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Guide: Every cosmetics store needs a bottle of "panacea oil"?!
Author 〡吴思欣
From zero to scientific skincare
The Chinese market has gone through nearly 40 years
The modern skin care concept in China has undergone 4 stages of change.
The first was in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, the domestic cosmetics industry was in the enlightenment stage.
Public data show that until 1987, the output value of Cosmetics in China was only 1.8 billion yuan, and there were only about 100 production enterprises. During this period, the per capita annual consumption of cosmetics in the mainland did not exceed 10 yuan, the cosmetic products on the market were extremely limited, and the head brands represented by "Dabao", "Friendship Alabaster" and "Yu Meijing" occupied most of the market share.
Correspondingly, at this stage, people's skin care concept is just beginning, and skin care cognition is limited to the "minimalist" 1.0 treatment of "morning and evening rubbing incense". For Chinese consumers in this period, cosmetics are absolutely "non-rigid" products.
Then, from the late 1980s to the turn of the millennium, international companies such as L'Oréal and Estée Lauder entered the Chinese market, and while making fanatical mergers and acquisitions and expanding their territory, they also conducted a wave of relatively systematic skincare education for Chinese consumers.
However, because most of the foreign brands are in the market cultivation period, a group of brands that promote "three days of whitening" and "seven days of skin rejuvenation" have become the grassy winners of the expansion of the skin care market.
At that time, it was a superstitious "skin care metaphysics" 2.0 skin care era, and the impetuosity brought about by the rapid economic development was also reflected in people's skin care concepts, and the "white and bright" quick-track method was highly respected. Many brands with high sales have been found to have illegally added banned substances such as lead, mercury heavy metals and hormones.
After 2015, with the strict control of the national regulatory level, the trend of "skin care metaphysics" gradually subsided. Coupled with the rise of post-90s and post-95 Generation Z consumers, the skincare trend on the market has begun to turn to curiosity and exploration of raw materials and formulas for skin care products.
A number of "ingredient parties" began to rise, and the concept of skin care entered the 3.0 era, and became popular with social networks such as Xiaohongshu and Douban Group.
Compared with the "result-oriented" consumers who only believe in the effect and do not ask the source, they pursue efficacy traceability and formula friendliness, and begin to pay attention to the leading raw materials of the product, following the skin care logic of "the right medicine".
But in the final analysis, cosmetics is an application discipline that integrates chemistry, dermatology, biochemistry, chemical technology, and physiology, and consumers are not R&D engineers and formulators after all, and it is still too simple to dominate raw materials to judge whether a cosmetic has the desired efficacy.
After 2021, the "Cosmetic Efficacy Claim Evaluation Specification" officially divides cosmetic efficacy claims into 20 categories.
At this point, China's cosmetics market has officially entered the era of efficacy, and the skincare logic of consumers has also fully evolved from "ingredient party" and "efficacy party" to scientific skin care. At present, on the Little Red Book, there are nearly 100,000 notes on the "scientific skin care" entry.
So what exactly is scientific skincare?
Literally, scientific skincare is a rational skincare concept based on skin science. According to the opinions of Zheng Zhizhong, the first president of the Dermatologist Branch of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association and a senior professor at Huashan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University, the guangzhou health commission, scientific skin care is divided into three steps:
1, fully understand their own skin, different skin types to use different skin care methods; 2. Do a good job in basic skin care, according to the "Skin Health and Beauty Pyramid" theory published by Zoe Draelos in the American JDD Medical Journal in 2014, basic skin care is cleaning, moisturizing and sunscreen; 3. Solve specific skin problems and pay attention to skin care in special periods.
The skin care concept of Chinese consumers has taken a total of more than 40 years from "just don't do it" to "scientific skin care", and the increasing popularity of scientific skin care has differentiated into a series of sub-tracks in the market, such as "skin care with oil", "clean beauty", "micro-ecological skin care" and "simplified skin care" and so on.
