The Top 26 Beauty Trends of 2025

Depuffing & facial sculpting

Demand for depuffing and facial sculpting products has soared in recent years. For many consumers, it’s about more than just vanity—it’s about taking control of their appearance with small, daily rituals. Products in this category promise visible results in minutes, often backed by before-and-after social media videos showing a slimmer, more contoured face.

This is part of a broader trend toward low-effort, at-home beauty tools that mimic spa services. Whether it’s reducing puffiness from sleep or sculpting cheekbones for an event, consumers are looking for fast, non-invasive ways to enhance their facial structure without turning to injectables.

Biotech beauty

Once reserved for clinical labs, biotechnology is now making its way into everyday skincare. Interest in biotech ingredients like exosomes—a type of regenerative cell signaling vesicle—is rising fast. These ingredients promise not just hydration or surface-level benefits, but actual regeneration at the cellular level.

Alongside exosomes, collagen for skin continues to trend upward, not just in topical products but in supplements too. The appeal is clear: products backed by science, not just marketing. For brands, biotech is more than a buzzword—it’s a competitive advantage in a market where consumers are increasingly skeptical and well-informed.

Shower water quality

Filtering drinking water is not a new idea. But what about shower and bath water? That’s the idea behind the growing interest in the Jolie filter.

Authorities usually purify water supplies by adding a small amount of chlorine, but showering or bathing in chlorine also causes an unwanted side-effect: dry skin and hair. Given that consumers spend over $10B a year on moisturizing, and that hydration is one of the fastest-growing skin and hair care trends, it’s easy to see why a filter that removes chlorine would be a tempting investment.

In fact, Jolie pitches its product as a financial investment: “Women who invest in their appearance spend an average of almost $3,800 a year on beauty-related expenses…if you are combining your products with unfiltered water, you're foiling your investment in your appearance.”

As for the business model, Jolie’s customers first buy a special showerhead, then start a three-month rolling subscription for replacement filters.

Skin Barrier

After years of aggressive exfoliants and 10-step skincare routines, many consumers are now focusing on one thing: healing their skin barrier. Interest in skin barrier creams, serums, and repair products has exploded, fueled in part by influencers educating their audiences on how overdoing skincare can backfire.

Rather than trying to strip away imperfections, people are learning to rebuild their skin’s natural defenses—often with minimalist routines and gentle, protective ingredients like ceramides, panthenol, and colloidal oatmeal. It’s a shift away from damage-control and toward long-term skin health, especially for those with sensitivity, redness, or inflammation.

Men's beauty

Men’s beauty is no longer niche—it’s mainstream. The shift started in skincare: it was only a few years ago when men's moisturizer was looked upon as taboo, yet now there are dozens of men's skincare brands.

Now, that shift is expanding to subtle cosmetics designed specifically for men, leading men's makeup to become one of the top makeup trends.

The messaging, however, looks very different from traditional beauty marketing. Male-focused brands tend to emphasize function over flair, often using terms like “eye de-puffing stick” or “blemish corrector” rather than “concealer.” Their packaging skews minimalist—black, matte, bold fonts—and models typically have traditionally masculine features like facial hair or defined jawlines.

What’s driving it? Some of it is generational: younger men are more open to skincare and grooming as forms of self-care. But it’s also about control—wanting to look more energized, confident, and polished in professional and social settings. As gender norms continue to blur, expect this trend to grow well beyond skincare into every category of beauty.

Ingredients over brands

Ingredient-focused shopping, a movement largely driven by Korean beauty, has become one of the biggest trends in skincare, with consumers often caring more about what’s inside their products than the brand name.

As skincare information becomes more ubiquitous, consumers are employing this new knowledge and searching for ingredients directly, running alongside rising consumer demand for total transparency and simplicity.

Brands have taken notice of these shifts in consumer behavior and many have found that by focusing on ingredients like beef tallow, they can cater to both sides of the market – the novices who are looking for simple solutions, and the beauty aficionados who feel they can be their own at-home chemists by focusing on single-ingredient products.

