents