Webinar: Makeup Trends & 2026 Rebound: Amazon Cross-Shopping, SPF & K-Beauty

Makeup spent most of last year in the red. It's now back to positive growth, but the recovery isn't evenly distributed: nail is compounding at roughly 15% while makeup proper sits near 5%, and Amazon's third-party marketplace has quietly passed Ulta in category share.

That was the setup for our latest beauty webinar, where Chelsey Birgisdottir, Lauren Sims, and Bella Smith covered the market backdrop, the skinification of makeup, and the question brands keep bringing us: what happens to specialty retail after a shopper's first Amazon makeup purchase?

Watch the full replay here.

Key takeaways:

• Makeup and nail reached $23.5 billion, adding $1.5 billion year over year, with nail growing ~15% versus ~5% for makeup.
• Amazon 3P passed Ulta in makeup and nail share, and Sephora continues to cede share to both.
• Growth is barbelled: mass and luxury are both near double digits, prestige closer to 6%.
• SPF makeup growth has slowed overall, but is moving into under-penetrated formats like setting spray, powder, primer, and blush.
• K-beauty makeup is outpacing both K-beauty skincare and total makeup, and names skincare benefits in product titles three times as often as the broader market.
• About a third of Ulta and Sephora makeup shoppers now also buy makeup on Amazon, up 7pp year over year — but for most brands, new-to-brand gains outweigh cannibalization.

Nail, over makeup, is powering the rebound

Makeup and nail now sits at $23.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than a year ago. Split the line, though, and the two halves behave differently: nail is growing about 15% year over year while makeup runs closer to 5%. The category still under-indexes against total beauty, where skincare and fragrance remain the engines, but the direction has finally changed.

Online is doing the heavy lifting. The gap between online and brick-and-mortar keeps widening, and brick-and-mortar has only recently bounced back to modest growth. Price tiers tell the K-shaped version of the same story: mass and luxury are both growing near double digits, prestige around 6%.

Share gains split the same way. In mass, false eyelashes, manicure tools, setting spray, lip stain, and lip liner are taking share — L'Oréal in setting spray, NYX in lip stain, and Korean brand Laka in lip liner. In prestige, it's mascara (Tarte), bronzer and lip liner (rhode), eyeliner, and tinted moisturizer. Four of the top share-gaining brands overall were nail names: Curve Life, Beetles Gel Polish, Glamnetic, and Olive & June.

SPF is slowing overall and growing in unexpected formats

SPF makeup has held roughly 6% of the category, and its growth rate has converged with makeup overall. That reads like a plateau until you look underneath.

Growth has moved out of complexion — BB and CC creams and tinted moisturizers are already saturated with SPF — and into finishing and color formats: setting spray, setting powder, primer, and blush. Ciele, Nudestix, and Naked Sundays lead SPF blush across powder, liquid, and stick formats; One/Size, Kopari, and Milani lead SPF setting spray.

Demographics are where things get interesting. SPF makeup overall skews older, higher income, and White and East Asian. SPF setting spray does not.

“While SPF makeup overall skews older, SPF setting spray actually skews younger. It follows more of the skews of setting spray overall than those of SPF makeup.” — Lauren Sims

Setting spray also over-indexes with Black, Hispanic, and Central and South Asian shoppers. In other words, putting SPF into a product a younger, broader consumer already buys is the fastest route into a market that has been hard to penetrate directly.

K-beauty is winning with positioning, not formulation

K-beauty makeup is growing faster than K-beauty skincare, nearly doubling it, and significantly outpacing the broader makeup category. TikTok and Amazon drive most of that volume. In BB and CC cream, K-beauty added 8pp of share to reach 17% of the segment, with lip gloss and foundation close behind. TIRTIR, Missha, Laneige, and Erborian lead the brand list.

The main differentiator is positioning (not formulation). We defined skinification as naming skincare benefits or ingredients in the product title, and K-beauty makeup does it about three times as often as makeup overall.

“It really comes down to, are they explicitly including these skincare benefits in their product titling and really leading with that skin-forward positioning?” — Lauren Sims

Hydration and SPF anchor these claims, and peptides and serum language are the fastest-growing. Unlike SPF makeup, skinification has no sharp demographic skew — the appetite for skincare inside makeup is broad. If your assortment already delivers those benefits and your product names don't say so, that's a bigger copy problem than anything.

Amazon is recruiting makeup shoppers more than it is taking them

Amazon added nearly five million makeup shoppers in the past year. Ulta added about one million; Sephora slightly fewer shoppers than the year before. Amazon is gaining share in every core makeup category, and takes roughly half the nail market outright.

So how much is cross-shopping, and how much is defection? About a third of Ulta and Sephora makeup shoppers now also buy makeup on Amazon, an overlap up about 7pp from last year. For most of them, Amazon is additive. But 15% bought makeup on Amazon and did not return to Ulta or Sephora the following year — a meaningful minority, and up 3%.

Where the new Amazon makeup shoppers come from matters for how you read that risk: 60% had already bought another beauty category on Amazon, meaning much of the audience is in-house. Among those coming from other retailers, Target, Walmart, and Ulta are the largest sources, with Sephora a distant third — so mass brands carry more cannibalization exposure than prestige.

At the brand level, the math still favors showing up. For top mass brands like Maybelline, buyers split roughly evenly between new-to-brand, prior Amazon buyers, and shoppers shifting from other retailers. Prestige brands post even higher new-to-brand rates with less cannibalization.

“Overall, the benefit of reaching new-to-brand shoppers on Amazon outweighs the risk of cannibalizing existing sales from other retailers.” — Bella Smith

One more thing worth knowing: Amazon and TikTok Shop shoppers are still largely distinct audiences, with under 10% overlap. TikTok isn't yet pulling from specialty the way Amazon is.

Which products move to Amazon, and which stay in the store

Once a shopper starts buying a makeup category on Amazon, how much of their spend follows depends entirely on the product. False lashes, brushes, and eyeliner shift hardest: they're confidence buys that don't need a mirror. Shade-driven lip and face products shift least, because shoppers still want to test them. Mass products shift faster than prestige, largely because mass retail offers little chance to sample in the first place.

Replenishment follows a similar logic. Mascara has the highest repeat rate on Amazon, followed by brow, eyeliner, and complexion staples; cheek, highlighter, and eye palettes repeat least.

What it means for makeup brands

Makeup's recovery is real but narrow, and the channel question has stopped being theoretical. The brands handling it well treat Amazon as a recruitment engine for routine, non-shade-dependent products, protect specialty for discovery and shade matching, and price that trade-off with shopper data instead of anecdote.

That's the gap our beauty panel closes: over 12 million panelists versus an industry average near 200,000, panel-based rather than POS, so Sephora- and Ulta-exclusive brands aren't suppressed and the two retailers don't collapse into one “specialty” line. We track it month to month in our monthly beauty recaps, and you can find a more complete half-year picture in our 1H 2026 beauty webinar recap.

Want to see how much of your Ulta or Sephora shopper base is already buying your category on Amazon, and which brands they're buying? Book a conversation with our beauty team.