Global beauty’s top 10 H1 earnings: Where is growth going?

Seven of the world’s 10 largest beauty groups grew sales in the first half of 2026, a reversal from the same period last year, when seven of them shrank. That count, from Chinese trade title Qingyan, still does not amount to a broad recovery: two of the remaining groups finished roughly flat, one declined, and L’Oréal ended the half with nearly twice the sales of second-placed Unilever, with Procter & Gamble third. Beneath a near-static ranking, the sources of growth shifted. Dermatological skincare, prestige fragrance and increasingly sophisticated haircare outperformed. China contributed growth again for several international leaders, and volume did more of the work than price. Some mass brands remained under pressure and the cost of marketing each incremental sale rose, making the quality of growth as important as the headline numbers. Shoppers bought at both ends of the range in the same half, picking up a Le Labo fragrance or a Helena Rubinstein cream while restocking Dove, Vaseline and Neutrogena. They traded neither uniformly up nor down but grew more selective about where a premium earned its keep, which left the undifferentiated middle harder to defend. Beauty’s disappearing middle Prestige beauty performed particularly well where brands had a recognizable point of difference. Estée Lauder Companies returned to growth in fiscal 2026 after several difficult years, with reported sales increasing 5%. Fragrance was its strongest category, rising 12% for the year, led by Le Labo, Tom Ford and Kilian Paris, while skincare returned to growth as La Mer and the Estée Lauder brand improved. L’Oréal’s half told the same story. Group sales reached 23.78 billion euros ($27.1 billion), up 5.8% reported, but its fastest-growing divisions were Professional Products and Dermatological Beauty. Professional haircare grew 12.6% like-for-like, and Dermatological Beauty 11.3%, against 6.8% for the group. Cheap products held their ground at the same time. Unilever reported strong volume growth from brands including Dove, Sunsilk and Vaseline, while Kenvue’s skin health portfolio continued to benefit from labels such as Neutrogena. Mass-market dermatological skincare, in particular, remains resilient because affordability is combined with recognizable efficacy and high-frequency usage. Beauty is therefore increasingly taking on a barbell structure rather than moving straightforwardly up or down the price ladder. Consumers are willing to pay more where the value proposition is unusually clear — whether clinical efficacy, sensory experience, professional credentials or cultural status — while remaining highly pragmatic in categories where more expensive alternatives provide little additional perceived benefit. The pressure becomes most visible among brands whose positioning sits somewhere between those two poles. Beiersdorf reported consumer segment organic sales fell 4.0% in the half and Nivea fell 6.8%, while Derma, built on Eucerin and Aquaphor, grew 7.8% on second-quarter strength in North America, Brazil and China. In August the group cut full-year guidance to a low-single-digit organic decline, against the flat-to-slightly-positive outlook it had reaffirmed in April. The two trajectories belong to one company. The divide suggests that price alone is becoming less useful for understanding beauty consumption. What increasingly matters is whether consumers can identify exactly what a product does for them and why that benefit is worth paying for. Science becomes a revenue story Dermocosmetics answers it better than anything else on the shelf. L’Oréal’s Dermatological Beauty division has become one of the group’s most consistent growth engines, supported by La Roche-Posay, CeraVe and SkinCeuticals, while Beiersdorf is experiencing a similar dynamic with Eucerin. The Ordinary has continued scaling inside Estée Lauder Companies, with the group indicating that the brand is approaching the $1 billion sales threshold, chief executive Stéphane de La Faverie told analysts on August 19. These labels span dramatically different price points, yet their commercial logic is remarkably similar. Recognizable ingredients, specific concerns and some form of scientific or dermatological authority give consumers a framework through which to evaluate value, replacing relatively abstract claims of luxury with propositions that appear more measurable. Beauty groups are pushing this logic considerably further as anti-aging moves beyond wrinkles and firmness towards longevity, cellular health, regenerative medicine and ideas borrowed from aesthetic treatments. PDRN, recombinant collagen, mitochondrial health, epigenetics, advanced delivery systems and skin longevity are entering product development and marketing vocabularies, extending the definition of skincare from correcting visible signs of aging to maintaining the biological functions associated with healthier skin for longer. Estée Lauder built its April launch of Re-Nutriv around sirtuin research and published two peer-reviewed studies alongside it; L'Oréal put Lancôme Absolue Longevity M.D. into the same territory. Skincare is no longer only about correcting what shows. Haircare has borrowed much of the language that transformed facial skincare over the previous decade, incorporating discussions around barrier repair, microbiomes, peptides, scalp health and biological aging. The financial reports suggest that this repositioning is beginning to translate into meaningful business: L’Oréal’s Professional Products business grew at twice the group rate in the first half, supported by Kérastase and Redken, while Unilever has been building prestige haircare through K18 alongside strong mass brands including Dove and Sunsilk. Procter & Gamble’s hair care organic sales rose mid-single digits in its June quarter on volume growth in Asia-Pacific and Europe. The opportunity lies in transforming a familiar necessity into a much broader routine. Washing and conditioning increasingly sit at the beginning of a regimen that can incorporate scalp serums, bond repair, anti-hair-loss treatments, masks and targeted solutions, enabling companies to recreate some of the category expansion that made facial skincare considerably more valuable over the past decade. China’s comeback is highly selective Nowhere is the selectivity sharper than in China, and nowhere is the headline number more misleading. Several international groups have moved the country from a standing source of earnings warnings back into their growth column, and the market grew 4.35% in the half to 611.41 billion RMB ($85.4 billion). But skincare — close to half of all online transaction value — was the only major category to shrink, down 5.40% on