When news of SUGAR’s down round broke, most of the conversation focused on the company’s fall in fortunes. There was almost a certain glee in the fact that a company once valued at roughly ₹3,000 crore was now raising capital at a fraction of that valuation. The story wrote itself: too much capital, too many stores, another once-hot D2C brand brought back to earth.
This is not to say SUGAR did not have missteps. Companies make mistakes, and SUGAR clearly has company-specific problems to fix. SUGAR’s operating revenue fell 20% to ₹404 crore in FY25, and its losses nearly doubled to ₹135 crore. The mechanics of what went wrong are well worth delving into. SUGAR raised more than $110 million in venture capital over the years, and that money gave it the runway to grow. Some recent reporting suggested that, at one point, its portfolio had reached around 850 SKUs and about 2,400 retail points (it is now rationalising that towards roughly 250 SKUs and cutting its retail points to roughly 1,000). Some of why this growth failed to stick is about the category. Growth sticks only when the money spent winning a customer through ads, influencers and stores leads to a product she links to your brand and comes back to buy. In makeup that is the hardest thing to do. There is very little to tie a customer to one ₹499 lipstick, or to make her recommend it over the next. For me, SUGAR was also emblematic of a broader set of questions worth asking about makeup as a category, and particularly about makeup in contrast to skincare in the Indian consumer landscape. At its core I think the puzzle is this: how has Indian skincare produced a set of winners, while we haven’t seen a similar break-out in the makeup / colour cosmetics segment?
That question becomes more interesting when you put makeup and skincare side by side. Both are large and growing categories. BDO India’s 2022 to 2027 forecast puts both face care and makeup at a roughly 13% CAGR (albeit makeup is growing from a smaller base). But they have produced very different kinds of commercial success in India.
Skincare’s playbook
Skincare has managed to do two things at once in India.
At the mass and middle of the market, it has become unusually easy to launch a skincare brand / product. This is largely a contract-manufacturing story. India has hundreds of beauty and personal-care manufacturers, many of them carrying large catalogues of products that are ready, or nearly ready, to launch. A new brand can choose a proven base, change an active or two, adjust the fragrance and packaging, and move quickly. The value proposition has worked particularly well in skincare because of the market moving towards actives: 10% niacinamide, 2% salicylic acid, retinol, ceramides, SPF 50. The customer can understand the product based on the label.
It is not surprising then that this segment of the market has proliferated and why it feels so crowded. The commoditised supply chain has enabled the boom. The initial barrier is less about inventing a formula and more about assembling a brand, a distribution plan and a marketing budget. Players like Minimalist had a first-mover advantage, and it will be interesting to see how players differentiate themselves now – I believe it will largely be on brand and distribution.
However, this is not the complete skincare story in India.
Some brands have found a second route to the top. Forest Essentials and Kama Ayurveda persuaded consumers to pay premium prices for an Indian skincare brand by selling something the global brands could not quite claim themselves: Ayurveda, ritual, ingredients and place.
An Indian consumer can spend ₹7,495 on 30ml of Kama Ayurveda’s Kumkumadi facial oil. Forest Essentials lists its Soundarya day cream at up to ₹6,495 and its night cream at up to ₹8,195. Luxe, tradition-steeped Indian skincare may not reach the pricing of La Mer, but it has become quite comfortable asking for serious money.
Indē Wild is a newer version of the same broad possibility, though I would still put it firmly in treatment-led beauty rather than makeup. It doesn’t preserve Indian ritual so much as translate it. Champi, ghee, Ayurveda alongside dermatology – familiar things made contemporary enough to sit comfortably at Sephora. The brand entered 178 Sephora stores in the US this March.
What is interesting in skincare is that there is still a fair bit of differentiation across the spectrum. Minimalist does not feel like Forest Essentials. Forest Essentials does not feel like Indē Wild or even Kama. That sounds obvious, but I think it matters. Skincare has produced enough genuinely different brand identities and USPs in the Indian market.
A crowded makeup shelf
Go on Blinkit or Zepto and search for a makeup product and there’s no dearth of choice, to be honest. MARS, RENEE, Insight, Swiss Beauty, SUGAR, Elle 18, FAE Beauty: endless lipsticks, liners, kajals, tints, blushes and palettes, often sitting within a few hundred rupees of one another.
The table below is already long, and it still understates just how crowded the market has become. Indian makeup doesn’t lacks big businesses. Lakmé has led the category for decades, and MARS and Swiss Beauty play very well at scale. Underneath the better-known brands is a growing indie layer — Thou, Prishé, Lamior, GoodSide, Diam and others — each attacking some version of Indian undertones, climate, clean formulation, multi-use beauty or premium colour. Some of these are genuinely interesting: Lamior, for instance, has gone as far as building its own manufacturing capability, while Thou is focused specifically on base makeup for Indian undertones and humidity. They are also mostly too young to judge. But there is clearly no shortage of people trying, or of products being launched.
