Cosmetics, Beauty Supplies, and Perfume Retailers (U.S., NAICS 456120)

1. Overview

This industry is the store — physical and online — where Americans buy makeup, skincare, fragrance, hair products, and grooming supplies. It runs from the big beauty specialty chains (Ulta Beauty, Sephora, Sally Beauty) down to roughly 17,000 storefronts, including thousands of independent neighborhood beauty-supply shops.[1] It does not include the companies that make the products (Estée Lauder, e.l.f., Coty) or the salons that apply them — those are separate industries, covered below.

Why it matters to an investor: beauty is one of retail's most durable categories. Spending holds up relatively well in downturns (the long-observed "lipstick effect" — shoppers trade down on big purchases but keep buying small affordable luxuries), it is fueled by constant product newness and social-media discovery, and the leaders earn some of the best margins and customer loyalty in all of retail. It is also a rare corner of brick-and-mortar that is still growing store counts, because shoppers want to test, smell, and sample.

• Public-market route: a short list of near pure-plays — Ulta Beauty (ULTA) and Sally Beauty (SBH) — plus adjacent names like Bath & Body Works (BBWI) and the landlords/partners that host beauty (Kohl's, Target, Macy's). Sephora exposure comes only through its French parent, LVMH.
• Private route: private-equity roll-ups of luxury and "clean" beauty chains, professional distributors, franchise-style studios, and — at the smallest end — owning and operating an independent beauty-supply store, a classic small-business and immigrant-entrepreneur path. The federal small-business size cutoff for this industry is annual receipts of $34 million, so the vast majority of operators qualify as small businesses.[2]

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2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS 456120 covers establishments primarily engaged in retailing cosmetics, perfumes, toiletries, and personal-grooming products.[3] In practice that means four store types:

1. Prestige / beauty specialty — Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Bluemercury, Space NK: assortments of premium and mass brands, testers, and in-store services.
2. Beauty-supply / DIY retail — Sally Beauty and thousands of independents selling hair color, extensions, tools, and multicultural/textured-hair products to both consumers and working stylists.
3. Fragrance and body-care specialists — Bath & Body Works, perfume shops.
4. Online-only sellers whose primary business is retailing cosmetics.

A classification change worth knowing. Under the 2022 revision of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), the retail sector was reorganized around what a store sells rather than how it sells it. The old "nonstore retailers" subsector was eliminated, and internet-only and mail-order sellers were folded into the merchandise category matching their products — which is why the label changed from "Stores" to "Retailers." So an online-only cosmetics seller now belongs here, not in a separate e-commerce bucket. The equivalent 2017 code was 446120; comparisons across years must account for the renumbering.[3]

What it excludes (and the adjacent NAICS codes):

• Salon and spa services — beauty salons (812112), nail salons (812113), barber shops (812111). Selling you a haircut is a service; selling you shampoo is retail.
• Pharmacies and drug stores (456110) — CVS, Walgreens; they sell heavy volumes of beauty but are classified by their prescription-drug core.
• General-merchandise and department retailers (subsector 455) — Walmart, Target, and department stores like Macy's and Nordstrom; their beauty counters and shop-in-shops book sales under their code, not here.
• Other health-and-personal-care retailers — supplements (456191) and all-other (456199).
• The manufacturers — Estée Lauder, e.l.f. Beauty, Coty, and thousands of brands sit in Toilet Preparation Manufacturing (325620), a fundamentally different business (product formulation and brand-building, with far higher gross margins) that investors often confuse with the retailers.

Ownership mix. Highly barbelled. A handful of large corporate chains sit atop a very long tail: the 2022 Economic Census counted 10,885 firms in this industry.[4] The top end is publicly traded or foreign-conglomerate-owned (Ulta and Sally on U.S. exchanges; Sephora inside France's LVMH). The bottom end is thousands of owner-operated single stores — especially beauty-supply shops — many of them family- or immigrant-owned small businesses. There is no official ownership-share breakdown; the field blends public chains, public-company subsidiaries, private regional operators, and microbusinesses.

