The Glossy Beauty Podcast looks back at beauty in 2025

Spruch-Feiner unpacks the continued rise of Gen Alpha as a beauty consumer, the brands emerging to meet that demand and the retailers adapting to deliver for this younger demographic. Jensen examines a challenging year for color cosmetics, where lip care and lip liner emerged as bright spots. And Lebsack points to longevity as a key growth area in wellness, highlighting momentum in categories like fitness trackers and strength-training equipment. She also notes that, in skin care, clinical, results-driven products are igniting consumer interest. 

Tune in for a look back at the biggest moments and themes across beauty and wellness in 2025 — and what they could signal for the industry in 2026.

Below are highlights from the episode, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

The Gen Alpha beauty boom

Spruch-Feiner: “This topic really dates back at least to 2023, … which was when I started really covering the ‘Sephora Kids,’ and we started seeing this explosion of popularity of brands like Drunk Elephant and Sol De Janeiro with 9-year-olds. … As I was preparing for this episode, I was thinking, ‘OK, so what changed? Like, why was this year different?’ And I think one of the main differences was that we started to see retailers say, ‘You’re not going to need to come in and buy things that you think it’s cool that your big sister or your older cousin or your mom is using — we have things for you, too. We are bringing brands into Sephora doors … that are made for you.’ And it’s a little too soon, I think, for me to have an opinion on how that’s resonating with these kids who are so young. … In September, there was the launch of Sincerely Yours, founded by creator Salish Matter, whose appearance at the American Dream mall drew 87,000 people. The launch event sold out in under an hour, and it drew a lot of controversy — you had people talking about the fact that there were kids wanting products that they literally couldn’t read the labels on. … [In November] Shay Mitchell launched Rini, a collection of sheet masks for [kids], and you had [children] three, four or five years old in the photos — and again, there was a social media uproar. … I would imagine that [next year] we will see more brands developed for teenagers. Evereden, which was not developed by a teenager, recently entered Sephora. So Sephora is definitely saying, ‘We see you, we see the demand, and we want you, Gen Alphas, to know that you can come into Sephora and find things that are made for you.’ They’re also saying to the millennial parent: ‘There are things that are safe for your kids here. There are things that you don’t have to worry about your kids putting on their skin in our stores. And you can shop confidently.'”

The continued lip craze, amid a color cosmetics slump

Jensen: “The category that was not really seeing growth overall in beauty in 2025 was makeup and color cosmetics, but with one big exception, which is lips. … Lip liners were a huge winner this past year. [According to] Circana, lip liner sales grew 28% year-to-date, as of October 2025, and even bigger than that, tinted lip treatments grew 60% over the course of the year. And just to put a point on how much of a contrast that is with the makeup category as a whole, Circana’s data from the first half of the year showed that prestige makeup sales in the U.S. rose just 1%, whereas mass makeup sales actually declined 1% in the first half of the year. So lips were really standing out in an otherwise kind of battered category. … As far as why lips have stood out in a soft makeup category, one obvious reason is that even a casual beauty fan [may have] 10, 15, 20 lip products around their house, versus they probably only have maybe one or two foundations or a powder or a concealer — those are kind of workhorse products you just buy and replenish. But lip [products], people will buy on impulse, and it gives you this instant gratification of [changing] your look right away. [It’s] fairly low cost compared to other beauty products, as well. … [Finally] another big change I saw [lies] in the way brands are marketing, especially lip liners. They’re positioning [them] more as contouring, sculpting, shaping products. So, it’s not about applying a base of color for your lips, as much as it’s about these, kind of, pink, nude, beige and brown shades you’re using to actually augment the lips and define them, as opposed to making a brighter, colorful statement.”

The longevity obsession

Lebsack: “If there was a word of the year for me in my reporting, it was definitely ‘longevity.’ I think consumers are very much primed to start spending even more. We already know that consumer spending on longevity and wellness is really, really high. I saw one data point indicating that it could reach $8 trillion by 2030 — so, a big, big jump there. And in skin care, the biggest part of this is derma skin care. It drove sales at L’Oréal and at Macy’s, [where] they had a lot of success with Blue Mercury — we know their strategy is all about this derma skin care. If I had to sum it up, it would be that, instead of having these short-term goals like hydration or exfoliation with your skin care, this new longevity movement is all about long-term improvement. The trust that consumers are looking for from these brands is no longer about good branding or a big, fancy brand that everybody knows, like Chanel or Dior. It’s much more about clinicals. Luxury skin care 10-15 years ago meant an Estée brand, like La Mer, that was built entirely off of a story. … Now it means fragrance-free, biosynthetic or human-derived stem cells. It means doctor[-founded] brands.”