UK Beauty and Personal Care Retailing Market Report 2026
The UK beauty and personal care retail sector unexpectedly contracted by 1.5% in 2025 to £13.2bn in specialist sales, ending a four-year recovery streak.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- What you need to know
- Outlook for beauty and personal care retailing in the UK
- Opportunities
- Trust-as-a-service
- The beauty store as a leisure venue
- Monetise personalised beauty and wellness
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THE MARKET
- Snapshot – market size and forecast
- Consumers and the economic outlook
- Regulatory tightening and accelerating investment in retail tech drive curation
- Cultural shifts and economic polarisation are shaping consumption
- Beauty and personal care spending
- BPC spending grows by 6.6% in 2025
- Graph 1: market size for consumer spending on beauty and personal care products (including VAT), 2019-25
- Facial skincare shines
- Graph 2: percentage changes in beauty consumer spending, by category, 2019-25 and 2024-25
- Suncare outperforms the market
- Graph 3: percentage changes in beauty consumer spending, by category, 2019-25 and 2024-25
- Specialist BPC retailer sector: market size and forecast
- BPC specialists’ sales reach £13.2 billion in 2025
- Specialist BPC retailers’ sales suffer surprising knockback in 2025
- Graph 4: health and beauty specialists’ sales*, 2019-25
- Final quarter of 2025 was a bad end to a difficult year
- Graph 5: average weekly sales of specialist BPC retailers*, by month, 2023-25
- Multi-channel BPC specialists fight back with experiential stores
- Graph 6: sales of specialist BPC retailers*, by broad channel, 2019-25
- Market size and forecast of beauty and personal care retailing
- Graph 7: market value forecast for beauty and personal care retailing, 2019-30
- Channels to market
- Specialists account for almost half of BPC spending
- Graph 8: estimated channel of distribution of spending on BPC products, by type of retailer, 2024-25
- Online growth slows in 2025
- Graph 9: market size for online BPC consumer spending (including VAT), 2019-25*
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THE CONSUMER
- Who shops for BPC, how and where
- Stores still the most popular place to shop for BPC products
- Who shops for BPC, how and where
- How gender influences buying habits
- Blended retail journeys
- Graph 10: channels used for BPC shopping, by demographics, 2025
- Beauty as belonging and how retailers can tap into this
- Enthusiasm for belonging
- Beauty as connection
- Graph 11: membership of a retailer/brand’s private community group*, by age and gender, 2025
- Host shared journeys in personal care
- Social discovery and creator influence
- BPC purchasing is highly trend-led
- Social media is shaping product discovery
- Graph 12: interest in purchasing products from a ‘trending on social media’ display in store, 2025
- The store as a leisure venue
- Blend inspiration and leisure into stores
- Graph 13: attitudes to leisure aspects of BPC shopping, by age and gender, 2025
- Leverage creator-led brands to stand out
- BPC retailers as trusted curators and safety gatekeepers
- Trust influences new product discovery
- Retailers can be trusted guides
- Graph 14: agreement with “I’m more likely to try a new brand that is stocked by a retailer I know”, by generation, 2025
- Curation helps shoppers navigate overload
- Graph 15: loyalty levers, by age and gender, 2025
- Simplifying choice in store
- Personalisation and services
- Guidance that goes further
- Younger men are most willing to pay for wellness product advice
- Making personalisation practical
- The role of technology in uplifting the in-store BPC experience
- Advancing ecommerce demands more experience-driven stores
- Graph 16: omnichannel shopping for BPC products, by generation, 2025
- Meaningful minorities are already engaging with AR and experiential retail
- Graph 17: interest in in-store experiences, 2025
- In-store tech can enable/enhance experiential retail
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RETAILER ACTIVITY
- Market shares
- Boots maintains its strong market position
- Graph 18: leading specialists’ share of sales of specialist BPC retailers*, 2024/25
- Space NK comfortably outperforms rivals in 2025
- Graph 19: leading specialist BPC retailers, year-on-year change in sales and customer numbers among Snoop SpendMapper cohort, February 2026
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INNOVATION AND MARKETING
- Launch activity and innovation
- Evolving stores into more immersive and playful spaces