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3. How big it is

Federal figures for establishments primarily classified in NAICS 456120:

The undercount caveat — important here. That $50.3 billion badly understates how much beauty Americans actually buy, because the federal code captures only stores whose primary line is cosmetics. Enormous beauty volume is booked under other codes: drugstores, Walmart/Target/Amazon (general merchandise), and department-store beauty counters. Sephora's fast-growing "Sephora at Kohl's" shops, for example, ring up inside Kohl's (a department retailer), not here.[9] On top of that, County Business Patterns counts only employer establishments and makes no estimate of its own undercoverage; the smallest sole-proprietor, home-based, and direct-selling beauty operators are tracked separately in Census Nonemployer Statistics, and the supplied federal file carries no nonemployer count for 456120 — so the true storefront-plus-microbusiness population is larger than 17,328.[5] Private trade estimates that define the industry a bit more broadly put beauty, cosmetics, and fragrance store revenue near $69 billion for 2026, growing about 2.5% a year.[6] Total U.S. beauty-and-personal-care product spending across all channels is larger still — U.S. prestige beauty alone ran roughly $36 billion in 2025 by one industry tracker's measure, with the mass tier larger again.[7]

Concentration. Within the federal 456120 universe, the four largest firms make 49.8% of receipts, the top 8 make 57.5%, the top 20 make 66.3%, and the top 50 make 73.7%.[4] Yet the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) — a standard concentration gauge that squares and sums each firm's market share — is only 774.8, well below the ~1,500 level antitrust regulators treat as "moderately concentrated."[4] The reading fits the barbell: a few chains take half the market, but roughly 10,000 small independents keep the overall market statistically unconcentrated.

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4. The investable universe

Genuine public "pure-plays" are few. The cleanest are Ulta and Sally; the rest are partial plays, hosts, or the product-makers investors often mistake for retailers. (Tickers and scale figures below are for the how-to-invest lens — the industry itself is overwhelmingly private and small-business.)

Public retailers in (or adjacent to) NAICS 456120

Large private / other-owned players

Makers, not retailers (different industry — for contrast). Investors routinely lump these in; they are manufacturers (NAICS 325620), sell wholesale into the retailers above, and earn far higher gross margins: Estée Lauder (EL, ~$14.3B FY2025 revenue), e.l.f. Beauty (ELF, ~$1.3B), Coty (COTY), and Inter Parfums (IPAR, licensed prestige fragrance).[20] Owning EL or ELF is a bet on brands and formulation, not on store retailing.

Bottom line: for a public bet on the store itself, ULTA is the flagship and SBH the value/professional angle; everything else is either a host (KSS, TGT, M), an indirect owner (LVMH → Sephora), or a product-maker.

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5. How the money works

Beauty retailers make money on the spread between what they pay for product and what they sell it for, amplified by traffic, loyalty, private label, and services. Revenue is a function of customer traffic, conversion, average ticket, purchase frequency, and services/other revenue; gross profit is sales minus merchandise cost; operating profit then absorbs store labor, rent, marketing, technology, fulfillment, distribution, corporate overhead, and inventory losses (shrink). The metrics that matter:

Comparable ("same-store") sales. The core health signal — sales growth from stores and channels open at least a year, which strips out the effect of opening new stores. It breaks into traffic (transactions) and ticket (average basket). Ulta's fiscal-2025 comparable sales rose 5.4%, split into a 3.3% higher average ticket and 2.0% more transactions — a healthy mix of shoppers paying more and coming more often.[8] Sally, by contrast, grew comparable sales just 0.3% in fiscal 2025 — a reminder that the value/professional end grows more slowly.[10]

Gross margin and the private-label lever. Retailers buy branded product wholesale and mark it up; margins improve when they sell more of their own private-label lines (sourced cheaply) and earn "other revenue" from co-branded credit cards and vendor marketing dollars. Ulta runs a ~39% gross margin; Sally a much richer ~51%, reflecting its own-brand and professional-distribution mix; Bath & Body Works ~44%, with imported-product tariffs cited as a recent headwind.[8][10][11]

Operating margin — the real prize. Ulta earns a best-in-retail ~14% operating margin, though that has slipped from ~16% a few years ago as rivals cut prices — a live illustration of competitive pressure.[12] Sally runs closer to ~8–9%.

