One message was clear at Beauty Independent’s 2025 Dealmaker Summit last week in New York City: the bar for beauty brand investment has never been higher.
From skincare to scalp care, aesthetic medicine to makeup, investors from L’Oréal venture fund BOLD, XRC Ventures, Alliance Consumer Growth and other key beauty dealmakers are recalibrating what they value and what they’re willing to pay for. Rapid growth is no longer enough. Today’s investors want operational discipline, proven loyalty and innovation that isn’t just hype, but clinically and commercially viable.
Below, we’ve rounded up standout insights across beauty categories to provide a window into what’s driving dealmaking—and what it takes to get a deal done.
Skincare: Delivery Tech, Longevity and Defensibility
“There’s real investor interest in platforms that pair bioidentical ingredients like synthetic peptides and growth factors with smart delivery tech. They’re scalable, safe and protectable from an IP standpoint, everything an investor wants to see.”
—Cori Aleardi, Elevate Beauty founding partner
“While a delivery system may feel less sexy and branded, if it actually helps boost efficacy, that’s what consumers care about and that’s where the investment potential lies.”
—Aleardi
“We believe there’s a lot of space in combining ingredients and optimizing delivery, whether that’s patented boosters or ingredient pairings like retinol with hyaluronic acid.”
—Fernando Acosta, RoC Skincare CEO
“Finding a way to bring skincare into the longevity movement, not just cosmetic appearance but true biological aging, could be a major unlock. There’s no brand that owns that space yet.”
—Aleardi
Aesthetic Medicine: Ecosystems and Regenerative Potential
“The strategics have been on pause…PE is really the one making moves in this space right now. They’re betting on platforms, aggregating practices and backing strong management.”
—Humberto Antunes, Gore Range Capital partner
“We’re moving from volume to regeneration. This is the future. It’s not just about filling, it’s about restoring tissue health, collagen and long-term outcomes.”
—Antunes
“We’re already seeing consumers ask about PRP, exosomes, microneedling, peptides. The question is, who’s going to own the category of regenerative aesthetics?”
—Jeff Bedard, Revance CEO
“The best investments aren’t just products, they’re ecosystems. Devices plus injectables. Skincare plus treatments. If it’s vertically integrated and defensible, it’s bankable.”
—Antunes
“We’re not building a Botox company, we’re building an aesthetic ecosystem: neuromodulators, fillers, skin health, devices. That’s how you compete with the legacy players.”
—Bedard
Haircare: Strong Fundamentals Meet Scalable Vision
“You can have an incredible product, but if you don’t have the right branding, if you don’t have awareness, you’re not going to be successful. You can have an incredible branding strategy, but if your product doesn’t deliver on what it says it will do, you’re not going to be successful. So, you really want to bridge those two concepts together.”
—Ashleigh Barker, Lincoln International director and head of beauty and personal care
“We know that you’re not going to be born profitable, you’re not going to be doing 50% growth necessarily in your first year, but, if you can really put the strong fundamentals in place and demonstrate that you are able to support a big retail expansion or invest more into marketing because you come across some unique ingredient, those are all things investors are going to be looking for.”
—Barker
Color Cosmetics: Beyond Growth to Durability
“You always have to have newness… but, as a buyer, especially if you’re a strategic, you’re thinking about a ‘capital B Brand’ that’s going to last forever. That’s the challenge in color, how do you know it will endure?”
—Ilya Seglin, Cascadia Capital investment banking managing director
“Strategics are going through a recalibration. They’re not stepping up to write billion-dollar checks for color brands, especially when the category is declining. But financial sponsors? They’re still looking for cash-flowing businesses.”
—Seglin
“Slow and steady wins the race. We’re looking at brands growing 20% to 25% year-over-year with a focus on profitability. It’s no longer about blitz-scaling.”
—Sarah Woelfel, Cult Capital co-founder and partner
“Product development used to be a couple of people. Now, it needs to be a fully built-out function with strong in-house capabilities and senior oversight.”
—Woelfel
“Makeup is a complex business. You need alignment across finance, ops, sales and marketing—and a leadership team that can execute across all of them.”
—Woelfel
“DTC, Amazon, retail, it’s not about the perfect ratio. It’s about building channel strategies that work together efficiently and profitably.”
—Scott Potter, San Francisco Equity Partners managing partner
“Clean is now table stakes. You need another very powerful layer, be it clinical efficacy, influencer-driven conversion or 30 years of loyalty.”
—Woelfel
“Loyalty is the ultimate metric. If your customer comes back again and again, that makes every part of your marketing model more efficient.”
—Potter
“A lot of influencer-driven brands are selling dollar bills for 90 cents. That’s a tough model to underwrite for a buyer that wants a brand for 20 years.”
—Potter
Fragrance: More Opportunities In The Air
“We’re interested in the fragrance market in India. India is a very exciting culture for all of beauty actually…They’re offering all these things and they’re taking the best they see in the Korean market and the best they see in the U.S. market and the European market. There really is a kind of youthful entrepreneurial energy to how they approach beauty brands in that market—and fragrance is no exception.”
—Presca Ahn, BOLD global investment director
“The high end needs to defend certain values and a certain process, and you get to participate in an incredible history, experience and artistic process…But there’s nothing wrong with dupes, right? The industry is full of dupes. There’s brands at every single one of the large beauty corporates that are basically dupes.”
—Ahn
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