Ten years ago, this article told you China’s cosmetics market was exploding and any brand that showed up would win. That story is over. The market is bigger than ever, but it’s not sprinting anymore, it’s walking fast, and the players who win it have changed.
Philip Chen runs GMA and has watched Chinese beauty brands go from copycats to category leaders since our first Shanghai office. This update pulls together what our skincare and makeup clients are actually seeing on the ground in 2026.
We’ve already covered the tactics on this site: how skincare sells on Chinese e-commerce, what you need for cosmetics registration (CSAR), and the organic and natural cosmetics niche. This article won’t repeat them. What follows is the panorama: how big the market really is, who’s winning, who’s losing, and where the money is still moving. With 29 articles on beauty already on this site, our job here is the numbers, not the playbook.
The real size of the market, and why growth slowed down
China’s cosmetics market crossed RMB 1.1 trillion (about US$154 billion) in retail sales across all channels in 2025, up only 2.8% year on year, and that modest growth came right after a genuinely rough 2024, when several trackers recorded a sales contraction of close to 10%. Compare either number to the 2013 to 2019 period, when the market often grew in double digits every single year. That era is gone. The market didn’t collapse, it matured and had a bad year along the way, the way any large consumer category eventually does.
Here’s what that means for you: a market growing at 2.8% a year rewards brands that take share from someone else, not brands that just show up and wait for the tide to lift them. Ten years ago you could ride the growth curve. Today you compete for a slice that isn’t expanding much on its own.
The gap between winners and everyone else is getting wider, not narrower. Among the top 50 beauty brands in China, 74% still posted growth in 2025. Below the top 500, that figure drops to roughly 26%. Scale and brand recognition matter more than they did a decade ago, when almost any reasonably good product could find an audience.
Guohuo: how domestic brands overtook foreign names
The biggest change in this market since our last update isn’t a number, it’s a reversal. Chinese shoppers used to trust a foreign label almost by default. That’s no longer true. Domestic beauty brands, what the Chinese call guohuo (国货), literally “national goods”, now hold roughly 57% of the Chinese cosmetics market. A decade ago the same brands were fighting for shelf space behind L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, and Shiseido. Now they set the pace on price, packaging speed, and reach into lower-tier cities that foreign brands never bothered to serve.
Three names carry a lot of that shift. Proya (珀莱雅) built a multi-brand portfolio around science-backed skincare and became China’s biggest domestic beauty group by revenue. Florasis (花西子), known abroad for its ornate packaging, has pushed into Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia rather than staying a domestic-only story. Chando (自然堂) stayed focused on mass-market skincare and kept its distribution deep in cities most foreign brands skip.
But don’t read “guohuo overtook foreign brands” as “guohuo always wins now.” Proya’s own 2025 numbers tell a more honest story: revenue came in at RMB 10.6 billion, down 1.68% year on year, and net profit fell 3.5% to RMB 1.5 billion. And during the 2026 618 shopping festival, international heavyweights like Estée Lauder, La Mer, and Helena Rubinstein reclaimed the top spots on Douyin and Tmall beauty rankings, pushing several domestic names further down the list. The market share shift is real and structural. The idea that every domestic brand grows every year is not.
Where the growth actually is
If the overall market is only growing 2.8% a year, where should a brand actually put its energy? A few categories are pulling well above the average.
Functional and dermo-cosmetics
Functional skincare, products marketed on a specific ingredient claim rather than a brand story, reached an estimated RMB 210 billion in 2025, growing at roughly 18.2% a year, more than six times the overall market’s pace. This is the modern version of what this article used to call “medical cosmetics” back when the segment was worth barely RMB 20 billion. If your brand has a real clinical or ingredient story to tell, this is still one of the few corners of the market growing fast. We go deeper into this segment in our guide to dermo-cosmetics in China.
High-end skincare and men’s grooming
Premiumization hasn’t stopped, it’s just gotten pickier. Shoppers who used to buy a premium product for the logo now want to see the clinical trial. Men’s skincare, which this article once described growing 34% a year back in 2011, has settled into a steadier but still healthy pace, with higher SPF, oil-free formulas becoming the baseline expectation rather than a novelty.
Sun care: the exception worth knowing about
Here’s a number that doesn’t fit the “everything premium keeps growing” story, and we’d rather tell you the truth than the tidy version: China’s sun care retail sales actually fell 7.8% in 2025, to around RMB 27.5 billion, as the category went through a correction after years of fast growth. Forecasts put it back above RMB 32 billion in 2026, with the growth now coming from reformulation (lighter textures, higher SPF) rather than new shoppers discovering sunscreen for the first time. If you’re entering this category, budget for a mature, competitive market, not a gold rush.