The loyalty engine. This is the beauty retailer's moat. Ulta's rewards program has 46.7 million active members, and the large majority of its sales come from members[8] — a data asset that drives personalized marketing, repeat visits, and credit-card economics. Sephora's Beauty Insider program plays the same role.

Services and experience. In-store salons, brow bars, skin treatments, and piercing turn stores into destinations, lift traffic, and boost product attach rates — margin that mass and online channels can't easily copy.

Store, digital, and inventory economics. These are high-productivity, relatively small-box formats (an Ulta is ~10,000 sq ft) judged on sales per square foot, inventory turns, and new-store payback. The business is inventory-heavy and highly seasonal — the holiday quarter (gift sets and fragrance) is the profit-maker. Digital matters but stays a minority: e-commerce was 10.7% of Sally's consolidated sales in fiscal 2025, with omnichannel options (buy-online-pickup-in-store, ship-from-store, same-day delivery) adding availability but also fulfillment and returns cost.[10]

Sally's twist — wholesale distribution. Beyond DIY retail, Sally's Beauty Systems Group distributes professional product to licensed stylists and salons; that segment is roughly 43% of revenue. It layers a distributor's economics — volume, exclusivity with pro brands — onto a retailer.

Note: the federal file provides no industry-wide same-store sales, gross margin, inventory turns, or profitability. Those must be read company by company; the figures above are individual filings, not industry totals.

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6. What drives demand

Beauty demand blends routine replenishment with self-expression, gifting, and services.

• Product newness and "hero" launches. Beauty is hit-driven and trend-fast; a viral serum or fragrance can move quarterly comps.
• Social media, especially TikTok. Discovery has shifted decisively online: TikTok's share of beauty discovery rose to roughly 53%, and creator recommendations drive a large majority of Gen Z beauty purchases.[21] TikTok Shop has become a major beauty channel in its own right — both a demand driver and a competitive threat to the stores.
• Younger consumers and the "skinification" of everything. Gen Z treats beauty as wellness and self-expression; the much-discussed rush of pre-teens into skincare ("Sephora kids") expanded the customer base — and the controversy.[21]
• Category cycles and a diversified basket. Beauty retail is broader than makeup. Ulta's fiscal-2025 sales mix was 39% cosmetics, 23% skincare, 19% hair care, 13% fragrance, 4% services, and 2% other — replenishment categories (skin, hair, body, fragrance) generate repeat purchasing while cosmetics add trend sensitivity.[8] Fragrance has been the standout, growing roughly 15–17% recently as scent becomes everyday self-expression; skincare and scalp/hair health are also strong.[7][21]
• Prestige/mass convergence. Shoppers increasingly buy "premium-feeling" mass products and cheaper prestige items in the same basket, blurring the old tiers and favoring retailers (like Ulta) that carry both.[22]
• Experiential, test-before-you-buy demand keeps physical stores relevant even as e-commerce grows — you can't smell a perfume through a screen.
• Broadening demographics — multicultural hair care, men's grooming, aging consumers, and wellness widen the addressable base.
• Macro backdrop. Relatively recession-resistant, but not immune: it's still discretionary spending tied to consumer confidence, employment, and disposable income.

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7. Regulation

Beauty retailing is lightly regulated as retailing, but the products carry real compliance weight — which increasingly falls on retailers that sell private-label goods.

• The FDA's baseline. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) generally does not pre-approve cosmetics or their labels before sale (certain color additives are an exception), but products and claims must not be adulterated or misleading. Critically, a cosmetic claim that treats or prevents disease, or affects the body's structure or function, can push the product into being regulated as a drug — a real trap for retailers selling under their own names or importing goods.[25]
• MoCRA (Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022) is the biggest expansion of FDA authority over cosmetics since 1938. It requires facility registration (renewed every two years), product listing (updated annually), reporting of serious adverse events to the FDA within 15 business days, safety-substantiation records, and — once the rule is finalized — good manufacturing practice (GMP) standards.[23] Most obligations land on manufacturers and "responsible persons," but a retailer that sells its own brand (as Ulta and Sally do) is a responsible person and must comply. A small-business carve-out exempts companies averaging under $1 million in annual U.S. cosmetics sales, with exceptions for eye-area, injectable, and internal-use products; the GMP rulemaking has slipped past its original 2024–2025 deadlines.[24]
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): advertising truthfulness, influencer-disclosure rules (paid endorsers must disclose material connections), "Made in USA" claims, and the crackdown on fake reviews — all central to a social-media-driven category.[26]
• Labeling and ingredients: the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, plus a growing patchwork of state rules — California's Proposition 65 warnings and state bans on certain ingredients (e.g., specific PFAS and formaldehyde-releasers) — that retailers must track across jurisdictions.
• Sales-tax collection across states (post-Wayfair economic nexus), plus standard retail employment, safety, product-liability, and consumer-protection law.

