Byredo
What Do You Own That Money Can't Buy?
Prestige beauty closed 2023 at $31.7 billion, up 14 percent. Mass grew 6 percent.
In this issue
The Quarter in Brand Authority
The Brand Worth Watching — Byredo
The Vocabulary Shift
Category Signals
The Blind Spot
The Question
That growth rate is not going to repeat. Circana said so plainly at the January 2024 industry briefing: the industry should expect a significant slowdown in 2024 after two years of extraordinary expansion. In a category growing 14 percent, almost every brand's numbers look good. In a category normalizing after three years of post-pandemic expansion, the brands without genuine authority will start to show.
Prestige skincare grew 10 percent in Q1 2024. The composition is more instructive than the headline. Body sprays nearly tripled year over year. Face serums were the second-strongest grower, driven by clinical brand launches. The growth is concentrated in two places: scent-forward body care where Sol de Janeiro created the category, and ingredient-specific clinical skincare where a named mechanism justifies the price. Everything in between is competing for a declining share of the consumer's prestige budget.
Unilever's acquisition of K18 closed in Q1 at an estimated $700 million for a brand that launched in 2020 with one patented peptide. K18Peptide mimics the human keratin structure at a molecular level to reverse chemical damage in minutes. That is not a marketing claim. It is a specific, proprietary, demonstrable thing. The acquisition price is a signal the category is sending about where authority is going: toward the brands that can name exactly what they have and prove it.
Color cosmetics closed 2023 up 15 percent in prestige. The consumer is not buying less makeup. She is buying makeup that does something beyond color. Lip oils, tinted balms, skin-tint foundations. Rare Beauty surpassed $350 million in revenue in 2023, tracking toward $400 million in 2024, the number one makeup brand by EMV. The question the category is not yet asking: when a brand built its authority on a self-acceptance premise and expands into adjacent categories, does the premise travel with it?
The Sephora Kids story is not going away. Children as young as eight are purchasing Drunk Elephant products formulated for adult skin. The brand reported a 77 percent year-over-year sales jump and 300 percent growth in social media followers. Both numbers are real. Neither captures what is happening to the brand's authority with the consumer who built it.
Ben Gorham founded Byredo in Stockholm in 2006. He had no formal training in perfumery. He had a background in basketball, fine art, and a specific interior life that he had spent years filling with cultural references, travel, memory, and the kind of precise observation that generates unusual creative output. He turned those things into fragrance. Mojave Ghost. Gypsy Water. Bal d'Afrique. Oud Immortel. Each name points to something specific and non-generic. Each scent is a point of view, not a category answer.
Puig acquired a majority stake in Byredo in 2022 at a valuation of approximately 1 billion euros. Under the terms of the agreement, Gorham retained creative leadership and agreed to remain through mid-2025. What Puig does not yet know how to do is replace a founder whose point of view was the product.
That distinction matters specifically for Byredo, and less for Charlotte Tilbury or Carolina Herrera. Charlotte Tilbury the brand is not equivalent to Charlotte Tilbury the person in the way that Byredo the brand is equivalent to Ben Gorham's interior life. The fragrances are the memories and references. Remove the person who had the memories and the references, and what remains is a library without a librarian.
The About page of Byredo's website in Q1 2024 describes the brand as a living library of collective memories and cultural references. That is accurate language for what Gorham built. It is also the kind of language that organizations produce when the person who made the thing specific has handed it to an organization that needs to make it general.
Gorham is still at the brand. He will be through mid-2025. The diagnostic question is what happens when the agreement ends and the next fragrance brief is written by someone whose memories and references are not Gorham's. The names and descriptions of Byredo's next launches after June 2025 will tell you more about the brand's authority trajectory than any sales figure. This Brief will watch that closely.
The phrase entering the category this quarter: clinical.
It is appearing on product pages, in founder copy, in press releases for brands that have no clinical data to support the term. The word is migrating from the earned vocabulary of brands with peer-reviewed studies and registered compounds into the ambient copy of brands that have neither. When three brands in the same subcategory adopt the same adjective in the same quarter, the adjective has begun its journey from differentiator to commodity. Clinical is at the start of that journey.
