Despite spending decades in the beauty industry helping launch beauty brands for the likes of Victoria Beckham and Prada, Sarah Creal had missed a chance to fill an obvious consumer need: Women in their 50s, she realized, were giving up on mascara. “They were using the same mascara that they had fallen in love with 15-20 years before,” said Creal. And those products were no longer working as their routines and needs changed.
Creal set out to address those concerns with the launch of her namesake beauty brand this summer. Her colorful line includes products like a tubing mascara that won’t deteriorate if you wear more moisturizing eye creams and concealers, and a lip primer that aims to prevent lipstick feathering — other versions of which already exist in the market, but don’t explicitly target a mature consumer.
“[Beauty] is an industry that … is run by men,” she said. “It’s the men who don’t want to look at older women. And maybe it’s the men who don’t want to have older women on their arm at their launch parties or in their ad campaigns.”
While much of the beauty industry has been chasing Gen Z and, increasingly, Gen Alpha in recent years, the Gen-X shopper has true disposable income to spend on beauty. Creal’s line is at the forefront of brands waking up to the opportunity and explicitly marketing and formulating their products to that mature audience. But reaching the padded wallets of those consumers also means striking a careful balance between addressing practical concerns and creating an aspirational beauty destination.
“American Gen Xers are outspending younger, and older, health and beauty consumers by up to 44%. Yet fewer than 5% of brand strategies in the health and beauty categories target Gen Xers,” said Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trend forecaster Stylus. “The brands are starting to see that the money is there, and that’s where they have to chase the money.”
Sarah Kugelman, founder of the skin-care line Skyn Iceland, launched the 45-and-up-focused beauty brand All Golden on Tuesday. The launch includes a mix of hair and face products like a peptide-infused serum and a root touch-up wand for gray hair, with prices ranging from $35-$95. Celebrity beauty brands have also turned their attention to the 40-plus demographic: Naomi Watts expanded her menopause beauty brand Stripes to Canada this year following its acquisition by investment firm L Catterton, while Brooke Shields launched her mature hair-care brand Commence this summer.
“In beauty, I didn’t feel like the brands were addressing me in a positive way. Everything was super negative, like, ‘You’re old, you’re wrinkled, we’re not going to show pictures of you because you’re not attractive anymore,’” said Kugelman. “You have to strike the right tone and the right visuals. You don’t want to go too far because [women over 40] don’t want to be labeled as this group of older women.”
Kugelman expects All Golden, currently available direct-to-consumer through the brand’s website, to reach $1 million in sales in its first year on the market, with plans to expand to further products down the line. And such goals are not unrealistic. According to beauty consumer analytics firm Spate, the search term “mature skin makeup” has shown a year-over-year growth of 72.9% on TikTok, with 7.2 million average weekly views, while on Google, the trend shows a year-over-year growth of 20.1%, with 7,100 average monthly searches. “Mature skin care,” meanwhile, shows a year-over-year growth of 10.5% on TikTok, with 181,000 average weekly views.
Addison Cain, marketing and insights lead at Spate, believes that with steady growth and low competition, now is the time for beauty companies to strike it out in the mature beauty landscape.
“With social media, in general, aging is more visible than ever, and it creates a new conversation around it,” said Cain. “For as many people as there are that want to change or modify wrinkles, there’s also a bunch of people that are just interested in feeling their best selves, with the makeup or skin-care options that are available to them.”
While at the outset of its launch, many viewed TikTok as purely for teens and 20-somethings, more 40-plus beauty creators are finding an audience on the platform. Makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes has nearly 350,000 followers on the app for her on-trend, mature-skin-friendly makeup techniques. According to data analysts Launchmetrics, creator Nikol Johnson Sanchez, who has more than 2 million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, has driven $4.9 million in media impact value for her posts related to mature beauty.
And Sephora, the mega-retailer that made headlines this year for becoming a destination for tween and younger shoppers, is getting hip to the opportunity at the other end of the age bracket. In September, it welcomed the Sarah Creal line to 22 stores, with plans for more store space down the line.
“The issue is [the Gen-X consumer] doesn’t have a destination brand. Gen Z has so many destination brands,” said Creal of Sephora’s motivation to take on her brand.
Targeting a mature audience has also proven successful for existing brands. According to Launchmetrics, makeup brand Laura Geller has generated $14.5 million in MIV in 2024, marking a 105% year-over-year growth. In April, the makeup brand founded in 1997 launched an “Own Your Age” campaign targeting women in the 50s and up. And “older” faces are proving appealing to Gen-Z audiences, as well, as part of a nostalgia for the ’90s and 2000s: On Tuesday, ’90s supermodel Claudia Schiffer was announced as the face of Rhode’s upcoming barrier cream.
But larger legacy brands like Estée Lauder and Lancôme may have a harder time pivoting to new strategies explicitly targeting that audience.
“The problem with these big heritage brands is there’s so much red tape. They can’t be as agile as the younger brands, even in terms of having … an age-appropriate model in the Advanced Night Repair treatment advert. Those models are still young,” said Payne.
And it’s not just in niche beauty communities that those changing ideas around aging are taking place; mainstream cultural depictions of women in their 50s have become more glamorous, as well. The 50-something characters of the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That…,” are roughly the same age as the gray-haired, dowdy cast of the 1980s sitcom “The Golden Girls.” “The Golden Bachelor” and “Golden Bachelorette” franchises, which debuted in 2023 and 2024, respectively, show retirement-age women seeking love in body-conscious gowns and flowing hair extensions.
“The population is aging,” said Kugelman. “In the last 20 years, the fabric of the population has changed dramatically, so we’re living much longer, and we’re living a much higher quality of life. It’s not just about getting to a ripe old age, but we want to be healthy and active and travel and enjoy these extra years we have.”
But seeing a few wrinkles in a beauty ad doesn’t erase the scrutiny women face as they age; even “pro-aging” products still promise to smooth fine lines. Some have criticized the abundance of anti-aging tools and products as putting increased pressure on women to appear smooth-faced and glowing well into middle age, while trends like the “aging” filter on TikTok highlighted Gen Z’s fear of getting older. The normalization of cosmetic procedures for consumers at younger ages may also change the market for “anti-aging” products in the future.
“Now that we’re getting so many fillers and procedures young en masse, I think the future of anti-aging, or a mature skin care, might be more of like, how are you caring for the procedures or the products that you’ve had injected, for example, which is kind of scary,” said Cain.
And the portrayal of 50-year-old women on screen isn’t limited to a glamorous silver-haired Carrie Bradshaw. The 2024 Demi Moore film “The Substance,” which earned Best Screenplay at Cannes in May, depicts a 50-year-old woman’s pursuit of youthful beauty as self-destructive body horror.
“It’s like aging is a failure for women,” said Creal. “Beauty is ephemeral, and you know, you really need to cultivate a life that is fulfilling to you.”