Net: not a heavily licensed industry like healthcare or banking, but rising product-safety and state-ingredient compliance is a real and growing cost, disproportionately for private-label sellers.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

Why scale matters. Large retailers can negotiate brand access, secure exclusive launches, spread technology and fulfillment costs, build loyalty-data assets, and improve in-stock performance. Their vulnerabilities are fixed costs, store leases, bureaucracy, shrink, and promotional pressure. Smaller operators still compete on local assortment, service, cultural expertise, professional relationships, and niche brands.

The two-horse specialty race. The premium end is a duel between Ulta (mass + prestige, suburban big-box, huge loyalty base) and Sephora (prestige-led, LVMH-backed, mall/urban plus its Kohl's shop-in-shops). Sephora's aggressive rollout inside Kohl's directly attacked Ulta's suburban turf.

Shop-in-shop wars — and a notable retreat. Partnering with a general retailer extends reach cheaply. Sephora at Kohl's scaled past 1,000 locations and $1.8B in sales.[9] Ulta ran the mirror-image deal inside Target, but the two agreed to wind that partnership down by 2026 — a reminder that host relationships carry partner risk and that channel strategy can shift without an acquisition.[16]

Channel pressure from all sides. The specialty chains compete with mass (Walmart, Target), Amazon's growing premium-beauty push, drugstores, department-store counters, brand-direct websites, and now TikTok Shop. Many direct-to-consumer brands have gone omnichannel, wholesaling into Ulta and Sephora — which broadens assortments but erodes exclusivity.

Consolidation is active. Recent dealmaking emphasized scale and portfolio focus: Ulta acquired the UK's Space NK (~83 premium stores) from Manzanita Capital to move international; family offices and PE bought luxury/clean chains (Cos Bar, The Detox Market); and Walgreens Boots Alliance was taken private by Sycamore Partners.[17][19] Public-parent ownership of Sephora (LVMH), Bluemercury (Macy's), and SalonCentric (L'Oréal) shows how luxury groups, department stores, and manufacturers integrate retail distribution.[13][14][18]

The independent tail. Below the chains, thousands of beauty-supply stores compete on convenience, specialty assortments (notably multicultural and textured-hair products), and stylist relationships — a fragmented, thin-margin segment with its own dynamics.

Judgment: further consolidation is most likely among regional retailers, professional distributors, niche brands, and digital businesses. National scale is valuable, but acquisition returns will hinge on retaining customers, suppliers, and brand identity after integration.

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9. Risks

• Discretionary and cyclical. Resilient, not recession-proof; weak consumer confidence pressures ticket and traffic, and prestige/gifting soften first when budgets tighten.
• Channel shift and price competition. Amazon, TikTok Shop, mass retailers, and brand-direct sites siphon volume and force discounting — visible in Ulta's operating margin sliding from ~16% to ~14%.[12] Promotions can defend traffic while damaging gross margin and brand perception.
• Loss of exclusivity / vendor power. Retailers depend on hot brands; when a prestige brand widens distribution (e.g., onto Amazon) or goes direct, the specialty store's differentiation weakens.
• Trend and inventory risk. A fast, hit-driven category leaves wrong trend bets in markdown-prone inventory that can also expire or become obsolete.
• Theft / organized retail crime. Small, high-value, easily resold products and open-sell testers make beauty a top target for shrink.
• Regulatory and recall risk. MoCRA compliance (heaviest for private label), state ingredient bans, and adverse events, unsupported claims, contamination, or mislabeling can damage both retailer and brand.
• Tariffs and supply chain. Imported product, packaging, freight, and currency swings pressure margins (BBWI has flagged tariffs directly).[11]
• Partner, lease, and labor intensity. Shop-in-shop deals can end (Target–Ulta); store rent, wages, staffing, and salon-service execution limit operating leverage; and the model still leans on physical foot traffic.
• Digital and cyber risk. Marketplaces, payment systems, customer data, counterfeits, and fulfillment outages can affect trust and profitability.
• Measurement risk. NAICS data exclude many nonemployers and miss beauty sold through broad retailers and online — so the industry is bigger and more fragmented than the headline federal figures show.
• For small operators: thin margins, big-box and online competition, and limited access to financing.