- Stores will become places of discovery and experience
- Blending in-store and digital services
- Fostering a stronger sense of community
- Capitalising on strong social media engagement among BPC buyers
- Repositioning to become trusted gatekeepers
- Advertising and marketing
- Advertising expenditure levels off in 2025
- Graph 20: advertising and promotional expenditure for cosmetics and personal care, 2021-25
- Boots highlights its curated fragrance ranges
- Tesco reflects growing interest among supermarkets in the BPC category
- Boots looks to take K-Beauty mainstream
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APPENDIX
- Market definition
- BPC consumer spending
- BPC consumer spending breakdown
- Beauty consumer spending by category breakdown
- Personal care consumer spending by category breakdown
- Market size and forecast
- Personal care retailers’ share of retail sales falls back
- Market size and forecast for beauty and personal care retailing
- Market forecast and prediction intervals
- Numbers of businesses and outlet numbers
- Forecast methodology
- Forecast methodology – fan chart
- BPC specialists enterprises and outlet numbers
- Graph 21: BPC specialists’ enterprise numbers, 2019-24
- Graph 22: BPC specialists’ outlet numbers, 2019-24
- The consumer
- Consumer research questions
- Consumer research methodology
- Retailer activity
- Leading specialist beauty and personal care retailers – sales
- Leading specialist beauty and personal care retailers – outlets
- Advertising and marketing
- Adspend by media type
- Boots dominates ad spending
- Other data source methodologies
- Nielsen Ad Intel coverage
- Snoop SpendMapper methodology
- Abbreviations and terms
- Generations
"With online discovery accelerating and stores under pressure to justify their role, the opportunity lies in blending expertise, services and experience."
Natalie Macmillan, Senior Retail Analyst
UK Beauty Retail Industry – Trends and Insights
- The UK beauty and personal care retail sector unexpectedly contracted by 1.5% in 2025 to £13.2bn in specialist sales, ending a four-year recovery streak. This drop was largely due to grocers upgrading beauty aisles and online marketplaces such as Amazon successfully poaching shoppers with their convenience and social-driven curation. This disruption exposed weak points in the specialist model, just as inflationary pressure began to ease.
- Despite this setback, underlying demand remains robust, with total category spend advancing 6.6% (5.9% real terms) in 2025. The beauty retail market remains shaped by a widening barbell effect: affluent shoppers gravitate to prestige, younger consumers fuel high-engagement skincare, while value continues to lure the cost-conscious. The segment’s major industry impact is the deepening polarisation that squeezes the undifferentiated middle and accelerates consolidation among pure specialists.
- Looking forward, the category’s leading opportunity is to combine curated, expert-led trust with emerging technologies: a notable 36% of BPC buyers would pay for personalised diagnostic services. The largest threat is the escalating convergence of grocery and marketplace channels, which can bundle BPC products into daily shops and undercut margins, demanding a reinvention of value and experience by specialists to thrive.
This Report Looks at the Following Areas:
- Specialist BPC retail sales contracted for the first time in five years, as grocers, online retailers and marketplaces gained share
- Economic polarisation deepens the prestige vs value divide, with the mid-tier feeling the squeeze
- Regulatory tightening on SPF, actives and green claims is redefining retailer responsibilities
- Technologies such as AI, AR and predictive analytics are reshaping consumer expectations and service models
- Channel dynamics are shifting rapidly; grocer premiumisation is accelerating as online-only specialist growth stalls
- Social commerce and community/creator ecosystems are transforming discovery and loyalty pathways
- Experiential flagship concepts emerge as the specialist counterweight to frictionless, commoditised ecommerce
Report Scope
This Report examines the UK beauty and personal care retailing market for men and women aged 16 and over. It covers:
- beauty – including makeup and colour cosmetics, nailcare, fragrances and skincare
- personal care – including haircare, bodycare, hair removal and everyday toiletries such as oral hygiene, bathing and deodorants
- BPC accessories and electricals – including hair and makeup brushes, hair styling tools, beauty and dental tools
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