The latest Innova Premium Market Report, Wellness In Beauty, highlights how the wellness trend has continued to grow post-COVID-19 to provide specific opportunities in the bath, bodycare and skincare categories to help consumers reach beauty and self-care goals.
“Beauty and wellness have become more intertwined than ever,” said Matthews. “Nearly every beauty category, from skincare to body and fragrance, has tapped into the wellness boom. Even more so over the past two years of lockdowns as COVID-19 had the world in its grip. Consumers have actively sought out beauty products to help self-soothe, aid relaxation, ignite pleasure or simply to provide and escape from reality. Post-pandemic, wellness has become an integral part of many consumers’ lives, who want to continue investing in their wellbeing.”
Ritualistic regimens means more steps
With beauty consumers’ interest in wellness skyrocketing, ritualistic regimens are leading to the incorporation of more products that enhance the individual’s overall health and provide a sense of self-care. This spells opportunities for multitasking products or the incorporation of additional products that contribute to a heightened sense of wellbeing.
During the pandemic many consumers reported heightened stress that impacted their sleep, a phenomenon Matthews refers to as ‘Coronosomnia’. This resulted in disruption to daily lives and sleep patterns that has led to an opportunity to incorporate solutions to these challenges into beauty regimens.
“In addition to stress, anxiety and depression, insomnia symptoms were commonplace and continued as the world opened up. As more becomes known about the neuroscience of sleep, sleep brands will be in a position to strengthen claims to reduce sleep anxiety and to achieve longer and more restful sleep.”
Beauty from within gets a wellness boost
The beauty from within category is also seeing a bump from the wellness trend, offering a broad range of opportunities for beauty and personal care brands to expand their offerings with more holistic and extensive solutions that also hit on self-care.
“Supplementation presents an enormous opportunity for topical beauty brands whose claims often fall short of the results,” said Matthews. “This includes personalized products that match an individual’s beauty requirements, and brain care supplements to optimise and maintain healthy brain function. Future supplement brands will offer combined cognitive and beauty benefits.”
On a category level some of the biggest opportunities will be seen in skincare, with Matthews pointing to the facial skincare, bath and bodycare spaces in particular. In the facial skincare area, wellness is causing a move towards multistep ritualistic regimens, providing an interesting contrast to the recent trend for more simple products and regimens.
“Going beyond the traditional three-step skincare routine of cleanse, tone and moisturise, beauty routines have evolved into wellness rituals that promote a mind-skin connection,” said Matthews. “As an example of this, Strange Bird has a self-care ritual kit that pairs cleansers, serum and moisturizer with a six-minute meditation to enhance the morning and evening skincare ritual.”
Textures and sensorial in skincare
The report also highlights how textures and sensorial attributes are likely to play an increasing part in the skincare category, and in particular for products in the bath and bodycare space. Here sensorial textures and mood-boosting fragrances are already playing a part in the type of claims brands are making, which in turn is lending itself to wellness attributes.
“Kohler’s shower brand, Sprig, features shower infusion systems with pods, bath bombs and body/linen mists in six scents to enhance different wellbeing needs. Unilever’s Love Beauty and Planet brand offers a bath product using relaxing scents along with a series of relaxing playlists on Spotify to enhance the bathing experience,” Matthews said.
The report also notes that the increasing popularity of mood-enhancing fragrances and sensorial textures is also spelling specific opportunities. Examples of this have been seen in the functional fragrance space, underlined by Nue Co tapping into mind-enhancing claims, while in the make-up category there has been a renewed interest in mood-enhancing claims, something color brand Violette_FR has effectively incorporated into its range.
The wellness trend is also throwing up a few pitfalls, with Matthews noting that brands that overtly commodify wellness taking the risk that this particular strategy could backfire on them, while those that employ pseudoscience and misappropriate traditional wellness movements like Ayurveda could also face backlash.
“Noteworthy is Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop, which was called out for false wellness claims by NASA for its Body Vibes stickers, which was said to “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies”. In 2018, the wellness conglomerate was ordered to pay $145,000 over unsubstantiated claims of some of its products,” Matthews said.
