The five trends were:

• New Materials: with innovative materials invading the beauty sphere
• Refill Revolution: with refill initiatives everywhere
• End of Life Management: for a better design for recycling or discarding
• Paperisation & woodification: with paper being the new gold
• Accessible beauty: with more tools and packaging that is disability friendly

Overall, new materials are still the big talk and the main investment attraction for impact investors and other companies. NOTPLA is a sheer example with the recent win of the coveted Earthshot Prize which gives them global recognition and financial support to keep developing innovative products. Developing new materials that will be compatible with all beauty applications will be a challenge but some promising innovations are already on the market with brands like Haeckels for instance.

Regarding the refill revolution: it is still a massive work in progress. Pressure coming from the regulator (especially in France) is pushing companies to adopt the model, but most remain reluctant considering all the barriers to entry. It’s a complete paradigm shift, for consumers, retailers, and also brands. The model will probably take years to implement successfully but brands like Beauty Kitchen or L’occitane are tackling the issue head on with innovative refill solutions in stores. We are building a report about refillable beauty (released in Jan 23) that will help you understand what the market holds in that sphere.

End of life management has got more structure. The European commission has just released new EU-wide rules on packaging into its Green Deal initiative. These rules will aim to restrict unnecessary packaging and promote reusable and refillable packaging solutions. The idea is to make all packaging on the EU market recyclable by 2030, a herculean task considering the current level of recycling in Europe (from 0 to 60% depending on the country and the material). The vision is also to massively increase the use of recycled plastics with a harmonisation of recycling symbols across Europe. TerraCycle is support the beauty industry in making its packaging recyclable, and Tom Skazy, its founder, will be present in January at PCD.

Paperisation and/or woodification is still a big area of investment and innovation. We are yet to find a barrier without plastics that will help protect the formula and host moisture. In particular, moulded pulp is a strong design trend and has seen many products rolled out to the market, winning industry awards and the hearts of consumers, for example Second Skin by Ruinart.  Another trend that we didn’t mention as it was already ongoing but took a further growth in 2022 is glassification of beauty products. With a need to use recyclable materials and gain in premiumisation, glass was a clear new and increased adoption in many ranges within the beauty industry.

Accessible beauty is one of the trends that didn’t grow so much in 2022. We saw a few releases in 2021 with VictoriaLand, Olay and Sure. In 2022 Guide beauty and Kohl Kreatives are helping the makeup industry with innovative design, and and it looks like Kohl’s sticker collection is a hit with a latest iteration on contouring (Kohl Kreatives founder will be at PCD in January). We’re yet to see more inclusive design. It’s still hard to open a skincare jar or a makeup compact with slippery hands (try it out you will see). Maybe because these products only address a small portion of the population, so the investment does not necessarily match the return, but with a widely ageing population globally it would make sense to have more intuitive or easier to use designs.