India could be a $40bn beauty market
Bloomberg reports India’s beauty market is rapidly expanding and could reach about $40 billion, driven by local platforms like Nykaa and Tira alongside global groups such as L’Oréal and Estée Lauder. That growth is already changing how prestige brands and local challengers allocate launches and distribution across regions. (bloomberg.com)
India’s beauty business is starting to look less like a side aisle in a pharmacy and more like a national retail land grab. Bloomberg says the market could reach about $40 billion by 2030, which would make India the world’s fourth-largest beauty market. (bloomberg.com) The reason big brands are moving now is that India is no longer just a future story on a slide deck. Bloomberg calls it the fastest-growing beauty market in the world, and that kind of growth changes where companies put stores, ad budgets, and product launches first. (bloomberg.com) One company helped build the map for that shift. Nykaa started as an online beauty retailer in 2012, and its 2024-25 annual report says it now serves more than 42 million customers, works with 8,600-plus brands, and runs 237 beauty stores across India. (nykaa.com) That scale matters because beauty is a discovery business. A lipstick shade or sunscreen texture is hard to sell from a shelf photo alone, so Nykaa built both a website and a store network, and Reliance Retail copied that playbook when it launched Tira as an omni-channel platform in April 2023 with a flagship store in Mumbai. (ril.com) Once local platforms got big enough, global groups stopped treating India like a market that only gets leftovers. Last month Nykaa said it would take over Kiehl’s India operations in an exclusive partnership with L’Oréal, including stores, the local website, and wider distribution. (cnbctv18.com) Estée Lauder made the same bet from another angle. On March 5, 2026, the company said it had agreed to acquire the remaining interests in Forest Essentials, after first investing in the Indian Ayurvedic brand in 2008 and raising its stake to 49% in 2020. (elcompanies.com) That deal says something specific about where demand is going. Forest Essentials sells luxury products built around Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of wellness, so Estée Lauder is not just importing Western prestige brands into India; it is buying an Indian prestige brand and betting it can travel further. (elcompanies.com) The fight is not only about rich shoppers in Mumbai and Delhi. Nykaa’s annual report says it added 50 new stores in financial year 2025, its highest-ever yearly store addition, which suggests the next phase is reaching more cities where online demand already exists but premium beauty counters are still scarce. (nykaa.com) That is why launches and distribution are getting reshuffled. When a retailer already has tens of millions of users online and hundreds of physical touchpoints offline, a brand can test a serum, fragrance, or sunscreen in one market, watch the data, and then widen distribution much faster than it could through old department-store style rollouts. (nykaa.com) India’s beauty boom is turning into a contest over who controls the shelf, the app, and the customer relationship at the same time. Nykaa and Tira built the roads, and now L’Oréal and Estée Lauder are paying up to drive on them before the market gets much more crowded. (bloomberg.com)