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10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes.

• Near pure-plays: Ulta Beauty (ULTA) is the flagship — the scale leader with the strongest loyalty engine and best margins; Sally Beauty (SBH) is the smaller-cap, value-and-professional angle.
• Adjacent: Bath & Body Works (BBWI) for body/home fragrance; the hosts and owners — Kohl's (KSS), Target (TGT), and Macy's (M, owner of Bluemercury) — carry beauty exposure inside broader retail; LVMH (LVMUY) is the way to own Sephora.
• Product-makers (a different bet): e.l.f. (ELF), Estée Lauder (EL), Coty (COTY), Inter Parfums (IPAR) — brands, licenses, and margins, not store retailing.
• Funds: there is no dedicated U.S. beauty-retail ETF; broad retail/consumer-discretionary funds (e.g., XRT, RTH) hold ULTA among many names, so the exposure is diluted.

A useful public-market diligence checklist: same-store sales split into transactions vs. ticket; gross margin after promotions and shrink; inventory turns, aging, and markdowns; store productivity, rent, and service margins; digital mix, delivery cost, and customer retention; private-label and exclusive-brand contribution; supplier and customer concentration; and cash generation, debt, and lease obligations. Valuation multiples (EV/EBITDA or P/E) are useful only after adjusting for leases, international exposure, manufacturing, and non-beauty businesses.

Private routes.

• Private equity / family offices are the main institutional path, via luxury and clean-beauty chain roll-ups (Cos Bar, The Detox Market and similar) and professional distributors.
• Owner-operation at the small end: franchise-style beauty studios and, most accessibly, buying or opening an independent beauty-supply store — the industry's classic small-business entry point, well within the $34M small-business ceiling.[2] Underwrite store-level contribution after labor and rent, repeat-purchase rates, customer-acquisition cost, inventory discipline, supplier terms, and the owner's ability to recruit and retain beauty professionals.

