Lily12tree (0:28)

Hello and welcome back to the bareface Podcast, a beauty business podcasted hosted by yours truly. My name is Lily12tree and I'm a digital marketer and data science student. Today we're going to take a look at the breakout category of high tech beauty devices. Over the last year, social media feeds have been flooded by these devices, from hair styling tools like the $850 Dyson Airwrap and the $590 Dyson Air straight or the incredibly LED light therapy masks with one from Dr. Dennis Gross setting you back $700 Omnilux $460 and current body $680 or microcurrent face sculpting tools like the $400 NuFace $300 Foreo. I wanted to understand why these devices were getting so much hype, especially at their $500 plus price tags. What's really interesting about these topics of microcurrents and LED therapy for examp growing in popularity before the pandemic, with Google searches for LED light therapy growing 320% between 2010 and 2020 since 2020, so in just the last four years, searches have grown 55%, which is still a lot. But that 320% over the decade before clearly primed us for this mass virality we're seeing on social media. I find it really interesting when we're able to identify big industry shifts like this that were brewing for years and then work backwards to figure out why. Now, what about the current beauty climate was so Perfect for these $500 devices to just soar? We're going to answer that and so much more in today's episode, which is going to be broken down into three parts. Firstly, how did these devices get so popular then? Why are beauty consumers willing to pay so much for them? And then finally, some predictions on what will be next. Part 1 How did beauty devices get so popular in 2016? A buzzword took off in China that was this term black tech. This term referred to products that were hyper futuristic and scientific and was used to describe tools like LED light facials, microcurrents and radio frequency tools. When we think about those devices in a 2016 world where they seem so futuristic, it makes sense that the kind of creepy and scary connotations of the term black tech was used then. But when these products started to gain consumer interest in China in 2016, understandably they were first met with a little apprehension. If you listened to the last episode about the Korean skincare market, you would have a bit of an understanding of how Much the Asian market is obsessed with prevention when it comes to skincare. So these devices at their core are anti aging and that suited the Chinese market perfectly. What was so crazy about beauty devices in their early stages was that in 2019, Jing Daily reported to the Business of Fashion that 80% of Black tech beauty device consumers were under 35 years old and 30% were under 25. This obsession with anti aging before you even start to show the signs of aging is one of the fundamental reasons that these products have gained such popularity. While brands like Foreo and Nuface have been around for years before they took off in China in 2016, it was this international momentum that was pivotal in the mass adoption of spending big money on quality at home devices. This spike in interest was noted by other companies too, as this was the year that Dyson expanded to hair care and launched the Dyson Supersonic, a US$400 hair dryer. We also have to look to the side and another industry that has been fundament in the success of high end beauty devices and was also taking off in 2016. And that's cosmetic surgery. 2015 was the year of the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge, where you would suck a drink bottle or shot glass so much that your lips would swell and it looked like you'd been stung by a bunch of bees. The mid 2010s were a period in time where cosmetic intervention was starting to become mainstream. But people were still hiding that they had had anything done. Unlike makeup, filler and Botox don't smudge. They don't we throughout the day. There's no room for practical error and there is no method. You need to learn. And once you've had the procedure done, you don't need to do anything to look the way you want to look. It's the same period that eyelash extensions started having a moment. It was the start of high maintenance to be low maintenance, where you would invest in appointments and services rather than products. Suddenly, it wasn't enough to have a lengthening mascara. We wanted perfect eyelashes that wouldn't smudge or lose their curl. We no longer wanted to slow down the process of aging with creams. We wanted to stop it altog with Botox or we no longer wanted to sculpt our cheeks with contour to give the illusion of full cheekbones. We wanted filler in our cheeks to actually give us fuller cheekbones. As cosmetic intervention became more and more mainstream, consumers began to want more from their beauty products. It wasn't enough to hydrate your skin or to reduce blemishes Instead, consumers now wanted to resurface, retexture, recolor. It was this desire to get more from beauty products that primed beauty consumers for high tech beauty devices and made an ideal market for these products to take off. It wasn't a trend that just came alive during COVID It wasn't a sudden want to do beauty treatments at home because we couldn't get to the salon. It was actually because skin care, hair care and makeup were no longer able to give consumers what they wanted out of beauty. As this want for more grew from the mid 2010s to the early 2020s and move more into the mainstream, we saw this manifest in some more accessible ways. For example, with the rise of expert creators, we started to see skincare experts join social media to teach the masses about the science of skincare. Creators like DERM, Dr. James Welch, Dr. Adele and many others have had huge success on apps like TikTok with their enhanced credibility, really cutting through a lot of the noise that's generated on these sorts of apps. Everything from ingredient concentration to product layering or understanding esthetician machinery, consumers suddenly wanted to know it all. As beauty and content are both becoming more and more saturated, there are certain demographics that are getting a lot smarter with how they shop. They're looking to