India’s $40B beauty surge
Bloomberg reports India is heating up into a roughly $40 billion beauty market, driven by major regional and multinational players—an obvious growth lane for beauty creators who can combine local nuance with global polish. That growth signal suggests scalable content types—tutorials, ingredient explainers, and short-form product education—will be in demand from retailers expanding in the region. (bloomberg.com)
India’s beauty business is getting crowded fast enough that two of the clearest signals in one week were a retailer chasing Deepika Padukone’s skin care label 82°E and Estée Lauder moving to fully buy Forest Essentials. Bloomberg says the market is headed toward about $40 billion and could become the world’s fourth largest by 2030. (bloomberg.com) The local company in the middle of this is Nykaa, which built beauty retail in India the way Sephora did in the United States, but with a stronger online spine. Nykaa told investors in 2024 that it had more than 30% share of India’s online beauty and personal care market. (nykaa.com) Nykaa is not just a website with lipstick listings. Its investor deck says it also imports and distributes global brands, sells to about 200,000 retailers across more than 1,000 cities, and runs a media and advertising layer that helps brands buy attention as well as shelf space. (nykaa.com) Reliance Retail saw that model working and launched Tira in April 2023 as its own omnichannel beauty chain. Reliance described Tira as a tech-led platform built around global and home-grown brands, which is a direct challenge to Nykaa’s mix of app, store, and brand curation. (ril.com) Global groups are not treating India like a side market anymore. Estée Lauder said on March 5, 2026 that buying the rest of Forest Essentials would make India its largest emerging market, and the company called Forest Essentials the top-ranked prestige skin care brand in India. (elcompanies.com) L’Oréal is making the same bet from a different angle. In its 2025 annual report, the company said its board visited India to see its “exceptional potential as a future growth engine,” which is corporate language for a market big enough to move group results. (loreal-finance.com) Part of the rush is simple math. Kearney estimated India’s luxury beauty market at about $1 billion in 2024, rising to $1.6 billion by 2028 and $4 billion by 2035, which leaves a lot of room between today’s base and tomorrow’s ceiling. (kearney.com) Another part is that Indian shoppers are buying more imported product. The Economic Times reported that India’s skin care and cosmetics imports rose to $171.9 million in fiscal year 2025, with lip makeup and face creams leading the mix and China and South Korea supplying much of it. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) That is why celebrity brands are suddenly takeover targets instead of just vanity projects. Nykaa confirmed this week that it is in talks to acquire a majority stake in 82°E, which would give it a recognizable founder, a ready-made product line, and one more brand it can push through its own retail machine. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The market taking shape is not one where a single foreign giant flies in and wins. It looks more like a three-layer stack: Indian retailers such as Nykaa and Tira controlling discovery, multinational groups such as L’Oréal and Estée Lauder bringing capital and prestige, and local brands supplying the cultural fit on ingredients, climate, skin tone, and price. (bloomberg.com) (ril.com) (elcompanies.com) That is what makes India different from a normal consumer boom. The shelves are filling up at the same time the pipes behind the shelves are being built, and when distribution, celebrity branding, imports, and foreign acquisitions all accelerate together, the market usually gets much bigger before it gets settled. (bloomberg.com) (nykaa.com)