Near-term drivers and outlook (forward-looking). Expect steady low-single-digit category growth with fragrance and skincare leading, continued prestige/mass convergence favoring broad-assortment chains, and international expansion (Ulta's Space NK move) as a new growth lever. Physical stores should stay resilient because sampling and services resist digitization. The central test is whether growth comes from more transactions and repeat customers rather than only price increases — and whether gross margin survives promotions, shrink, tariffs, and fulfillment costs. Key watch-items: margin pressure from mass, Amazon, and TikTok Shop; the loyalty economics of the leaders; and how cleanly the specialty chains defend exclusivity as brands broaden distribution. These are judgments, not guarantees — beauty's fast trend cycles cut both ways.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 456120 (establishments, employment, payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (2023), NAICS 456120 ($34 million). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual — definition of 456120 and the 2017→2022 recode from 446120; and "NAICS Changes" explainer on the retail reorganization. https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf; https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/11/naics-changes.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration by Largest Firms, NAICS 456120 (firms, receipts, CR4/8/20/50, HHI). https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
5. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns Methodology (employer-only coverage; no undercoverage estimate) and Nonemployer Statistics (microbusiness tail). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
6. IBISWorld, "Beauty, Cosmetics & Fragrance Stores in the US — Industry Analysis" (~$69B, ~2.5% growth, 2025/2026). https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/beauty-cosmetics-fragrance-stores/1055/
7. Circana / BeautyMatter, "2025 US Prestige and Mass Beauty Retail Deliver Positive Performance" (prestige beauty ~$36B; fragrance strength). https://beautymatter.com/articles/2025-us-prestige-and-mass-beauty-retail-deliver-a-positive-performance
8. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Ulta Beauty fiscal-2025 Form 10-K (net sales $12.4B, comp +5.4% = +3.3% ticket / +2.0% transactions, 39.1% gross margin, 46.7M loyalty members, category mix). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1403568/000110465926035243/ulta-20260131x10k.htm
9. Global Cosmetic Industry / BeautyMatter, "Sephora at Kohl's Surpasses $1.4 Billion" and 2024 update (>$1.8B, 1,000+ shop-in-shops). https://beautymatter.com/articles/sephora-at-kohls-surpasses-1-4-billion-in-sales
10. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Sally Beauty Holdings fiscal-2025 Form 10-K (~$3.7B revenue, comp +0.3%, ~51% gross margin, e-commerce 10.7%, Beauty Systems Group segment). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1368458/000119312525280122/sbh-20250930.htm
11. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Bath & Body Works fiscal-2025 Form 10-K (~$7.29B revenue, ~43.7% gross margin, ~1,800 stores, tariff headwind). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/701985/000070198526000008/bbwi-20260131.htm
12. Ulta Beauty, Inc., "Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2024 Results" (~13.9% operating margin, down from ~16%). https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250313496800/en/
13. LVMH, "Sephora" (Selective Retailing division; >$17B global 2024; Sephora operated as a private banner). https://www.lvmh.com/en/our-maisons/selective-retailing/sephora
14. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Macy's fiscal-2025 Form 10-K (Bluemercury banner and comparable-sales growth). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/794367/000162828026021721/m-20260131.htm
15. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Kohl's Form 10-K (Sephora shop-in-shops). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/885639/000095017025042662/kss-20250201.htm
16. Target Corp. / Ulta Beauty, "Ulta Beauty and Target Announce Plans to Conclude Partnership in 2026" (2025). https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2025/08/ulta-beauty-and-target-announce-plans-to-conclude-partnership-in-2026
17. Ulta Beauty, "Ulta Beauty Announces Acquisition of Space NK from Manzanita Capital" (~83 stores, July 2025). https://www.ulta.com/investor/news-events/press-releases/detail/208/ulta-beauty-announces-acquisition-of-leading-british-beauty
18. SalonCentric (L'Oréal USA), "About Us" (manufacturer-owned professional distributor). https://www.saloncentric.com/about-us.html
19. Global Cosmetics News / TheIndustry.beauty, "2025 in Review: M&A Activity" (Space NK, Cos Bar, The Detox Market, Walgreens take-private). https://www.globalcosmeticsnews.com/2025-in-review-ma-activity-scale-and-strategic-focus-drive-dealmaking/
20. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Estée Lauder fiscal-2025 (~$14.3B revenue), e.l.f. Beauty fiscal-2026 (~$1.3B), Coty, and Inter Parfums Forms 10-K (makers, not retailers). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1001250/000100125025000099/el-20250630.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1600033/000160003326000020/elf-20260331.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1024305/000102430525000030/coty-20250630.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/822663/000175392626000464/ipar-20251231.htm
21. Cosmetics Business / CEW-NIQ, "The global beauty trends of 2025 revealed" (TikTok discovery ~53%, fragrance +15–17%, Gen Z) and McKinsey, "A close look at the global beauty industry in 2025." https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/beauty-trends-2025-global-tiktok-shop-gen-x-cew-nielsen; https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/a-close-look-at-the-global-beauty-industry-in-2025
22. Retail Brew / Retail Dive, "Premium and mass beauty are 'converging' as consumers seek value" (2025). https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2025/08/21/premium-and-mass-beauty-are-converging-as-consumers-seek-value
23. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 (MoCRA)" (registration, listing, adverse-event reporting, safety substantiation, GMP). https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/modernization-cosmetics-regulation-act-2022-mocra
24. Congressional Research Service, "FDA Regulation of Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Under MoCRA," Report R47826 (small-business exemption; GMP timeline). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47826
25. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Cosmetics & U.S. Law" and "Cosmetics Labeling Claims" (no pre-approval; structure/function claim can trigger drug regulation). https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/cosmetics-us-law; https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-labeling/cosmetics-labeling-claims
26. Federal Trade Commission, "Advertisement Endorsements" and health-products/advertising guidance (truthful claims, influencer disclosure). https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising/advertisement-endorsements; https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/health-products-compliance-guidance