The channels flipped: Tmall out, Douyin and Xiaohongshu in
Back when this article was first written, a Tmall flagship store was step one for any foreign cosmetics brand. That’s no longer where the traffic lives. Douyin’s skincare and makeup sales now approach a third of all online beauty sales in China, and Xiaohongshu (also called RedNote) has become the discovery engine shoppers use before they buy anywhere. Tmall hasn’t disappeared, but it’s become a mature, search-based channel where new brands struggle to get discovered without spending heavily on ads first.
We’ve written a full breakdown of why brands are making this move in our platform migration guide, and a dedicated piece on selling on Xiaohongshu. Read those before you build a channel plan. Here, the short version: content-driven platforms reward a good product story even from an unknown brand. Search-driven ones reward brands that already have recognition. A new foreign entrant almost always has an easier first year on Douyin or Xiaohongshu than on Tmall alone.
Snapshot: the numbers that matter in 2026
| Metric | 2025/2026 figure |
|---|---|
| Overall cosmetics market size (2025) | RMB 1.1 trillion (~US$154B), all channels |
| Market growth rate (2025 vs 2024) | +2.8%, down from double digits pre-2020 |
| Domestic (guohuo) brand market share | ~57%, up from a minority a decade ago |
| Proya 2025 revenue / net profit | RMB 10.6B (-1.68%) / RMB 1.5B (-3.5%) |
| Functional / dermo-cosmetics segment | RMB 210B, growing ~18.2% a year |
| Sun care retail sales (2025) | RMB 27.5B, -7.8% (correction year) |
| Growth split: top 50 vs below top 500 brands | 74% growing vs ~26% growing |
| Douyin share of online beauty sales | Approaching one third |
A small brand’s real numbers: Stefan’s story
Stefan runs a small Romanian skincare brand built around a mineral spring water formula, the kind of niche story that works well in Western pharmacies but says nothing to a Chinese shopper on its own. He opened a Tmall flagship store in 2025, the “safe” first move, and spent most of his budget on search ads there. Six months in, his conversion rate sat under 0.5%, buried behind two dozen domestic brands selling near-identical claims at half his price.
What changed things wasn’t a bigger budget, it was moving most of that spend to Xiaohongshu seeding and small paid slots in mid-tier Douyin livestreams, targeting the specific search term “mineral water sensitive skin” instead of competing on the generic word “skincare.” It worked because content platforms let an unfamiliar brand win on story and proof (dermatologist mentions, before-after skin texture videos) instead of forcing it to out-bid brands Chinese shoppers already trust by name. His monthly GMV moved from around RMB 40,000 to RMB 170,000 over five months, still a small brand, but one that finally found its actual audience instead of paying to be ignored on Tmall.
FAQ
Is China’s cosmetics market still worth entering in 2026?
Yes, but with a different mindset than five years ago. The market is worth over US$150 billion and still adding tens of billions in value each year, that’s not small. What’s changed is that you’re now taking share in specific categories and channels, not riding a market-wide wave. Come in with a category where you can prove a real advantage, not just a nice brand story.
Do I need CSAR registration before I sell anything?
For most cosmetics categories, yes, before you can legally sell or ship into China you need to register or file your product under China’s cosmetics regulation (CSAR). Requirements differ by product type, ordinary cosmetics versus “special use” categories like sunscreen or whitening products need different levels of testing and paperwork. We cover the process in detail in our CSAR registration guide.
Should I still open a Tmall store first?
Not necessarily, and not alone. Tmall still matters for credibility and for shoppers who search a brand name directly, but as a first move it’s often the slowest and most expensive way to get discovered in 2026. Most of the foreign brands seeing real early traction are building on Douyin or Xiaohongshu first, then adding a Tmall store once they already have some name recognition to search for.
Which category still has room for a new foreign brand?
Functional and dermo-cosmetics, the ingredient-and-claim driven segment, is growing about six times faster than the overall market, and foreign brands with real clinical backing still carry credibility there. High-end skincare with a genuine efficacy story also still has room. Categories to enter carefully rather than blindly: sun care just went through a sales correction, and mass skincare is now dominated by fast-moving domestic players on price.
At GMA, we help beauty brands figure out which of these categories and channels actually fit their product, before they spend a single RMB on ads. We’ve watched this market shift from a foreign-brand default to a guohuo-first market, and we build the entry plan around where the data says the shoppers already are, not where they were five years ago. If you’re weighing whether China is the right market for your brand, or trying to fix a Tmall store that isn’t converting, get in touch with our team.
You can also read our full guide on the Top Marketing Strategies to Succeed in the Beauty Market
Sources: China Briefing, Xinhua, 36Kr, company filings.
