In recent years, India has become a very important market for makeup brands. Thanks to the rising purchasing power of women in urban areas, an increasing focus on beauty and fashion, and a growing middle class, the Indian cosmetics market has boomed. As more and more international brands enter the country, local brands have struggled to keep up. However, a handful of Indian companies have managed to prosper thanks to their focus on innovation and catering to the specific needs of Indian women.
India’s makeup industry in India is growing at a rapid pace and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6% from $1.2 billion in 2020 to $1.6 billion in 2025, primarily driven by quality-conscious and digitally savvy consumers. This growth is fueled by millennials who want to express themselves through makeup and are willing to spend on it. With such a big opportunity on the table, it's more important than ever to get your brand out there.
With the recent Nykaa IPO, making headlines - a customer of ours wanted to do an analysis of the market. We helped them with the data. This blog is an independent analysis from Datahut about the top ten makeup brands in India.
At Datahut, we conducted an analysis of the Indian makeup market using the data we obtained through our cloud-based web data extraction platform.
We've done a deep dive so that you don't have to. Here is our analysis of the top 10 makeup brands in India. In this blog, we use this market data to provide insights into the makeup brands covering the following aspects:
Data collection and preparation
Pricing and promotional insights from the makeup industry
Data collection
For gathering initial information on various makeup brands, we collected publicly available data from a prominent online beauty retailer using our own proprietary data scraping platform. The initial data set contained 23015 records ( This includes duplicates as well). We tried many combinations to maximize the coverage of the data.
Data Attributes
The following data fields were extracted for each makeup brand:
Brand: Brand represents the brand name, for example, L’Oreal.
Sale_price: Sale price is the price at which the product is available for purchase. It is the price after the discounts.
Entry and Exit Price: This comprises the lowest and highest prized products for a particular brand.
Average Discount percentage: Average Discount percentage is the average of all discounts offered on the various products of a particular brand.
Average Number of ratings: Average number of ratings is the total number of star ratings given to that particular product.
Average rating across brands: This is the average rating of all products within a particular brand.
Discount range across all products: Discount range refers to the number of products that fall within a particular discount range.
Discount statistics: This denotes the number of products with and without discount in each brand.
Data Validation and Deduplication
One of the major problems with scraping product information is the duplicates. After the data extraction process is complete, deduplication is a must and we use the links as a reference to deduplicate. The deduplication is a feature built-in on our web scraping platform and it spits out the data in seconds.
The final data output after filtering out the duplicates contained 15600 products implying that 33% of the scraped data was in fact duplicate. If you’re collecting web data using web scraping make sure that you perform Q&A on the data. There could be both coverage issues and data issues when you are scraping the data.
The Tools for Analysis of the Scraped Data
For the analytics, we used Jypyter notebook and Python Pandas to explore the data. We also used Seaborn as the plotting library. However, we decided to use Tableau Public to publish the interactive visualizations for the readers.
This helped us infer the following analysis:
1. Top 10 makeup brands by product range
The online makeup retail site sold more than 15000 makeup products. Out of these, we identified the 10 top makeup brands leading the category due to their product range.
The top 10 brands are:
Nykaa
Maybelline
L’Oreal Paris
Lakme
Sugar Cosmetics
Faces Canada
Colorbar
MAC
Huda Beauty
PAC
Nykaa topped this list with nearly 687 products listed on the retail site, followed by PAC (457), Maybelline(276), and Colorbar (200).
Here is an interactive visualization of the top 10 makeup brands by product range
View the Tableau visualization link here.
2. Products with and without discount
One of the fundamental reasons makeup brands run regular discounts is that they’re designed to get people who wouldn’t normally buy makeup to buy it, and people who are on the fence about buying a product to go ahead and make the purchase.
Many people are hesitant about trying new products because of cost, so giving them an opportunity to try a new product at a discounted rate can help them get over that hurdle. Someone who is skeptical about whether or not they will like a new gloss from our company might be willing to try it out if they know they aren’t committing themselves to spend money on it if they don’t like how it performs.
Brands also run promotional campaigns because they want to encourage brand loyalty in their customers by making them feel good about the choice they made when purchasing a product. Giving customers an opportunity to save money makes them feel as though they got an exceptional deal and thus encourages them to keep coming back for more deals on products that they love.
We analyzed the number of products on discount in each of the top 10 brands and came to the following conclusion: a) Nykaa had the most number of products on discount: 567 (82%), followed by Colorbar: 191 (95.5%) and Maybelline: 155 (56.1%)
b) The brand with the least number of products on discount was PAC (only 1 product), followed by Mac cosmetics (2) and Huda Beauty (5)
It is interesting to see the products in the same category choose different strategies when it comes to discounting.
Here is an interactive visualization of the products with and without discount
View the Tableau visualization link here.
3. Entry and Exit price of products in each brand
The Entry and Exit prices of products in a particular brand, signify the lowest and highest price that a product is sold, respectively. These prices signify the price range in which the brand sells its products.
We analyzed the entry and exit prices for the top 10 makeup brands and found the following: a) The brand Maybelline has the lowest entry price of Rs 45 (i.e Maybelline’s lowest priced product costs Rs 45).
b) The brand Huda Beauty has the highest entry price of Rs 1300 (i.e Huda Beauty’s lowest priced product costs Rs 1300).
c) The brand whose exit price is the highest is MAC (Rs 9500) followed by PAC (Rs 8795)
Here is the visualization of the minimum and maximum prices of products in top 10 makeup brands.