"Nourishing the skin with oil", the new answer to scientific skin care
A closer look at scientific skincare reveals two key points:
The first is the protection, regulation and repair of the sebaceous membrane. As long as the facial sebaceous membrane is in a healthy state, most of the skin problems such as water and oil imbalance, sensitivity, and redness can be solved.
The second is anti-light aging. On the one hand, through physical sunscreen and sunscreen, protect the skin from the outside to the inside to resist light aging; On the other hand, by adding functional raw materials that can scavenge free radicals, the effect of preventing skin cell damage is achieved.
If you think of the outermost stratum corneum of the skin as a set of brick wall structures. The "brick" is composed of 12-20 layers of dead keratinocytes, which can prevent water loss, chemicals and microbial invasion as a physical barrier.
The "cement" is the lipid between the keratinocytes, including "ceramides", "fatty acids" and "cholesterol" three types of substances, the balance between them, can form a perfect layer structure, thereby regulating the penetration of substances inside and outside the epidermis, to prevent the loss of water in the skin.
"Water" is a general term for some low molecular weight substances that can bind to water in the stratum corneum, including amino acids, lactate, etc., which can easily overflow with water.
One important point is that if the raw material cannot pass through the "brick" layer of structure, then the product is difficult to play a role deep in the skin, but it will increase the burden on the skin.
Oil products are an effective solution for crossing the skin brick wall structure.
Take, for example, the formula of the French Mepa "Youth Oil".
The product begins with the addition of four essential oils – Moringa Seed Oil, Inka Fruit Oil, Sunflower Oil and Organic Acerola Cherries – combined into a powerful defensive nourishing plant oil component that gives the product the product's ability to improve the skin barrier, antioxidant and anti-aging.
Secondly, in order to effectively scavenge free radicals, "youth oil" added an anti-pollution purifier LIPOCHROMAN®, it is understood that this is a synthetic antioxidant, the three harmful radicals (reactive oxygen ROS, reactive nitrogen RNS and active carbonyl RCS) have a good neutralization effect, by removing nitrogen radicals to prevent damage to skin cells, inhibit the production of oxygen radicals to resist ultraviolet A, so as to achieve intrinsic photodamage protection, At the same time, it inhibits the peroxidation of oil under low concentration conditions and protects the antioxidant pressure of human skin fibroblasts. It is reported that Dior and Elizabeth Arden use this ingredient in their antioxidant products.
Finally, in order to enhance the permeability of the product and allow the above two types of functional ingredients to be effectively absorbed by the skin, French Mepa uses three polyunsaturated fatty acids in the product, Omega-3, Omega-6 and w-3. According to the French Mepa research, these three substances can not be synthesized by the human body, and are easy to penetrate into the surface layer of the skin and even the deep layer, play a role in repairing and enhancing the skin's natural barrier function, increase the fluidity of the skin cell membrane, thereby enhancing the hydration and moisturizing effect of epidermal cells, and reducing the dispersion of percutaneous water.
The linkage of these three types of ingredients makes "youth oil" have the effect of regulating and repairing the sebaceous film, reducing redness, dryness, and resisting light aging from the inside out.
If the two problems of sebaceous membrane and light aging are solved, a healthy skin can be guaranteed to a certain extent. Therefore, the French Mepa "youth oil" is actually suitable for a variety of use scenarios:
For example, for the skin redness, itchiness and roughness during the sensitive period of the changing season, "youth oil" can effectively soothe; In the dry period of autumn and winter, it can effectively replenish water and lock water and deeply nourish; After a long period of overtime and late nights, the skin with enlarged pores is oily, and this product can restore the skin's radiance through antioxidants; When the skin care cannot be absorbed, it can accelerate penetration, paving the way for subsequent products.
Therefore, oil products can actually be used with a variety of skin care products to achieve the effect of efficacy bonus.
