Singles’ Day beauty sales surge, but margins tell another story

China’s Singles’ Day beauty battle opened with the kind of numbers that would once have been enough to declare another record-breaking shopping festival. Four hours after Tmall began sales at 8pm on October 20, 124 brands had passed 100 million RMB ($15 million) in GMV, while 27,681 brands had already exceeded their entire first-day sales from last year’s event. Beauty was prominent in the early rankings, with Proya (珀莱雅) holding first place among domestic brands and Mao Geping (毛戈平) moving higher, while SkinCeuticals, Helena Rubinstein and other international prestige names remained near the top. Behind those headline figures, however, the market entering Singles’ Day was hardly accelerating. China’s cosmetics retail sales reached 349.1 billion RMB ($52.4 billion) in the first nine months of 2026, up 6.1% year-on-year, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while September sales rose 5.4% YoY to 39 billion RMB ($5.8 billion). Online beauty was considerably weaker: combined skincare and makeup GMV across Tmall, Douyin and JD.com fell 2% in July, grew 1% in August and declined 6% in September, according to Citic Securities data. That contrast makes this year’s festival less a question of whether Chinese consumers still buy beauty than a test of how much brands must spend, discount and reorganize their businesses to secure those purchases. “China’s beauty market is maturing,” said Jacob Cooke, co-founder and CEO of WPIC Marketing Technologies. “Consumers are spending more deliberately and waiting for Singles’ Day to save on their repeat purchase products. People are buying better things, but more deliberately, such as taking time to research efficacy-led skincare products.” Jacques Roizen, co-founder of Shanghai-based Foresight Performance Partners, is cautious about reading the pre-festival numbers as evidence of stagnation. He expects online prestige beauty to have grown at a single-digit rate in the third quarter and points out that cosmetics still outpaced China’s broader retail market during the first nine months of the year. “A strong opening tells us when consumers bought. It does not, by itself, tell us they bought more,” he said. The cost of winning traffic The harder challenge for beauty companies is increasingly not whether they can generate GMV during Singles’ Day, but what remains after they have paid for the traffic required to generate it. Analysis by Chinese media outlet FBeauty of nine beauty brands on Douyin during the October 9 to October 21 period found paid traffic rising sharply from last year. International brands derived an average 62.4% of traffic from paid sources, up from 45.3% in 2025, while the equivalent figure for Chinese brands climbed to 63.6% from 45.1%. One observed brand saw recommendation-feed traffic drop to 28.1% from 51.8% in a year while paid traffic jumped to 64.8% from 33.4%. For labels accustomed to describing Douyin as a growth engine, that changes their returns substantially. Roizen estimates indicative performance-marketing investment at roughly 15% to 25% of net revenue on Tmall, compared with traffic costs approaching 40% on Douyin. He also notes that more than half of beauty transactions on Douyin sit below 100 RMB ($15), versus less than 10% on Tmall, leaving brands with smaller baskets from which to absorb advertising, discounting and fulfillment costs. The resulting gap can be wide, as Roizen estimates operating margins after platform advertising at roughly 25% to 45% on Tmall, compared with generally below 15% on Douyin, with many international brands struggling to reach 5%, while returns and cancellations add further pressure. “Douyin can be a very effective marketing platform,” he said. “That does not automatically make it an attractive sales channel, particularly for prestige brands that not only care about profitability but also about brand image.” Cooke sees the two platforms playing increasingly distinct roles. “Broadly speaking, Douyin is great for driving first purchases via the short-video feed, but long-term success requires shifting repeat purchases onto Tmall,” he said. “We look at it as Douyin for discovery, and Tmall for cultivating a long-term customer relationship.” Influencers still move volume Rising traffic costs have encouraged Chinese beauty companies to build their own livestreaming operations, but the opening weeks of Singles’ Day show why top influencers are efficacious, particularly for prestige brands looking for a burst of sales. Estée Lauder generated 54.6% of its Douyin sales (October 9-21, 2026) through influencer accounts this year, up from 23.7% in 2025, while Helena Rubinstein reached 69.5% and Lancôme rose to 39.8% from 33.7%. During the first day of Singles’ Day, celebrity livestreamer Jia Nailiang’s (贾乃亮) Douyin room generated more than 570 million RMB ($85.6 million) in sales, including over 150 million RMB ($22.5 million) for an Estée Lauder product and more than 200 million RMB ($30 million) for Helena