In January, Fara Homidi launched Faun, a cool-toned, light beige lip liner shade by her namesake makeup brand. The makeup artist-turned-founder felt it filled an important gap in her lip liner collection. Customers agreed: The brand’s Smudge & Contour Lip Pencil in Faun has since become the best-selling product in the brand’s lineup.
The product’s popularity underscores a larger trend in the beauty sphere across 2025: Even while makeup sales have remained largely stagnant, lip products ranging from sculpting lip liners to glossy lip oils have proved to be the category’s saving grace.
“It’s been exciting, the art of lips,” said Homidi. Lips occupy her brand’s two top-selling SKUs, with the Soft Glass Lip Plumping Oil following the Smudge & Contour Lip Pencil. “For a long time, lip products, like your standard lipstick, all felt the same. With lip pencils, there really wasn’t much movement in shades and textures for a very long time. And now you’re seeing, for example, really innovative lip gloss oils.”
While categories like fragrance and hair care have seen a spate of new launches and excitement throughout the year, color cosmetics have been left holding the bag. According to market analysts Circana, prestige makeup sales in the U.S. rose 1% in the first half of 2025, while mass makeup sales declined 1%.
But lips have stood strong: According to data from Circana, lip liner sales have grown 28% year-to-date as of October 2025. And liners aren’t even the fastest-growing category in lips: Tinted lip treatments have grown more than 60%.
“These balms, butters, serums — it’s all connected to this broader theme of a more natural look, or the skinification trend,” said Larissa Jensen, svp and global beauty industry advisor at Circana.
Lip products’ popularity in a soft makeup market speaks to the category’s strong points — namely, its relative affordability compared to higher-priced beauty products like foundation. The Louis Vuitton $160 lipstick is something of an outlier in a category dominated by the likes of Summer Fridays’s $24 lip butter or Charlotte Tilbury’s $26 Pillow Talk Lip Cheat. And unlike a premium serum, even a drugstore lip liner can fulfill its promise of instant gratification.
“A woman can have about at least 10 different lipsticks. But you’re probably not going to have 10 different foundations,” said Jensen. “They didn’t call it the Lipstick Index for nothing.”
Makeup artists have long since used techniques like contouring or mixing products to build the lip, Homidi said. But the consumer adoption of multi-layered lip looks is a newer phenomenon, driven by access to more user-friendly textures and colors in lip products and social media tutorials.
“For such a long time, we didn’t understand that the public was willing to go the extra mile of contouring, adding something in the middle to plump, then adding a third thing and maybe sometimes even a fourth thing,” said Homidi. “People really do want to dive into that. They want to nerd out. They are willing to buy three and four products to get that makeup artist-perfect finish.”
And the adoption of techniques to contour and plump the lips has also run parallel to talks of “filler fatigue,” as consumers abandon the pillow-faced look.
“For a long time, there was lip augmentation, and that was really popular. And in the last few years, you saw a decline in that,” said Homidi. “Education is [focusing on], ‘Here’s how you can work with what you have and volumize your lips.’”
The 2025 take on lips, characterized by sculpted outer edges and plumped glosses in largely nude and beige shades, stands in contrast to the ultra-matte, brightly colored liquid lipsticks popularized by the Kylie Cosmetics lip kits a decade ago. But if the return of “King Kylie” is anything to go by, don’t discount the high-impact lip for long.
“What we’re forecasting is that makeup is going to go through a bit of a revolution again. We’ve had so many years of it being very clean, almost quiet-luxury beauty. And what’s really exciting people now is that makeup is becoming fun again,” said Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trend forecaster Stylus. “It’s all about bringing color back.”
That may look like a continued popularity of lip liners and glosses, but with more emphasis on colorful shades, she said, referencing the punchy glosses from Chinese beauty brand Kaleidos and Mac’s glittery Dazzlelips Crayon.
And rather than pulling out their 2016-era liquid lipsticks again, Payne anticipates consumers will be looking for high-impact color that also comes with high-impact benefits.
“We’re ready to go back to those days, only if the formulas are 10-15 times what they were before,” said Payne. “We want the color and we want the longevity, but we don’t want any of that crumbliness or dry cakeyness that are associated with the highly pigmented stuff. And I think innovation is now able to provide that experience without any of the negatives.”
And with the return of color in lips, consumers may swing back to more colorful products in a lately neglected category: eyes.
“Mascara is another high-impulse purchase category. And we have started to see a pickup in the eye category this year, where it had been kind of in decline for some time after all the surge we saw during the pandemic,” said Jensen.
Homidi is also at work on new product launches for 2026, including entering a new, but still undisclosed makeup category.
“I have the lip category, and I have the complexion category. There is one part of the face I haven’t touched yet,” she hinted.
