From beauty queens to Bollywood stars to the average woman walking the busy city streets, the women of India take their beauty very seriously.
The pursuit of beauty has been instilled in the Indian psyche for centuries and is an intrinsic part of the country’s long and rich history. From the 15th-century list called the Solah Shringar, the poet Vallabhadeva’s enumeration of 16 decorations for a model Hindu wife, to the Ayurvedic health and grooming treatments that have been used for more than 2,000 years, Indian women grow up knowing how to make the best of what they have.
The Indian beauty industry can be divided into cosmetics and grooming — and the public’s perception of both categories has started to change radically in recent years.
According to Anil Chopra, a beauty and fashion adviser at Hindustan Unilever, cosmetics were considered luxuries until the late 1980’s. At the same time, it was generally considered unsuitable for girls from good families to be seen in makeup.
‘‘It was taboo for the unmarried woman, but the other side of it was that, when you got married, you needed to wear makeup because you needed to look good for your husband,’’ Mr. Chopra says.
Over the past decade, the taboo has started to fade under the glaring light of the global media. Western movies, television and magazines, as well as a growing fascination with the styles of international and Bollywood stars, have made wearing makeup an acceptable practice, at least in the major cities.
Lakmé, the Unilever-owned beauty company with 45,000 outlets around India, has solidified its dominance of the local market as a result of that change; growth has also been driven by the growing number of woman entering the workforce.
‘‘Women, especially in the big cities, are getting married later and later,’’ says Monisha Bharadwaj, author of ‘‘India’s Beauty Secrets.’’ ‘‘They are becoming much more financially independent now. And women going into the workplace know they now have to be groomed properly, wearing makeup and jewelry.’’
As a result, India is one of the beauty industry’s fastest-emerging markets, with sales growing 18 percent to 20 percent a year during each of the last several years, Mr. Chopra says. Although the industry is still very small, with $500 million in annual sales compared with more than $16 billion worldwide, Mr. Chopra says the kind of growth — with buyers upgrading to better brands, rather than just buying more items — is what is really interesting.
This is music to the ears of global brands like Estée Lauder, which introduced its MAC makeup brand to India about four years ago and now has five stores around the country. ‘‘India represents a huge opportunity for MAC,’’ says John Demsey, whose role as group president of the Estée Lauder Companies includes supervision of the MAC brand. He noted that MAC recently collaborated on a special line with the Indian designer Manish Arora.
Estée Lauder introduced its Clinique line to India in 2007 and its Estée Lauder line last year. But it recently invested in the Indian brand Forest Essentials, which primarily sells products based on ancient Sanskrit Ayurvedic formulations.
‘‘We wanted to get an even better understanding of the market, so we wanted to invest in a local luxury brand with a natural, organic base,’’ says Daniel Rachmanis, a senior vice president of international business development at Estée Lauder. ‘‘Not just because it was rooted in the Ayurveda belief, which is something a number of local mass beauty brands are based on, but the luxury aspect of the brand made Forest Essentials a very appealing investment.’’
The focus on naturally based products, seen through the prism of a luxury brand, is an interesting development for the Indian grooming market — a market in which natural grooming products are readily available.
‘‘The grassroots Indian woman is still using natural products, which are available to her free of costs,’’ says Ms. Bharadwaj. ‘‘And, at the end of the day, she doesn’t think of them as being any less quality than say, what Stella McCartney is providing, for instance. You know, if she is seeing a designer brand selling a strawberry or mango face mask, well she’ll just use pure mango; it’s only going to be better.’’
Mr. Chopra agrees: ‘‘Natural skin and hair products are available at every corner, every roadside.’’ And, he adds, that availability means Western brands will not have an automatic aspirational appeal.
Perhaps the path to a successful luxury line of natural skin care and grooming products can be though the spa and salon industries, which are expanding with the country’s increase in wealth. The number of Indians with more than $1 million in assets grew 22 percent, to 167,000, in the last year, the best rate of growth in any Asian country, according to the 2008 CapGemini Merrill Lynch Asia Pacific Wealth Report.
And along with that growth has come 12-hour workdays and longer workweek, driving a craving for pampering among Indian workers.
The Unilever group alone has opened 120 salons and 46 spas across India, most of them in the last six years.
‘‘I think this will be the next big thing the country will see,’’ says Mr. Chopra. ‘‘It’s going to explode.’’
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