The professional nail care market grew eight percent last year – its highest growth rate in the last five years – and shows no signs of slowing down.
According to the latest ‘Professional Nail Care: Global Market Brief’ report by Kline & Company, the market’s growth was driven largely “by the solid performance of the nail enhancements category” as well as “increased emphasis on education and training, new and innovative products, digitalisation, and beauty salons expanding their service menus”.
Report author Shivani Singh said that ‘nail enhancements’ was the best-performing category (recording a sales increase of 26 percent) out of four categories (care products, gels, nail enhancements and nail polishes) for the second-consecutive year.
“The trend for poly-acrylic gels, which began at the close of 2017 with Gelish paving the way with Polygel, was the key growth driving factor for the category in 2018,” he said.
He said poly-acrylic gels are now “making an impact far and wide” as many new product lines (including Entity Studio One, Christrio Sculpture Gel, Roby Nails AcryGel, LCN Fusion, and Alessandro AcryLove, Peggy Sage Gel Sculpt, and Orly Gel Fx Builder in a Bottle) were introduced in 2018.
Meanwhile although nail polishes and gels remained the two-leading categories, collectively accounting for approximately 80 percent of the global professional nail care market sales in 2018, gels experienced a major slowdown ‒ registering the least growth in 2018.
“Nail polishes, gels, and care products all lose market share to the rapidly expanding nail enhancements category in 2018,” said Singh.
“Nail polishes finally seem to be on the road to recovery with a sales gain across all regions, except for North America, where the category continues to lose sales in 2018.”
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