things like cost per meal and the science behind a product. Before purchasing, experts were able to provide a level of authenticity that consumers have sought out for years. Now, relying on a dermatologist or an esthetician for skincare recommendations over a lifestyle influencer is getting more and more appealing as consumers become increasingly savvy about the science rather than purely aesthetics and hype. This interest in experts can also be seen outside of skincare as well, with celebrity hair stylists like Chris Appleton and celebrity makeup artists like Keddie, Jane Hughes or Patrick Ta or Gucci Westman and makeup by Mario. They're all gaining huge attention online, as are their brands. Suddenly, you no longer just care about how to do a 90s blowout because you're learning about treatments and heat protection. So you want to know how to do a 90s blowout through a method that's best for your hair health, introducing you to the world of overexposure to heat and therefore the appeal of something like a Dyson airwrap. As consumer knowledge has grown and people have become truly informed about beauty in a way that was previously inaccessible to the major, we now expect so much more from our products. This growing understanding and interest in the science of beauty helps explain just why Consumers are Willing to Pay so Much for High Tech Beauty Devices Part 2 why are beauty consumers willing to pay so much for beauty Devices? The desire for elevated results has driven the creation of a new category of at home devices that replicates salon and clinic treatments. And since the category was new, the brands that were pioneering it had the freedom to set premium prices as long as their products delivered on their promises. The fact that 400, 500 or even $600 products are trending is crazy, but it does make sense. China International Beauty Expo CEO Linlin told Business of fashion in 2019 that for high end smart beauty devices, offline experience focused distribution is best. Showrooms and brick and mortar stores can inter with consumers in a dynamic way, and that aligned with Foreo's original strategy in China, which in addition to an online store, they had online and offline B2B distribution and social media marketing, but they also had 62 stores. And while this made sense for a market where these devices were really new and hyper futuristic, the need to see these products in store, although they're so expensive, is no longer the case in a present day Western context. Because consumers have been primed through all the reasons we just spoke about and social media is now able to play a huge role in driving sales in a way that it just couldn't before. When these products can actually deliver those elevated results, it makes for some pretty eye catching testimonials and reviews and even before and afters, which if you love them or hate them, they really do move product. If you were to walk into a Sephora without ever having heard of a new face, for example, and you just saw the US $400 gadget sitting there claiming to sculpt your face through microcurrents, you would probably roll your eyes and wonder what the world has come to, right? But if you see video after video over the course of maybe a few months of people raving about this thing and you're looking to target puffiness and facial definition, then suddenly this product is quite appealing. Not to mention the customers that are already considering going to a salon or a clinic to address these concerns. Investing a few hundred dol home device might actually lead to savings. We're also seeing a shift among certain demographics who now prefer to avoid cosmetic interventions altogether, with terms like puffy face and pillow face associated with the overuse of fillers, but then also just fillers as a whole. Many consumers are now looking to avoid these treatments entirely, but still want to treat signs of things like anti aging, so they're more driven to explore non invasive at home solutions and then for the consumers that can't justify high price tags. They are reaching for things like Gua Sha and Jade Rollers. Entire brands have launched in attempts to capitalize on this interest in devices and to provide I say in air quotes, more affordable options because these examples are not cheap but they are less than the high tech devices. For example, Lon Vita Lite have created a AUD$100 microcurrent device and a $250 LED facial wand. Then you also got brands like Face Gym which is a facial studio originally born out of the US which are known for being a workout for your face and they're trying to reimagine lymphatic drainage. They also have launched a product line which includes an AUD $1,200 microcurrent device. But then they also have these tools like a $52 face ball. They have a weighted face ball, $115 micro needle derma roller with hyaluronic refills and a $94 high performance gua. And as we see the rise of dupe products and TikTok consumers in particular buying products for what they look like rather than how they work, I'm certain we'll see more beauty devices enter the market at lower price points. Today's episode is sponsored by the Bareface newsletter. If you work in beauty, then I'm sure you are very aware of the lack of data available in this industry. That was until I decided to develop it myself. Bareface is a research and insight company that specializes in beauty. We help beauty brands utilize data to understand the ever changing beauty consumer. This week I analyzed the 1,357 products in Australia's biggest beauty retailer, Mecca's Holiday Collection. As we all know, Q4 is beauty's biggest sale period. So I wanted to identify which brand are betting on holiday sales the most and to understand how consumer behaviors shift during this period compared to the rest of the year. I found that holiday beauty shoppers not only shop by brand but also cost per mill. So along with this analysis, I made this Google Sheet value guide to help beauty professionals and beauty consumers alike navigate Mecca's holiday offering. Buy cost per mil and there's some really interesting trends in here. To access both the analysis and a Google Sheet, you can head to bareface.substack.com and if you're interested in weekly beauty data, be sure to sign up. Part 3 what's next? High tech beauty devices to me signal two major industry shifts. Firstly, it's this consumer desire for our beauty products to do more. And then secondly is brands wanting to expand into new categories so they can be the ones to set the price point. The same way. We no longer want to just hydrate our skin, we want to fully resurface, recolor, retexture. I believe that we're going to see that in areas like hair care, for example, it won't be enough for a hair oil to make your hair just look shiny. We'll want something that actually makes our hair grow out of our head shinier. Or for skincare, it won't be enough to exfoliate, to remove texture. We'll want a product that stops us getting that texture altogether. Right now, I predict that that's going to come in the form of ingestible beauty. We're already starting to see signs of this. For example, in last week's beauty analysis over on Substack, I analyzed the top 100 beauty products on Amazon in the US and the US$88 Nutrafol women's balance hair growth supplements made the list, which were more than double the price of the next most expensive product. Further proof of this growing interest in the ingestible space is the huge success of Kourtney Kardashian's vitamin brand Lemmy. They don't even stock it in Australia, but I can't seem to escape Lemmy on socials. The reason I predict companies are likely to focus their time and energy to new categories is so that they can control the price points. As we discussed in the last episode of the Bareface podcast, Korean skincare is so well priced because there is so much competition in the space, and then that in turn drives the price down. If brands are able to generate enough interest in a completely new category, they get to own that space and essentially charge whatever they want because there's that lack of competition. For this reason, I believe we're going to see brands try to forge the way in categories that exist outside of makeup, hair care and skincare. The way that right now beauty retailers have these little sections that look like a skin clinic or somewhere you would go to buy devices for a skin clinic. I predict that we're going to see beauty retailers slowly start to have sections that look like a bougie health food store. Brands that are able to make sense in a beauty space, but focus in areas like sleep or mindfulness or sexual health will make a lot of sense here. Sephora US, for example, already stock 12 vibrators, but they're only available online. I believe this space is going to have huge growth. Beauty expanding beyond its just standard categories and bleeding into all areas of life will come with one of two outcomes. Firstly is the preferred of the two, which is just the amazing power of beauty, which is these small everyday luxuries increasing those moments of joy and pleasure throughout the day through silly little unnecessary but fun products to me is just the beauty of beauty. But option two is that the industry will find ways to create new beauty ideals or a new set of standards for womanhood. Think back to Goop's attempt at creating a vaginal care category, which thankfully was slammed for creating an insanely unnecessary beauty standard for your vagina of all things. But I really hope that brands lead with innovation rather than old fashioned tactics of preying on insecurities. All in all, the high tech beauty device market is driven by innovation and innovation is going to remain paramount as the industry becomes increasingly populated. The Rise of dupe products on TikTok, where consumers increasingly buy products more for how they look rather than how they work, there is a real concern that companies will increasingly slash innovation costs and chase commercial success over anything, turning beauty Into Fast Passion 2.0. Mandy Lee, known as Odloser in Brooklyn, made an amazing video on this in relation to Trump's proposed tariffs over in the US and she spoke about how if they come into fruition, the cost of goods will increase and the first thing that brands will cut is quality because they understand that consumers don't want to pay more for a product. So instead we'll see in the beauty space cheaper formulas, reduced packaging quality and everything in between. The next thing to go will be innovation spend and instead brands will focus entirely on commercial success and the safer commercial bets which are products that have already generated higher There is a very real craving for improved results in beauty and high tech beauty devices are proof of that and they're also proof that people are willing to spend big on. But doing something completely different comes with a major startup cost and also risk. So there's a very daunting reality that the state of the economy will stunt many of these brands and ideas from ever taking off. But that brings us to the end of today's episode. Thank you so much for being here. It was another short one, honestly with trying to make these informative episodes so they don't just get lost in the noise of the podcast universe. I am struggling to make these podcast episodes more than 20 minutes which is such a lame listening length. I personally much prefer kind of the 40 minute mark, but I would love to know what you guys think and enjoy listening to. I hope to get to a point where these can be a little bit chattier, but doing this solo, I'm not entirely sure what that'll look like and another random update. You may have noticed that this episode has dropped in your ears first thing Monday morning for my Aussie folk, very unsurprisingly, but something I hilariously had to learn was that the late Friday Saturday night launch times weren't really performing. So instead finishing them off as I have been and then putting them out for you first thing Monday in time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to give this episode a like and rate the podcast as it really helps me find new listeners. And if you want to chat about any parts of today's episode, be sure to slide into the bareface DMs, which is airface Media over on Insta. Other than that, have a wonderful week and I will see you next Monday. This episode was recorded on Ghana Country. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present.