Edited by Christian Thompson
Hello readers,
Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Inflection Point. This week we're diving into skincare trends. We've noticed hyperpigmentation has been growing on our platform, so we decided to take a deeper look.
What is hyperpigmentation? Hyperpigmentation is not a condition, but rather the result of how skin can appear when overexposed to the sun. Hyperpigmentation can occur in small patches, large spots, and affect the entire body. It is caused by excess production of melanin in the skin. This is what causes dark spots or sunspots to occur. Dark spots frequently occur on the face and hands, with a common example being freckles.
The main factor driving the growth behind hyperpigmentation is treatment and prevention. As we described above, hyperpigmentation can cause discoloration and dark spots on the skin. Unlike a tan, consumers are not fond of these blemishes and want to avoid hyperpigmentation. Using an SPF-based product is the best way of prevention while treatments can vary. Another factor explaining the growth of hyperpigmentation may be shifting beauty standards. Recently, we have seen a shift in the beauty standards to a more natural look. Therefore, people are focusing on improving the quality of their skin. We wrote about this shift when covered Dewy Skin and it seems be a contributing to the hyperpigmentation hype.
Over the past two years, the impact score for “Hyperpigmentation Treatment” has increased by 170%. The future estimate forecasts steady growth throughout the following year. During that same period, the impact score for “Hyperpigmentation Prevention” increased by 542%. With the future estimate for “Hyperpigmentation Prevention” indicating a significant percentage increase in the coming months, what products stand to benefit?
The first product we looked at was dark spot serum. Dark spot serums aim to treat, and repair skin damaged from hyperpigmentation and are a great way to treat it. Over the past two years, the impact score for “Dark Spot Serum” has increased by 182%. The future estimate predicts continued growth throughout the following year.
One interesting takeaway from this signal is the consistent growth throughout the winter when sun exposure decreases. This may indicate that this signal is not susceptible to seasonality, illustrating the potential consumer energy of dark spot serums. From here, we wanted to see what kind of ingredients in these serums were gaining the most traction on our platform.
We started by looking at some of the most popular active ingredients known to help treat and repair hyperpigmentation. The comparison includes tranexamic acid, retinol, kojic acid, hyaluronic acid, and azelaic acid. These ingredients are often found in dark spot serums and other products for hyperpigmentation prevention.
Above, we can see that all the ingredients are trending upwards and have increased over the past two years. The ingredient will the highest increase during this period was tranexamic acid, increasing by 261%. Retinol was second, possessing a 148% increase. All of the ingredients have impact scores between 80 and 100 and most signals predict future growth. This may be an indication that hyperpigmentation as a concept is increasing because of similar increases among active ingredients.
With hyperpigmentation at an inflection point in the mind of the consumer, we are expecting to see more demand for prevention products in the coming months.
We hope you enjoyed this week’s Inflection Point covering hyperpigmentation. Next week, we will be covering the latest and greatest from New York’s Fall Fashion Week. Don’t forget to tune in next week.
Cheers!
About NWO.ai
NWO.ai's predictive platform enables leading Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to anticipate and track global cultural shifts by aggregating, analyzing, and producing actionable reports on human-generated data. We are leveraging petabytes of external, noisy, and unstructured data from various sources –including search, social media, blogs, news, patent databases, and SEC filings and we are continuously adding more sources. Our mission is to answer the what, when, and most importantly, 'why' behind a consumer trend and enable our customers to detect these shifts as early as possible.
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