View the interactive visualization here.
4. Average discount percentage
The average discount percentage is the average discount that a brand offers on its products.
For beauty brands, this is important because offering discounts can be a strong way to incentivize customers and sales. But if a brand offers too many discounts, it can create an expectation in customers that they should shop only when there are discounts.
You'll want to keep an eye on your average discount percentage so you know what's normal for you and that you're not offering too many discounts. This value can be used to compare how different brands discount their products as well as to determine which brands tend to give larger or smaller discounts.
We analyzed the average discount percentages of the top 10 makeup brands and found the following:
The highest average discount percentage of 23.9% was offered by Colorbar followed by L’oreal Paris offering 22.48%.
The lowest average discount percentage was 0.01% offered by PAC.
Here is the visualization of average discount percentages offered across products in the top 10 makeup brands.
View the interactive visualization here.
5. Number of ratings
In the beauty industry, a brand's total number of ratings is one of the most important metrics to measure both performance and potential. Product ratings are a key component of the customer journey for a beauty brand. Having an abundance of positive ratings can be an asset for a product, as it gives customers confidence in the quality and effectiveness of that product. It also helps customers narrow down their options when presented with a wide variety of products. A robust number of ratings is almost always better than fewer ratings because it communicates to potential customers that the product is worth trying.
We analyzed the number of ratings of the top 10 makeup brands and found the following:
The makeup brand Nykaa had the highest number of customer ratings: 15,670 followed by Maybelline (5230) and Lakme (3489).
The brand PAC had the lowest number of ratings: 162
Here is the visualization of the average number of ratings of the top 10 makeup brands.
View the interactive visualization here.
6. Average rating across brands
Average ratings across a brand can be an important metric for beauty brands. A brand's aggregate rating is the average rating across all of its products, and it can help customers who are looking to try a product from that brand in particular, or who are interested in trying something new and don't have a specific product in mind.
Knowing the average ratings across your brand can also help you identify trends within your own company—you may find that certain products are consistently receiving higher ratings than others, which might indicate that you need to modify your production process or tweak your ingredients to better fit customer needs.
We analyzed the average rating of the top 10 makeup brands and found the following:
The highest average rating of 4.4 was achieved by Huda Beauty whereas the lowest rating of 4 is achieved by Colorbar.
The most common average was 4.2 which was achieved by 4 brands: L’Oreal Paris, MAC, Faces, and Sugar Cosmetics.
Here is the visualization of the average ratings of the top 10 makeup brands.
View the interactive visualization here.
7. Discount range across products
The discount range across products is a measure of the difference between the largest and smallest discounts given on a brand's products. Brands with a high discount range across products may be more likely to offer lower prices on their highest-priced items, while brands with a low discount range across products are more likely to offer consistent discounts, regardless of the price of the item.
Discounts can be an effective way to drive sales, but brands need to be aware of the impact it has on consumer perception.
How much is too much?
In our survey of beauty consumers, we asked how much a "discount range across products" would impact their view of a brand.
We found that discounts of up to 30% can actually have a positive impact on consumer perceptions. However, discounts over 30% can lead to negative perceptions.
What does this mean for beauty brands?
When choosing discount ranges and placement, brands need to carefully consider how that will affect the overall perception of their brand and the products they sell.
We analyzed the discount range of the products from the top 10 makeup brands and found the following:
Out of 2527 products, 45% of products (1141 products) had no discount.
The most common discount range is 20-30% with 21% of all products (549 products) falling in this range.
The next common discount range is 10-20% with 15% of all products (401 products) falling in this range.
Only 1 product fell in the discount range of 60-70% which is the maximum range.
Here is the visualization of the discount range in which products from the top 10 makeup brands fall.
View the interactive visualization here.
8. Mean and median price
The mean and median prices for beauty brands are often used interchangeably, but they represent different data points. The mean price is the average price of all products sold in a given line or category. The mean value signifies the price value that is most common for a brand.
On the other hand, the median price is the middle-most price of all products sold in a given line or category. This can be useful for brands that want to see if their product pricing skews high or low in a given category, as well as for brands that have a wide range of product prices.
We analyzed the mean and median price of the products from the top 10 makeup brands and found the following:
Huda Beauty had the highest mean price of Rs 2393 followed by MAC (Rs 2432), On the other hand, Nykaa had the lowest mean price of Rs 387.
The median price of products from Huda beauty is the highest (Rs 2400) whereas the median price of products from Nykaa is the lowest (Rs 299)
Here is an interactive visualization of the mean and median prices across the top 10 makeup brands.
View the interactive visualization here.
Conclusion
This blog was created to help readers gain a better understanding of the makeup industry in India. The analysis of the past and future market trends will allow brands to better predict their objectives and focus on key factors to grow their business in this rapidly expanding market.
The Indian makeup industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, where new product launches are carried out each year. Our hope was to provide you with an understanding of how this industry works, what kind of makeup products are in demand, and what retailers can do to get a jump on the competition. With this data analysis, we hope to deliver relevant insights and results that may be useful to retailers across India who want to ride the trends of this industry.
At Datahut we help market research companies get all kinds of data in virtually any industry for conducting competitive research. If you need web data from another category for analysis, Contact Datahut