A few days ago, an industry insider offered a provocative observation: "Top Chinese beauty brands are starting to look more and more like 'general stores.' They sell skincare, color cosmetics, men's products, and even haircare and body care."

The phrasing may sound harsh, but from a certain angle, it's quite vivid. Since last year, full-category expansion among leading domestic beauty brands has accelerated significantly. They have ramped up offerings in cosmetics, men's skincare, hair care, body care — even down to niche items like foot masks, neck masks, and cotton pads.

From face to full body, from skincare to makeup, from women to men — the category boundaries of top Chinese beauty brands are dissolving at an astonishing pace.

Yet the "general store" metaphor implies a lack of strategy, while what's actually unfolding is a calculated, strategic category expansion — top local brands are evolving from "hero SKU companies" into "ecosystem brand companies."

Either become an ecosystem brand, or become a category specialist.

By | Cosmetic Observation

Skincare growth slows, color/hair care fills the gap: "transgression" driven by growth anxiety

To understand this wave of expansion, we must first recognize a reality: the main category (skincare) of leading brands has already, is now, or will soon hit a temporary ceiling.

Looking at the overall market: data from China Fragrance and Cosmetics Association shows total omnichannel cosmetic sales in 2025 reached 1,104.245 billion RMB, up 2.83% year-on-year, with domestic brands further increasing market share to 57.37%.

While the total market is healthy, the structure is undergoing profound change.

Third-party data indicates that in Q1 2026, the year-on-year growth for skincare/essence on mainstream e-commerce was barely 1%, while color cosmetics/perfume/makeup tools and hair care/wigs saw growth rates near 20%.

This contrast is not just "one falls, another rises" — it reflects a shift in consumer purchasing behavior. After five years of content-commerce immersion, consumers are moving from ingredient stories and influencer seeding toward instant efficacy validation.

As a result, categories like color cosmetics, body care, and hair care — where results are immediately visible — are diverging from skincare, which requires "delayed gratification." Over the past two years, many new color cosmetics and hair care brands have emerged, but very few new skincare brands have broken through.

Leading Chinese beauty companies feel the temperature shift most acutely.

Proya's revenue for the first three quarters of 2025 was 7.098 billion RMB, a meager 1.89% growth. Although skincare still accounts for the largest share, revenue in that category has contracted, while color cosmetics and hair care are growing rapidly.

Shanghai A-share's 2025 revenue reached 9.178 billion RMB, up 35.1% year-on-year. Kans, its flagship brand, contributed 7.36 billion RMB (up 31.6%), staying #1 on Douyin for three consecutive years. However, Kans' skincare share on Douyin has dropped from over 99% in 2023 to around 85% this year, with personal care and color cosmetics rising to over 10%.

When the two largest domestic beauty companies see their "growth baton" shifting from core categories (skincare) to new ones, it's a signal worth heeding.

What's even more alarming is the accelerated elimination race in the beauty industry.

China Fragrance and Cosmetics Association data: 27,000 brands were phased out in 2025, accounting for 41% of active brands. Among the top 500 brands, over 60% maintained positive growth, while only about 26% of brands ranked 500th or lower grew. Market resources are concentrating among top brands and tech-driven innovators.

When core category growth slows and mid-to-low-tier brands are being washed out, expansion beyond the core becomes not an option but a necessity.

Using the main brand for full-category rollout while nurturing "multiple offspring"

One notable fact: top Chinese beauty brands are not simply relying on their main brand for "general store" expansion. While single-brand category expansion proceeds, multi-brand portfolio building is also advancing in parallel.

The difference lies in pace — main brand extension delivers faster results, while sub-brand incubation requires a longer cultivation period.

Shanghai A-share is the most telling example. It has built a portfolio covering skincare, mother & baby, hair care, color cosmetics, and more — including Kans, newpage Yiyé, Red Elephant, Anminyou, Jifang, NAN Beauty, Juguangbai, and Bread超人. In 2025, newpage Yiyé shone brightly: revenue of 880 million RMB, up 134% year-on-year.

Proya's multi-brand matrix is also paying off. In H1 2025, Timage (Caixi) achieved 705 million RMB, up 21.11% — on track to exceed 1 billion RMB for the full year. Off&Relax brought in 279 million RMB, a stunning 102.52% increase.

Chando Group is likewise advancing multi-brand strategy. In 2025, besides its main brand Chando exceeding 5 billion RMB, its sensitive-skin-focused brand Pofuyan grew strongly — from 63 million RMB in 2023 to 183 million RMB in 2025, nearly tripling in three years.

Thus, leading players are walking on two legs: main brand extensions address immediate growth pressures, while sub-brand incubation builds long-term competitiveness.

In contrast, nearly all newly established Chinese beauty companies in recent years have chosen vertical focus.

