Unable to find a mascara that she really loved, Vivian Lee decided to stop buying it altogether. "I’ve tried all the different brands of mascara,” says Lee, who works in San Francisco’s tech industry. “I just haven’t found something I really liked—it's kind of a pain." It's not that she doesn't love makeup. In fact, since making the decision to give up on too-smudgy formulas and not-quite-right wands, she's put her money toward other products like Glossier's lip gloss and Marc Jacobs' Highliner. Mascara honestly just wasn't doing it for her anymore. "I’ve found that I get a better effect with simple eyeliner anyway," she says.
It's not just Lee, either. Along with a growing number of women who have stopped wearing mascara in favor of other products, brands like Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, Kylie Cosmetics, and Anastasia Beverly Hills aren’t even bothering with mascara anymore either. For example, Huda Beauty, a billion-dollar cosmetics empire, currently sells 22 types of false eyelashes, both faux and mink, but not a single tube of mascara.
To be more precise, mascara’s slice of the $445 billion global beauty industry was worth more than $8 billion in sales last year, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm. But the numbers are dwindling. Euromonitor expects sales to increase by only 1.9 percent between 2017 and 2018, compared with 3.8 percent between 2016 and 2017. That’s almost half the growth rate of previous years. Searches for "mascara," meanwhile, declined by more than 18 percent between February 2018 and April 2018, and have remained flat, according to SEMrush marketing analytics.
While mascara most certainly isn’t disappearing overnight, there are several culprits leading to its lagging sales—the most notable being Instagram.
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It’s no secret that the most successful of millennial-minded brands are engineered with the app in mind. Take Fenty’s account, which is filled with artfully shot photos of models in blindingly bright highlighter and bold lipstick. Its packaging is so perfectly made for the 'gram that the brand even fashioned a life-size version for photo ops at Sephora's beauty festival this fall.
Lee says she’s noticed that, among her friends and colleagues, women are more interested in brands that focus on "beautiful, glowy skin" and Korean beauty lines that "knock it out of the park" with eyeliners and brow products. These brands, she says, “don’t really make a big deal out of mascara.”
What many of them do play up, however, is skin care. Which is why it might not be surprising that the category outpaced color cosmetics over the past year, according to the NPD Group. In fact, sales of skin care in the U.S. grew 15 percent from the previous year, while cosmetics grew only 3 percent during the same time period.
Another category on the rise? Lash extensions. Heather Auger, a lash artist in Malibu, California, who works with celebrity clients and YouTube artists, says the demand for extensions has grown so much recently that she's had to turn people away. She credits the majority of its popularity to how great they always look—both in real life and in photos. “[Mascara] won’t give you that same look in every shot like lash extensions will,” she says.
Again, the numbers back it up. The lash extension market is expected to generate nearly $1.5 million by 2022, according to Fact.MR, a market research firm.
"I don’t have a friend out here who doesn’t have them," said Julia Nell, who lives in nearby Venice Beach, California. “In L.A., the more unnatural [your extensions look], the better.” Her Instagram is filled with photos of her lounging by a pool in Spain one day, then strolling through a park in New York City or a busy street in Hong Kong the next. Her crystal blue eyes pierce through her long lashes in each shot, but it’s clear she’s wearing minimal makeup.
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Nell travels around the globe for her day job in the tech industry. A few years ago she realized that Instagram was a great way to score free samples on her travels. But that means she needs both her beauty routine and her photos to deliver. She admits fake lashes can look "a little bit too much for real life,” but says they’re great for selfies and a better look for her more than 94,000 followers. Plus, "it’s pretty awesome to avoid that look of mascara falling down your face,” she says.
Lash extensions—or simply less makeup altogether—are saving busy women like her something else: their time. "My clients wake up in the morning with a mascara look, and they’re ready to go," said Juliet Saco, a lash artist in Troy, Michigan, who said she gets all of her business through Instagram and Facebook. "Their time is valuable, so it’s worth it."
Another problem plaguing mascara is that in an age of high-tech tools and gimmicky face masks, mascara can be kind of…boring. "There’s not a lot of new innovation in mascara, so sales have slowed," says Kloe Angelopoulou, a research analyst at Euromonitor International.
Lashes, like any other trend, are always evolving. In the Middle Ages, women would remove their lashes to highlight their foreheads. Eyelash curlers first hit the market sometime in the 1920s or 1930s but seem like a museum relic today with so many curl-enhancing formulas that don’t make lashes go limp. Then came different colors, waterproof options, vibrating wands, weird-looking brushes, and comically racy product names. It's possible we're just in the era of extensions for now.
It’s not entirely a death knell for mascara though.
In an attempt to reverse the trend, some brands are still putting time and money into creating never-before-seen innovations. Earlier this fall Chanel released its much-anticipated 3-D volumizing mascara, which features a brush made entirely from 3-D-printing. After being patented over a decade ago, the brand worked for years to nail the perfect “honeycomb structure” that “loads [the brush] with just the right amount of formula”—as the description reads on it website.
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Meanwhile, Glossier’s Lash Slick—what many on the Internet have taken to calling a "non-mascara mascara" because of how natural it looks on—took 18 months to create and 248 tries to perfect the formula.
Both companies have been tight-lipped about the cost of production and what sales stats look like, but there’s no denying another issue: Mascara isn’t cheap to make. Many smaller cosmetics brands and indie lines are reluctant to produce mascara at all because getting the technology behind the liquid, the lash wand, and the brush just right can become a wildly expensive endeavor. Which is likely why there still hasn’t been a Fenty ThicccLash or Kylie LitLash.
Still, brands that have cornered the market on the so-called cult favorite mascaras are doing just fine. Too Faced reportedly sells one tube of its famous Better Than Sex Mascara every 7.4 seconds, while Nars released its provocatively named Climax Mascara to much fanfare this fall.
And there is a glimmer of hope that more Insta-brands will jump aboard the mascara train: Kim Kardashian, who is famous for her often unrealistic-looking fake lashes, just dropped her KKW Beauty line's first mascara. Albeit it was quietly done on Black Friday, when shopping is guaranteed to be at an all-time high. But it is a good testing ground to gauge the reaction of finnicky Instagram audiences.
Unlike her sister’s lips, though, it remains to be seen whether Kim’s eyes will be enough of a draw.
