Natural Fragrance: a must-watch beauty and personal care segment

Across the market—from mass to prestige and on up to luxury—there is no doubt naturals are popular.

“Consumers are demanding eco-friendly products in all aspects of their lives, including their beauty routines, and more brands are coming to that realization,”​ CEW president Carlotta Jacobson told the press​ late last year when the trade organization hosted a Global Trends Event on the topic of naturals.

Widely influential ​

Shoppers across demographics and with wildly different worldviews are opting for natural skin care, color cosmetics, hair care, and fragrances.

Explaining why (in a presentation at that CEW event), Lucie Greene, worldwide director of JWT Intelligence, called “healthcare and wellbeing a consumer movement [that] blurs category lines” ​and impacts the entire personal care and cosmetics industry.

Natural products are equated with healthy choices. So sourcing, formulating, and labelling are changing accordingly.

Retailers are fully on board with this shift as well. “Today, all-natural and niche brands have a stronger presence on department store shelves. Buyers are recognizing that there is a demand for these products,” ​Katharine L’Heureux, founder of Kahina Giving Beauty, tells Cosmetics Design​.

Naturally scented ​

As Cosmetics Design reported early last year, natural fragrance ingredients are in high demand​.

All this week, Cosmetics Design will share insights from fragrance expert Lisa Wilson, principal at Scent&Strategy, a consulting firm that serves clients in bath, body, and hair care as well as in fine fragrance. 

In her exclusive interview, she explores the pros and cons of creating fragrance products with a necessarily limited selection of natural ingredients, the scalability of such collections, and where the trends are taking the segment next.

As our conversation with Wilson begins, she situates natural fragrances in the larger perfume, cosmetics, and personal care business:

Lisa Wilson: “Natural and organic personal care product sales represented $15.26bn in 2015 and nearly 19% of the total personal care market sales according to Sundale Research. We’ve seen dramatic growth in this segment, and Kline projects it will continue at a CACR of almost 10% through 2019. So it’s a segment worth watching.”​

Up next​

In tomorrow’s instalment of this four-part series on natural fragrance, Cosmetics Design talks with Wilson about how exclusivity and purity play a role in making and marketing natural fragrance.