Asia Focus: a wealth of innovation and opportunity

Asia is a vast and diverse region and is the world’s largest continent with a population of over 4 billion. Naturally, with such an enormous geographical area, Asia’s countries have a wide range of climates and cultures, which in turn develop different cosmetic preferences and trends. Asia is recognised as vital to the development of innovative personal care formulations which have regularly become global phenomena, with countries such as Korea and Japan becoming by-words for trend-setting cosmetics.

In this article we will attempt to present a snapshot of the Asian cosmetics market and highlight the respective characteristics of some of the key Asian countries. To begin with, we spoke to Sneha Varghese, who heads the Consumer Product division at Future Market Insights (FMI), an ESOMARcertified market research and consulting firm, to get an idea of the Asian cosmetics market as a whole: “Probably, you have heard of the term ‘glass skin’, the seven-step skin care routine and wondered how obsessed are women with their looks in Korea? Well, welcome to the personal care market in Asia, where you will find extreme trends followed by women to give a new definition to ‘Beauty is only skin deep’! Men are fastcatching up with the appearance-conscious trends too and are relying on skin care products.”

As we will discover later on in this article, social media and digital technology is having a huge impact, with many Asian countries providing inspirational advances for brands worldwide.