Among the several collocations recommended by French Mepa, "Youth Oil" with the brand's "Chitosan Essence Wet Powder" can be multiplied and repaired; With "Vitamin C Whitening Essence Wet Powder", it can add whitening effect on the basis of repair; With the "Snake Venom Firming No Trace Cream", it can promote absorption and effectively anti-aging firming.
This also means that oil products are a real "panacea" category in skin care collocation.
Why does every store need a bottle of expensive essential oil?
A survey of offline cosmetics stores in 2022 shows that the overall sales of CS channels fell by about 16% in the first quarter of 2022 compared with the first quarter of 2021. The overall decline is greater than tmall and Taobao, the largest online sales channels.
It is worth noting that the overall negative growth of CS sales did not start from the epidemic in March this year, but from September 2021, there were obvious signs of decline, and the dive was gradually deepening.
At the same time, according to the "Future Traces Future Beauty" survey of CS chains in Sichuan, Yunnan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hunan, Hubei, Liaoning and other provinces across the country, cosmetics chains are experiencing a difficult bottoming period, traffic decline, profit decline, store contraction is common, many store owners believe that cosmetics stores urgently need to be deeply reformed from the inside out.
The problem is visible to everyone, but how to change it? Which direction to change first?
An underlying idea is that if the store is regarded as a brand with consumer demand as the core, then the brand must provide products and services that consumers like, and even lead and tap the potential needs of consumers, so as to create a platform advantage for stores as "regional KOLs".
The key to all this lies in the presentation of the store's "human goods yard", which should change from profit-oriented to content-oriented.
Chen Xinghong, general manager of Hunan Shifuli Global Beauty, Zhang Rui, general manager of Hubei Qifenmei Chain, and other chain bosses pointed out that their current product planning is more from product content, including product value, efficacy and concept, combined with the popular trend of online interest in e-commerce, so as to seize the needs and eyeballs of post-90s and post-00s consumers.
"Nourishing the skin with oil" is a branch line of the current 4.0 skin care concept.
It can be seen from the fruit collection data that in the social platform Xiaohongshu, where young consumers are concentrated, in the past 90 days, the essence oil ranked fourth in the content keywords of the skin care essence category, and the related notes reached 7502. In the past year, the search for essential oils in Xiaohongshu has exceeded 110,000, and more than 1.18 million notes related to "skin care with oil" have been published.
In December 2021, the French Meipa brand was newly upgraded, and jewelry designer Wan Baobao was invited to serve as the brand's essence spokesperson in the Asia-Pacific region, further enriching the connotation and image of skin care technology and sustainable development. At the same time, it also allows the main products such as "youth oil" to have more brand attitude and long-term development tone than the general Internet celebrity explosives.
But in addition to the popular content, physical retail stores must also reflect the "face-to-face" advantages that only offline have.
In other words, cosmetics stores should not only follow the popular trend of interested e-commerce, but also combine the operation ideas of increasing the connection rate of stores, improving customer unit prices and membership stickiness, and choose unique products that are different from online.
Let's take facial essence oils as an example.
"Future Traces Future Beauty" combined with the hot face oil data during Tmall 618 found that among the top 20 facial oil products sold online, local brands and mass products below 400 yuan accounted for nearly 70%.
However, it is worth noting that while opening the facial essence oil track, volkswagen essential oil products also have the characteristics of more basic efficacy and low user loyalty, similar to the "light luxury" brand in the luxury market, which is easy to become a transitional product with strong substitution after the completion of consumer education.
After a wave of facial essence oil market cultivation, brands that truly have efficacy and scientific and technological hard power have the opportunity to become the biggest winners.
In the hot list of imported facial essence oils, France Meipa continues to be on the list, and the price is also in the high-end positioning of 520 yuan / 20ml.
Such products are more suitable for stores to become unique "long-term products" and "long-term categories". They require a certain amount of time and manpower investment and cultivation, but after successful shaping, they can also bring continuous and rich returns, and even become the "treasure of the town store" that supports the store.
It can be said that this is an opportunity for cosmetics stores to draw a "second growth" curve.
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