For example, under the same Paohong Group, Zaowuzhe focuses on soft masks, while Sanzitang specializes in eye makeup. They haven't chosen to "sell everything" because at the start-up stage, without brand recognition or channel resources, the only option is to excel in a niche category.

This precisely confirms the stage-based law of brand development:

Therefore, "new brands focus, established brands expand" is not contradictory — it's the same law manifesting at different stages.

Those leading brands now going down the "general store" path once tore open the market with a single core product: Proya's Bubble Mask, Kans' Red Clay set, Chando's Little Purple Bottle. Their origin stories are essentially no different from today's specialists like Zaowuzhe.

The only difference is that they have already moved beyond that stage.

Domestic “multi-category” vs. foreign “multi-brand”: It's not just about time

A frequently asked question: Facing the same bottleneck in main brand growth, why do L'Oréal and Estée Lauder prefer to acquire or incubate new brands, while Chinese brands tend to first extend their main brand?

On one hand, it's rooted in differing genetic strengths.

L'Oréal and Estée Lauder's core competency is brand management. Their growth logic is: one brand corresponds to one category, one positioning, one set of mindshare. The group's value lies in letting each brand excel in its own domain. When the group needs to enter a new category, acquiring or incubating a brand with an existing foundation in that category is more efficient.

In contrast, Chinese leading brands have forged their core capabilities over the past decade in channel operations and traffic acquisition. What they excel at is pushing a product to consumers through efficient channel networks and traffic tactics.

This genetic difference dictates that Chinese brands will prioritize using their main brand to sell more categories — because it's the lowest-cost, highest-efficiency option.

On the other hand, there's the difference in market reach.

L'Oréal and Estée Lauder are truly global enterprises. Their brand portfolios are essentially a means of allocating resources globally, diversifying risk, and capturing growth opportunities across different regions.

Conversely, the vast majority of Chinese brands are still overwhelmingly focused on the domestic market. Although Proya and Shanghai A-share have started overseas expansion, overseas revenue remains extremely low. This "single-market dependence" means that when domestic skincare category growth slows, there is no other market to absorb growth pressure.

Single brand, single market — these two "limitations" combine to make main-brand expansion into adjacent categories the most direct and urgent outlet.

It's not that Chinese brands "don't want" to calmly build a brand matrix like their foreign counterparts — it's that they "cannot" yet. Before overseas markets reach meaningful scale and before second/third brands achieve stable scale, the main brand is the group's most core, even sole, reliable asset. Using a brand that generates billions annually to sell new categories offers far greater certainty than building a new brand from scratch.

However, that doesn't mean Chinese brands cannot build brand matrices. The attempts by Proya, Shanghai A-share, and Chando Group prove it's possible. But time and accumulation are also unavoidable key factors — L'Oréal took over a century to build its brand portfolio, while Chinese brands have only had two or three decades.

Chinese beauty brands will diverge along two paths

Based on the above analysis, we can make a judgment about the endgame for single Chinese beauty brands: the vast majority will diverge along two paths — either become an “ecosystem brand” or become a “category specialist.”

The core logic of an “ecosystem brand” is to leverage proven main brand assets to cover multiple categories, using the portfolio to hedge against growth fluctuations in any single category.

Kans, Chando, and Pechoin are walking this path.

However, the prerequisites for this path are that the brand positioning itself has extensibility, the core category foundation is solid, and the R&D, channel, and operational systems can support multi-category synergy. Kans, for example, has repositioned itself as a “full-category beauty & fashion brand,” and its R&D and supply chain systems can be applied to categories beyond skincare.

The core logic of a “category specialist” is to defend a single category or core mindshare to achieve absolute “brand = category” mental monopoly.

C咖 (C+'s) for oily skin, Zaowuzhe for soft masks, are representatives of this path.

The prerequisites for this path: the chosen track has a sufficiently high ceiling, the category mindshare is deep enough, and there are technical or supply chain barriers to prevent large brands from crushing with scale advantages. For example, C咖 for oily skin developed proprietary supramolecular sustained-release technology, launching an acid-enzyme synergistic system, becoming China's pioneer in supramolecular acid-enzyme skincare.

However, both paths have their own challenges to address.

“Ecosystem brands” need to manage brand mindshare during category expansion to avoid blurring consumer perception; “category specialists” must continuously strengthen vertical barriers to withstand low-price or bundled competition from ecosystem brands.

Those “mid-to-low tier” brands that have neither the full-category coverage of ecosystem brands nor the vertical barriers of category specialists are disappearing in batches.

Looking from a longer-term perspective, the true endgame for Chinese beauty brands may be only one path: first, use the main brand to achieve scale in the domestic market, while simultaneously building a multi-brand, multi-category matrix to cover more demographics and scenarios, and ultimately, go global.

The “general store” expansion is merely the first steep slope on this long road.

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