Building differentiation
The brands that make up the offline and digital shelf aren’t carbon copies of each other but look at their product lines and I am less sure that anything feels genuinely different.
I want to be clear here: I am not at all saying Indian makeup is subpar. But unlike my favourite international makeup brands, none of the Indian players offer me a shorthand for what I should turn to them for. This is also a problem globally, with new international brands popping up constantly, driving a cornucopia of choices for the customer and no doubt a lot of churn for the brands themselves. Yet the true stand-outs have built a story and have a very strong POV.
Fenty changed what consumers expected from complexion. It launched with 40 foundation shades after two years in development, explicitly built around tones that had historically been hard to match. Haus Labs is a useful lesson for any celebrity brand. Lady Gaga’s first attempt, sold as kits on Amazon in 2019, did not last. The brand scrapped the line, reformulated everything and relaunched at Sephora in 2022. Sarah Tanno, Gaga’s makeup artist of many years and the brand’s global artistry director, is described as co-developing every product with the lab team. Its Triclone foundation, in 51 shades, is built around a patent-pending fermented arnica meant to calm redness. ILIA’s Super Serum Skin Tint collapsed makeup, skincare and mineral SPF into a single product, while MERIT has built a whole brand around makeup that is deliberately easy: a small, considered collection for the five-minute face.
e.l.f. is interesting for almost the opposite reason. It isn’t trying to be an artist’s brand. Its skill is watching where prestige beauty is going, understanding which product ideas consumers actually want, and translating them into credible mass products at speed and at a radically lower price. That is also a point of view, and perhaps a particularly relevant one for India, because it shows that a mass brand can have a specific USP without being expensive.
And Violette_FR is perhaps the clearest version of what I mean (disclaimer here that I’m a huge fan). Violette Serrat says she only makes what isn’t already on the market, which is why she has said she will never launch a foundation. One of her products, a skin spray, took three years to develop
That is a strangely radical idea in a category obsessed with launches: if you don’t have something to add, don’t add another SKU.
I look at much of Indian makeup and see the reverse problem. Huge assortment, but fewer products where I immediately understand why that brand had to make that object.
A marriage of taste, vision and technique
It is tempting to explain the sameness we see through manufacturing (in a way very similar to what we are seeing in the mass / mid skincare segment). Indian colour brands often use contract manufacturers; components and formats travel through the same global supply chains, and makeup brands often converge towards what is trending.
This proliferation of products makes sense if you are playing the scale game, as some of the most successful mass-market brands are. MARS has more than 1,000 SKUs, 50-plus exclusive outlets and 15,000 general-trade stores. Swiss Beauty has more than 1,500 SKUs and 25,000-plus retail touchpoints. Both have largely grown without institutional equity capital.
These are businesses built on distribution and a very economic price point. Their proposition does not need to be Violette_FR; it is running a highly efficient scale business. Give the customer a bite of what is trending globally, quickly, at a price she can afford. Put it everywhere. Keep the economics sane. That can be an excellent business. But clearly not every makeup brand on the list above can or should aim to be a scale play competing for the same share of wallet.
And contract manufacturing cannot be the full answer to the sameness question. Almost everyone outsources something. Fenty did not become Fenty because Rihanna owned a foundation plant. What sets the leading global makeup brands apart happens further upstream. They set a trend, innovate on product specification and think deeply about product use. Much of K-beauty’s reputation was built on new textures and delivery mechanisms, and on manufacturers able to make them. Amorepacific, Korea’s largest beauty group, whose makeup brands include Laniege and Etude, launched the first cushion compact in 2008. The format then spread through Korea’s manufacturers who then went on to make cushion foundations for YSL, Dior and Lancôme.
Indian brands now have access to some of that technical know-how at home. Intercos, one of the world’s largest makeup manufacturers, makes products in India and runs a colour-development lab in Mumbai. Most of Kay’s lip range is made by Intercos India. Indian brands are moving up the ladder in the manufacturers they work with. But while a good lab brings formulation expertise, texture development and manufacturing know-how, someone still has to give it an exacting brief. At some point ‘I want a brown lipstick’ has to become: how much red underneath? How much grey? How much pigment in one swipe? Drag or glide? Does it stain? How long before it sets? What should happen after lunch? Do the ingredients and formulation require me to build a unique type of applicator? The best products come from a brand’s taste and vision meeting a manufacturer’s technical skill.
Indian brands are clearly capable of good formulation. Kay has modern products. LoveChild’s tint is interesting. MARS is now investing in a second, larger R&D lab. Where I still struggle is an entire product range where I could remove the logo and not be able to guess who made it. Maybe that is too high a bar. But the best beauty brands eventually get there. And that is honestly what I think it will take for makeup in India to build uniqueness, break out of its current price bands, and price at a higher range, similar to what its breakout skincare cousins have in some cases managed to do.