What is exiting: natural. The word has been in the category for fifteen years and it now carries no signal whatsoever. Every brand at every price point is natural. Clean beauty is following it -- still present, still used, but losing the authority signal it carried in 2018 and 2019. The brands that built their identity around clean as a primary claim are discovering that clean is not a position anymore. It is a floor.
Skincare, fragrance, color cosmetics, hair, and wellness signals tracked across observation, validation, and forecast.
Skincare — The Clinical Over-Claim
Prestige skincare grew 10 percent in Q1 2024, with face serums the second-fastest growing segment. The pattern underway is familiar: brands without clinical foundations are borrowing clinical vocabulary because it is what the consumer is reaching for. Clean went through the same arc from 2015 to 2020. Validation: K18 closed its Unilever acquisition this quarter on an estimated $700 million valuation built on a named, patented mechanism. Brands borrowing the term without that architecture are growing more slowly. Forecast: the clinical vocabulary commodifies within 18 to 24 months. Brands with a named mechanism, a registered compound, or a peer-reviewed study will hold authority when the signal fades.
Fragrance — Body Mist at Peak
The prestige body spray market nearly tripled in 2023 and is still accelerating. The format has unlocked a consumer who had not previously bought fragrance at a prestige price point. Validation: body sprays are the top gainer in the skincare category Q1 2024, with searches up 24 percent year over year. Forecast: body mist as a category peaked in 2023. The consumer who entered fragrance through mists will either trade up to higher concentrations or abandon the category when novelty fades. Brands that built a fragrance worldview will retain her. Brands whose entire authority rests on the body mist format will face saturation by mid-2025.
Color Cosmetics — Skinification Entering
The prestige consumer is beginning to apply her skincare logic to color purchases. Lip oils, tinted balms, and skin-tint foundations are growing while straight-pigment formats soften. Validation: prestige color grew 15 percent in 2023, led by hybrid lip formats. Rare Beauty's Soft Pinch Liquid Blush generated approximately $70 million in single-SKU revenue on a blendable, skin-compatible formula. Forecast: pure color brands have a 12 to 18 month window before functional expectations in color fully crystallize.
Hair — Scalp Care Emerging
The consumer has started treating her scalp as a skin surface requiring targeted, ingredient-led care. Validation: prestige hair grew 10 percent in H1 2024. Scalp care grew at twice the rate of the overall hair category. Hair thinning and loss products are up 34 percent in prestige year over year. Forecast: scalp care is at the beginning of a 3 to 5 year mainstreaming arc. Brands entering now with documented follicle health mechanisms will own a defensible position before the category floods.
Wellness — Longevity Entering the Consumer Vocabulary
Longevity is migrating from biohacker niche to aspirational consumer vocabulary. Validation: Cosmetics Business named longevity as a top five beauty trend for 2024. Mintel documented growing consumer belief that skincare should address root causes of aging biologically rather than surface appearance. Forecast: longevity reaches mainstream prestige within 2 to 3 years. Brands arriving with genuine regenerative medicine credentials will have a durable authority position.
The category has spent the past 18 months analyzing Drunk Elephant's decline through the lens of a brand that lost its core consumer to a younger one. That is accurate but incomplete.
The Sephora Kids conversation is consuming the category's attention this quarter, and it is almost entirely framed as a product safety problem. The question being asked is: should children be using actives designed for adult skin? That is the wrong question. The question the category is not asking is what happens to a prestige brand's core consumer when she watches her brand become legible to ten-year-olds. The authority damage is not happening to the twelve-year-old. It is happening to the thirty-four-year-old who built the brand's reputation and who is now deciding whether a product associated with tween haul culture still belongs in her bathroom. Drunk Elephant is the visible case. It will not be the last. Any prestige brand that allows its visual identity, its vocabulary, or its distribution to become more legible to a younger consumer than to its intended one faces the same fracture -- without the benefit of a viral TikTok moment to make the damage visible in real time.
Circana's Larissa Jensen said in January 2024 that the industry should not rest on its laurels and that 2024 would likely bring a significant pullback after three years of double-digit prestige growth.
When growth normalizes, the brands that gained share on the tide rather than on merit become visible. The question for any brand entering a slower market is: what is the specific thing you own that no competitor can acquire by spending money?
Not the product. Not the formula. The thing the product points to -- the credential, the origin, the mechanism, the proof -- that would take a competitor years of documented work to replicate.
If the answer requires more than two sentences, it may not be specific enough yet.