volume 3.46% lower, on China Fragrance and Cosmetics Association figures. The groups gaining in skincare are taking share of a smaller pot. L’Oréal's North Asia business grew 4.6% during the first half, with mainland China described as the region’s principal growth driver. Helena Rubinstein achieved double-digit growth, while SkinCeuticals and Kérastase helped dermatological beauty and professional haircare record strong increases. Estée Lauder’s improvement was more pronounced, with mainland China organic sales increasing 9% across its fiscal year and Q2 growth reaching double digits (12%) as the company continued to gain share in prestige beauty. Shiseido's China and travel retail arm illustrates how much the basis matters. Reported sales rose 10% to 191.4 billion RMB ($1.26 billion) and core operating profit 22.7%, but strip out currency and the half was flat, down 0.1% like-for-like. Consumer purchases inside China did return to low-single-digit growth in the second quarter, and hero products carried the group through 6.18. Beiersdorf's Derma business grew fast in China too. None of this restores the market of the 2010s, when category expansion, store openings and a widening middle class lifted almost any international brand that showed up. Growth today is increasingly concentrated around specific brands and online channels rather than being generated automatically by market expansion. L’Oréal says e-commerce already accounts for more than half of its North Asian sales, while Estée Lauder has identified Douyin as an important source of consumer recruitment. The 6.18 shopping festival also became a meaningful sales event for several multinational groups, with international prestige brands including Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein and La Mer reclaiming leading positions across major beauty rankings. International brands have not suddenly become better suited to China than their domestic rivals. Rather, some of the strongest global names are becoming more effective at connecting established brand equity and hero products with local content, livestreaming, platform promotions and e-commerce execution. The improvement did not extend evenly across multinational portfolios. Higher-priced hero brands and scientifically positioned skincare are performing considerably better than many foreign mass-market skincare and makeup labels, particularly around the 100 RMB ($14) to 300 RMB ($42) price band where Chinese brands have become formidable competitors. China is therefore becoming more valuable again for international beauty, but it is also considerably less forgiving about which brands participate in that recovery. Volume is back, but at a price Another important change is taking place in how beauty groups generate growth. During the inflationary years, companies could frequently expand sales by raising prices, but the latest financial results indicate a greater reliance on consumers actually buying more products. Unilever’s first-half underlying sales growth of 4.8%, for example, was overwhelmingly volume-led, with volumes contributing more than four percentage points and pricing less than one. The pattern represents a notable change from the pricing-led growth model that characterized much of the preceding inflationary period and suggests that product innovation and penetration are becoming more important as consumers become increasingly resistant to repeated price increases. Volume-led growth provides a healthier indication of underlying demand, but generating that volume is not necessarily cheap. As international companies compete for renewed consumer spending, several are putting more money behind marketing, launches and online promotions, particularly in markets where digital platforms have made consumer acquisition increasingly competitive. Unilever has increased brand and marketing investment, while Shiseido’s first-half marketing investment rose 8.1%. Beiersdorf is spending more behind consumers and channels as it works through an 18-month recovery plan for Nivea, and Puig’s makeup profitability has been pressured partly by higher marketing and promotional investment supporting Charlotte Tilbury’s channel expansion. In light of this, sales growth and profitable sales growth are consequently becoming more important. Coty illustrates the other side of the recovery, with sales remaining under pressure while management restructures its portfolio, while LVMH’s Perfumes & Cosmetics division struggled to generate meaningful organic expansion despite the resilience of individual prestige fragrance brands. Category momentum alone is therefore insufficient protection. A company can be heavily exposed to fragrance, dermocosmetics or haircare and still underperform if its brands lack differentiation, distribution is poorly balanced or the cost of acquiring consumers overwhelms the additional revenue generated. The next ranking will be decided below the headline numbers The global beauty hierarchy has barely changed, with L’Oréal remaining in a league of its own and the companies immediately behind it retaining broadly familiar positions. What has changed more significantly is the composition of the portfolios generating growth and the capabilities required to convert favorable category trends into profitable sales. Prestige fragrance can grow alongside Vaseline, just as a $350 cream can coexist with consumers becoming more price-sensitive elsewhere. Chinese shoppers can return to international brands during 6.18 while domestic companies continue taking share in mass-market categories, and scientific innovation can support higher pricing without making consumers indiscriminately receptive to every product carrying a clinical claim. The groups best positioned for the next phase will therefore not necessarily be those capable of raising prices the most. They will be those able to turn dermatological science into scalable brands, transform haircare into a higher-value routine, make Chinese e-commerce profitable beyond promotional peaks and expand prestige businesses without becoming dependent on increasingly expensive marketing. Consumers have not stopped spending on beauty; they are becoming more selective about which purchases deserve more money and which should cost less. That makes 2026 less a story of beauty’s generalized recovery than one of where growth is being redistributed, with the rankings still populated by familiar names even as the products, channels and brands determining who moves up next are changing much more quickly.

Global beauty’s top 10 H1 earnings: Where is growth going?

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Global beauty’s top 10 H1 earnings: Where is growth going?

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag