The beauty trends that dominated CosmoProf Las Vegas 2024
It’s estimated that CosmoProf Las Vegas welcomed more than 20,000 visitors and 1,100 exhibitors to its 2024 show last week at The Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
Exhibitors included manufacturers like B.Kolor and Fiabila; popular European CMs for color cosmetics and nail product manufacturing; TikTok, which attended to educate brands about its TikTokShop program; and third-party certifiers like NSF International. But the lion’s share of booths were occupied by recognizable and emerging brands hoping to boost brand awareness or meet distributors and buyers walking the floor show.
Standout events and panels included a City of Hope gala honoring Jessica Philips, Ulta Beauty’s vp of merchandising, which raised more than $850,000 for the hospital non-profit. Elsewhere, “Cosmo Talk” panels were led by top execs at Estée Lauder Companies, Summer Fridays and Curie body care.
Top trends on display at the show included AI-powered in-store sampling, powder shampoo and conditioner, and a return to old-world beauty rituals.
Emerging brand Small Wonder took home the show’s 2024 hair-care award for innovation for its powder-to-lather shampoo and conditioner. The formulas are made from encapsulated cleansers, oils and active ingredients, and distributed through custom packaging.
“We spent the past three years making a patented bottle that keeps everything dry in the shower,” Small Wonder founder Stephanie Farsht told Glossy. “My mission is all about sustainability. But after spending decades at Target, we knew we had to be better at everything, including formula, experience and packaging — so we didn’t want to lead with sustainability.”
Farsht said sustainability should be table stakes, not a marketing strategy that could scare off weary consumers who have had bad experiences with eco-focused hair products in the past. Another benefit of the new form factor is fresher ingredients that activate in water in the shower, allowing for fewer preservatives in the bottle, Farsht said. She worked with a “well-known global salon product manufacturer” that had been working on dehydrating salon formulas for nine years before Small Wonder joined the process. After an additional three years working hand-in-hand with the company’s R&D, the tech was complete and Small Wonder purchased the formula outright and moved it to a CM in California.
“It’s been a very complex process,” Farsht said. The waterless bottle is equally nuanced: “The bottle has six components manufactured in three countries and assembled in the Dominican Republic.”
Each shampoo and conditioner is 2.5 ounces, lasts up to 80 washes, can be refilled, and retails for $26 and $38, respectively.
Small Wonder launched DTC online in February. Farsht attended the show to target the salon retail space in the coming months through introductions to new distributors. Farsht’s CV includes 15 years at Target working in strategy and innovation. She told Glossy the company has taken on $1.5 million in investment so far.
“We’d [eventually] like to take a three-prong approach [to distribution],” Farsht told Glossy. “Salons are the influential intersection and the most important component of a customer learning something new, … but we know we need to be in retail eventually, as well.”
Among the featured emerging brands in the body and skin-care categories, there was a bifurcation between biotechnology-powered formulations and a return to natural, old-world ingredients and rituals.
Shikohin, a line of mushroom-powered body care inspired by Japanese forest bathing, was called out by several influential attendees Glossy spoke to at the show as a standout exhibitor.
Founder and CEO Takeshi Nobuhara calls himself a serial entrepreneur, having worked in global business and trade — but Shikohin marks his first foray into personal care. The line is inspired by forest bathing and foraging for mushrooms during his childhood in Japan.
“All of our products are inspired by ‘kampō’, or Japan’s herbal medicine system,” Nobuhara told Glossy. The line’s ingredients include five functional mushrooms, fermented botanicals and minerals.
Shikohin’s mineral-rich Onsen Bath Tablets look like giant aspirins and deliver an at-home Japanese hot spring experience, while its Bath Essence is a milky emulsion with yomogi and camelia oils. They retail for $24 and $48, respectively. The brand’s face moisturizer and night serum, both hero products, sell for $88 and $68. Nobuhara sells the line DTC and in Neiman Marcus. He attended the show looking for further distribution.
Other old-world-inspired brands also garnered attention at the show. They included La Rouge Francais, which makes lipsticks with plant-based pigments and organic ingredients inspired by Cleopatra’s beauty routine. There was also Bejou skincare, a U.S. brand that harnesses ingredients native to Colombian beauty rituals like the chontaduro fruit.
Meanwhile, a company called iRomaScents led in sampling innovation with its new AI-powered fragrance sampling device that seeks to replace employees and testers in brick-and-mortar retail spaces.
The small tabletop device is filled with up to 139 fragrances and connected to a consumer-facing tablet. Totally automated, iRomaScents guides the customer through a two-minute, tablet-based survey about fragrance preferences before recommending a scent, along with three backup options to choose from. The customer selects one and the machine then dispenses one pump of the selected perfume.
iRomaScents hopes to sell the entire system to retailers for around $1,000 per store per annual license, with fees increasing based on volume. For example, fragrances are provided to an iRomaScents representative, and the yearly cost increases based on how often the rep returns to the store to reload the cartridge. Avner Gal, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said he expects most businesses to need two to five refills per year.
“What you don’t see is all the data [that we collect],” Gal told Glossy. “We analyze it and give the brand all the statistics. … They can use this data to improve their marketing and their sales, and it’s also a system for the brands to help in [how they make the products]. … Before iRomaScents, there was no hard data as to what [in-store shoppers] prefer.”
“The AI [within our tabet’s technology] takes into consideration all the observational outcomes [to keep getting better],” Gal told Glossy. Retailers can brand the station with store graphics, as well.
After entering retail this year, the company will have enough data to deeply impact the fragrance industry in the next 18 months, Gal told Glossy. How the data will be released to stores and manufacturers, and at what cost to them, is still undecided.