Kids skincare

In 2023, Sephora reported that the number of its customers aged 9 to 12 had doubled over the past five years. Social media’s role in shaping this trend is undeniable, with over 80% of teenagers reportedly watching beauty tutorials online, especially as beauty trends on TikTok go viral and influence younger audiences.

This growing focus on beauty among (pre)teens has fueled the explosion of brands like E.L.F., a standout in Gen Z beauty, which saw its revenue surge by a staggering 77% in 2024 to $1.02 billion and now commands 35% of the female teen market.

Kids’ products are heavily influenced by clean beauty trends and typically offering gentler, more hypoallergenic formulas to reduce the risk of irritating younger, more sensitive skin.

Some argue that beauty routines offer kids an opportunity for self-care and personal expression. But others are concerned that introducing complex beauty routines at a young age can send the message that looking good requires constant effort—and spending. This not only fuels self-consciousness as kids begin comparing themselves to curated ideals, but also normalizes costly habits that may be more about pressure than play.

Virtual try-ons

The key purchases for consistent makeup users like foundation or concealer involve experimentation and so have traditionally been bought in-store. Online instead serves mostly as a replenishment channel in the beauty industry once a customer knows what they want. In fact, for female teens, a demographic that spends more time online than almost any other, 90% prefer to make beauty experimentation purchases in-store rather than online.

However, companies like Il Makiage are capitalizing on advancing technology trends to match users with the right shade of these products, making it easier for consumers to find their perfect match.

Red light therapy

The staggering 98% drop in LED bulb prices over the past decade has allowed for new types of consumer products and is eroding the economies of scale that hold the salon industry together.

Not to be confused with surgical face masks, LED face masks are an increasingly popular treatment where a face mask with embedded LEDs bombards the skin with light, allegedly reducing acne. This would have been a ridiculously expensive product a decade ago, but the LED price drop helps these face masks replace what used to be an in-person treatment. Instead of spending $25 to $85 per session at a salon, users can order a single mask for $100 and get as many treatments as they want. And not only have LEDs gotten cheaper, but the lights have also gotten significantly longer-lasting.

The rise in popularity of LED face masks is also another case of the kit trend, where an in-person service gets replaced by a kit that can be used at home, alongside things like lash lift kits, beard growth kit, ebike conversion kits, fertility testing kits, and more.

"Non-toxic" beauty

What used to be a niche concern has become a mainstream movement. As ingredient transparency rises to the top of consumer priorities, more people are actively seeking out non-toxic beauty products—especially in categories like skincare, makeup, and hair care—that avoid potentially harmful chemicals like parabens, sulfates, phthalates, and synthetic fragrances.

This shift is closely tied to broader health and wellness trends, as consumers become more skeptical of what they put on their bodies, not just in them. It also echoes the rise of ingredient-first shopping, where people research formulas like they would food labels. Brands are responding by launching “free-from” product lines and emphasizing transparency, even when regulation is still catching up.

While “non-toxic” remains a loosely defined term, its influence on how beauty products are developed, marketed, and purchased is undeniable—and growing.

Kbeauty

Korean beauty isn’t a new trend—but it continues to rise. What began as a niche movement has become one of the most influential forces in global beauty, shaping everything from daily skincare routines to packaging design. Driven in part by the global popularity of K-pop and K-dramas, Korean skincare trends like “glass skin,” “slugging,” and multi-step routines have found dedicated followers far beyond Asia.

The appeal lies in both the philosophy and the innovation: a focus on gentle, preventative care paired with cutting-edge ingredients like snail mucin, fermented extracts, and ginseng. Consumers are drawn not just to the effectiveness of K-beauty products, but to the experience—lightweight layers, sensorial textures, and playful yet minimalist branding.

This rising cultural influence has extended into adjacent categories, too. Korean-inspired alcohol trends, for example, have taken off globally as soju and makgeolli grow. Together, these shifts reflect a broader fascination with Korean culture and show no signs of slowing down.