Whole Foods Sells 100 Beauty Brands a Week in Affordable Skincare Push

By Amara Osei

Whole Foods now sells products from 100 beauty brands in any given week — a deliberate, two-year push by the Amazon-owned grocer to become a beauty destination at prices well below Sephora or Bluemercury. Kat Stevenson, Whole Foods's senior category merchant for beauty, disclosed the figure as the chain leans into affordable personal care while inflation squeezes even its wealthiest shoppers.

The shift is already visible at the register. In-store customers haven't cut spending; they've redirected it. "We're not seeing [our customers] reduce their spend," Stevenson said. "They're changing the way they're spending." Beauty is where those dollars are landing.

Why is a grocer chasing beauty dollars?

The market is enormous. Americans spent $36 billion on prestige beauty and another $72.7 billion on mass-market beauty last year, according to market research firm Circana. McKinsey pegs the global beauty industry at $450 billion.

Timing matters. Prestige beauty growth cooled to 4% in 2025, down from 14% in 2023, while Ulta — which mixes drugstore staples with high-end brands — grew sales nearly 10% last fiscal year to $12.4 billion. Wealthier households are trading down too: Walmart's market share gains now come from households earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year.

Whole Foods spotted the opening about two years ago. Stevenson said the beauty aisle then tilted expensive and lacked the newness beauty shoppers expect. "We saw we were maybe losing our customers a little bit, and we needed to revive our space," she said. The retailer added 10 new beauty brands in 2026.

Consumers have also stopped equating price with quality. A Circana survey found only 14% of consumers believe higher prices signal better quality. "As they have become more knowledgable, customers know they don't need a 10-step skincare routine to achieve the results they're looking for," Stevenson said. "They also don't necessarily have the budget for it."

What does it take to make the shelf?

Whole Foods bans more than 200 ingredients from personal care products, including PFAS "forever chemicals," formaldehyde, and phenylethyl resorcinol, a skin brightener. It posts the full list on its supplier portal. "All brands, even if they're not currently working with us, can download that and cross-reference," Stevenson said. The vetting process can take up to a year.

Magic Molecule, a startup that launched in 2023 and reached Ulta, Target, CVS, and Erewhon within two years, went through that scrutiny. Its acne- and eczema-fighting spray uses hypochlorous acid, an ingredient Whole Foods had never carried. Before stocking it, the grocer reviewed the brand's scientific research, safety and stability testing, and FDA clearance documentation.

Founder and CEO Justin Kerzner called the hoops worth it. "Whole Foods is a great validator for us," he said. "People see the logo, they see the Whole Foods launch, and they believe we must be legit."

Mad Hippie, Whole Foods's top-selling facial care brand, built its entire business on those standards. Founders Sam and Dana Stewart formulated every product to Whole Foods's specifications before pitching in 2009. Fifteen years later, the brand sells nationally without external investment. "Just to be on the shelves, it means you have met Whole Foods' criteria," Sam Stewart said.

The retailer merchandises differently from Sephora and Ulta. Stevenson is wary of TikTok fads and sometimes waits out hot ingredients like collagen or niacinamide. "We want to bring in trends that are meaningful and that we see longevity in, as well as meeting our quality standards," she said. She also pushes back on bulky packaging in favor of glass, recycled paper, shampoo bars, and aluminum tubes. "If a package is unnecessarily bulky, I push back," she said. "We want products to look great, but we know we can achieve that without a ton of plastic."

Is everyone else chasing the same aisle?

Yes. Walmart, as part of a plan to remodel 650 stores by year's end, is building staffed beauty counters carrying premium brands like La Roche-Posay; it says three-quarters of its beauty sales growth has come from new and premium brands. Target, whose beauty sales rose 5% in 2024 while overall merchandise sales slipped, replaced its Ulta shop-in-shops this summer with Target Beauty Studio — launched in September across more than 600 stores with 90 brands, over two-thirds of them new to Target.

The economics fit the "Lipstick Effect": prestige beauty sales rose 4% last year and mass beauty rose 5%, per Circana, even as consumers cut back elsewhere. Indie Lee, whose fifteen-year-old brand just debuted Indie Lee Botanicals exclusively at Whole Foods, describes the backdrop bluntly: "There's total market saturation."

Whole Foods's counter is curation over breadth, backed by decades of trust — it became the first national certified-organic grocer in 2003. "We are probably a lot more strict than people think," Stevenson said. For a chain long mocked as "Whole Paycheck," building a reputation for value in at least one category could pay off precisely when its well-heeled customers are tightening their belts. As Stevenson puts it: "You really don't need to spend that much on something you're just going to rinse off."