Jacqueline Clarke

The new anti-aging skin care market will be 80% bigger than the previous one. Two factors are key to this growth: increased life expectancy and efforts to delay the signs of skin aging.

These two combine to extend the anti-aging market at both points – the market starts at an earlier age in life, and ends at a later age. The lifelong nature is driving new behavior: that is to rationalize anti-aging skin care spending.

On the individual level, the increase in life expectancy adds many years – if not decades – to the anti-aging skin care market. In the major beauty economies — both established and new — people will live with aging skin for many decades. The 40 year old of today in the USA and Europe can anticipate living for another 40 years, rather than 30 years as was the case a few decades ago.

The market for anti-aging skin care is set to grow.

The culture that has been shaped by the aging of the baby boomer generation explains the dramatic fall in the age of starting the anti-aging skin care market. Diagonal Reports and other research indicates that significant numbers of women now start their anti-aging regime before they can even see the first signs of facial skin aging. Furthermore, the starting age continues to fall. In addition, the starting age is lowest in some key beauty economies — most notably in China.

In effect the new anti-aging market creates new and quite distinctive consumer segments inside the larger skin care products, treatments and devices market. These segments will transform the facial care market and have ramifications for the entire beauty industry. Formulators should be aware that the new and larger skin care market does not spell more of the same for the beauty industry. Rather consumers turn to many portfolios of solutions and methods of delivery – from the traditional cosmetic to the high tech and the medicalized.

One distinctive consumer segment is the preventative anti-agers. Their concerns and needs are distinctively different from those of the older anti-agers in two ways. First, their aim is to prevent (or at best delay) the appearance of the signs of aging. Second, these younger women are concerned with specific signs of aging, those that affect them – such as very fine lines, and eye area aging. Marketing anti aging to these younger women is an exercise in discretion. Very simply they do not find being lumped in with the “wrinklies” appealing.

Another distinctive consumer segment is the older anti-agers. Their concerns are not a global monolith but are further segmented by geography, by ethnicity and by culture.

Unlike the prevention-oriented younger women, the older anti-agers want solutions for a wide range of — generally — obvious and visible signs of facial skin aging. Many wish that the signs of aging could be limited to the small number that feature in marketing (e.g., the seven signs of aging).

The anti-aging skin care buyers have proven to be resilient — despite the recession. This contrasts with how other shoppers have cut back on more discretionary beauty and grooming spending. However, the rising generation are the best informed generation of beauty buyers. Their understanding that investment in anti-aging will last for most of their lifetime explains what is an emerging trend, to rationalize their beauty spending accordingly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jacqueline Clarke is beauty market analyst at Diagonal Reports (www.diagonalreports.com). She has been tracking the global hair and skin care market for almost 15 years.