Rubinstein’s Re-Plasty Age Recovery cream. Domestic brands are building a different mix, for instance Kans (韩束) and Chando (自然堂) generated 61.8% and 61.7% of their sales, respectively, through brand-run livestreams in the sample, while also using thousands of creator videos to maintain reach across Douyin’s recommendation feed. Owning the livestream gives brands more control over products, messaging, pricing and customer data, but it is not automatically better. “Replacing an influencer commission with an advertising bill is not necessarily progress,” said Roizen. In fact, buying traffic for a proprietary livestream can consume the savings brands hoped to make by cutting influencer commissions. Cooke similarly argues that brands should not frame influencers and self-operated livestreams as an either-or decision. High-profile creators remain effective when entering a market or introducing a new product, but their commissions and discount demands can squeeze margins. Brand-operated channels are better suited to protecting margin, collecting customer data and maintaining relationships between major promotional peaks. “The measure of success is whether those conversions turn into repeat purchases, which is key for any beauty brand,” he said. New products take a bigger role As traffic gets more expensive, brands are also reconsidering what they sell during the festival. Tmall reported that 102 new products passed 10 million RMB ($1.5 million) in sales during the opening four hours and 1,113 exceeded 1 million RMB ($150,000), while 228 emerging product categories grew more than 50% YoY and 117 more than doubled. Proya’s five brands contributed 27 new-product links tracked in Jiuqian’s dataset, compared with 15 for Botanee (贝泰妮), 12 for Giant Biogene (巨子生物), 12 for Yatsen Holding (逸仙) and seven for Mao Geping. Discounting an established bestseller can generate volume but teach customers to wait for promotional pricing, particularly damaging for prestige businesses that depend on maintaining a strong reference price. A new launch gives brands another reason to compete for festival traffic while protecting older hero products from increasingly aggressive discounts. Cooke said that Singles’ Day has therefore moved well beyond its earlier role as a clearance event. Prestige brands can use the festival to introduce products or offer gifts with purchase rather than repeatedly cutting the price of products consumers already know. “Discount-driven growth is simply not sustainable,” he said. Chinese brands no longer need a separate competitive category The early rankings also show how much the competitive line between Chinese and international beauty companies has blurred. Proya remains among the strongest names on Tmall, Mao Geping is gaining ground, and domestic brands occupy a substantial share of personal-care rankings, while international prestige houses remain dominant at the highest price points and across several Douyin beauty rankings. Between October 15 and 26, seven of Douyin’s top 10 beauty brands were international, with Helena Rubinstein, Estée Lauder, La Mer and Lancôme occupying the top four positions as per Chanmama data. Roizen attributes domestic brands’ progress to better product quality combined with faster development and a better understanding of local consumers. “Chinese brands are already established competitors at the top of the market. The useful distinction is increasingly how convincingly a brand justifies the purchase, rather than where it comes from,” he said. Nowadays, consumers not only compare brands but also channels. There is a rapid growth in lower-priced skincare and makeup bands, alongside increasing consumer willingness to compare official flagship stores, subsidies and alternative platforms before checking out. Even shoppers willing to spend heavily on prestige products are becoming more forensic about where they buy and how much of a price premium they accept. For beauty companies, this makes the opening sales tables less revealing than they once were. Singles’ Day can still concentrate extraordinary volumes of demand into a few hours, and the festival remains capable of making a launch visible almost overnight. The more consequential numbers now sit behind that GMV: how much traffic had to be bought, how heavily the product was discounted, what the customer paid per transaction, whether the order was returned and, eventually, whether that shopper bought again without another livestream deal. Those data explain why a festival capable of producing 124 100-million-RMB-brands ($15 million) in four hours can simultaneously feel tougher than the Singles’ Days that came before it. Beauty demand has not disappeared, but converting that demand into profitable, repeat business is becoming a much higher bar.

Singles’ Day beauty sales surge, but margins tell another story

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Singles’ Day beauty sales surge, but margins tell another story

TUMI’s new growth playbook: From travel expertise to lifestyle performance