There is an obvious objection to all of this. Perhaps the Indian makeup customer is simply not ready to pay for authorship. I don’t think the evidence supports that. Indian consumers are already buying international makeup at international prices. Nykaa launched more than 200 global brands in FY25 alone, including Chanel, Armani Beauty and Kylie Cosmetics, and Reliance brought Fenty Beauty to India through Sephora and Tira. Nykaa says around 55% of sales for its top nine prestige brands come from outside the metros. The willingness to pay exists. It is going to foreign brands, because no Indian makeup brand has yet given the customer a reason to pay the same for one of its own.
Of all the Indian brands we listed, Kay Beauty and LoveChild are, to me, the two that are just about getting somewhere more interesting. Kay deserves more credit than a simple ‘celebrity brand’ label. Katrina Kaif appears genuinely involved in product; she credits her years on film sets with teaching her how makeup holds up under lights and in heat. The brand is beginning to push up both sophistication and price. Kay also has the extraordinary advantage of Nykaa, a majority owner that supplies distribution, consumer feedback, beauty advisers and shelf space. FY26 GMV, the total value of products sold, crossed ₹380 crore, nearly three times its scale three years earlier. In January it launched its first collaboration, a limited edition with the couture house Falguni Shane Peacock: twelve lipsticks and two face palettes in gold packaging, sold in India, the UK and the UAE. (In India, the lipsticks were priced at ₹1,799, almost double Kay’s everyday bullet lipstick at ₹989, yet still well below imported prestige brands like Rare Beauty.)
LoveChild, meanwhile, is aiming for something even harder to manufacture: a signature style and point of view that identifies the product. The name is Masaba reclaiming a label she grew up with, as the daughter of Neena Gupta and Viv Richards. She has described herself as a woman of colour from two different ethnicities who dealt with acne and sensitive skin for more than 15 years, and she has spoken about India’s obsession with fair skin. LoveChild looks like Masaba. Its skin tint is also a genuinely thought-through product: a four-in-one tint that comes with a built-in brush in place of the usual dropper. And yet, while you can recognise a Masaba print from twenty feet away, could you recognise a LoveChild formula? Not yet, but I think it’s trying.
I increasingly think the breakout Indian makeup brand will have a strong POV on shade and colour theory, married to technique (how a product moves, blends, sets and wears), expressed through the delivery mechanism itself (the pencil, brush, applicator, component, whatever makes that idea work on the face).
The clearest example of where India is lagging on these fronts is kajal. If there is one makeup product India should have an unfair advantage in, surely it is kajal. We have worn it for generations. It is makeup’s version of the heritage that skincare turned into pricing power. It is one of the most habitual colour-cosmetics products in the country. Lakmé makes one. Kay makes one. Colorbar makes one. Maybelline has sold millions of them here. There is absolutely no shortage of kajal.
And yet one of the few pencils I and a lot of beauty obsessives I know would actively seek out is made by Victoria Beckham. Victoria Beckham! She did not invent kajal. Nor did she discover some consumer need Indian beauty companies had somehow missed. What Victoria Beckham Beauty did was take the product proposition seriously. The Satin Kajal has a very particular balance: creamy enough that you can work and smudge it, then capable of setting down for long-lasting wear so it doesn’t smear and smudge and leave the wearer with raccoon eyes in the ways most Indian kajals do. It has a gorgeous colour range: Cocoa, Cinnamon, Fig, Olive, Sea Grey; matte, shimmer and jewel finishes. The shades aren’t simply more options. They reflect a view of what different colours can do around an eye, and the formula and pencil have been designed to let you execute that vision.
And people pay for it. The pencil costs $35 in the US, roughly ₹3,000 (Indian resellers charge over ₹6,000 once duties are paid). That is for a product whose Indian equivalents sell for a few hundred rupees. It is not a vanity product either. Beauty now makes up around two-thirds of Victoria Beckham’s revenue and helped carry the business to its first operating profit in 2025, after 18 years of losses. The kajal is its bestseller, reported to sell one every 30 seconds.
This, to me, is the distinction. Indian makeup has become very good at assortment. The next leap is authorship: knowing exactly which brown you want, why it has that amount of red in it, how soft the pencil needs to be, how long the customer should have to smudge it before it sets. And being willing to keep working on the product until all of those decisions cohere.
The next great Indian makeup brand does not have to be luxury. It may look much more like e.l.f. It may come from a celebrity, a makeup artist, a retailer or one of the mass brands already on the shelf. But I increasingly think I will know it when I can answer a very simple question: why am I buying THIS product from THIS brand?
I shared this with my beauty/skin care specialist of a husband ;) He keeps asking for consumer perspective - what I feel about these products as a user - and I thought this was such a good articulation!