Beyond the hot flush

FITH Futures

Oct 16

5 min read

It’s Menopause Week, again. But is the beauty industry truly invested in Gen X women?

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By mid-October the inbox has a theme. Cooling mists, magnesium sprays, a “hormone-harmonising” serum and a firming cream for “menopausal skin”, all addressed to the same woman and all timed for World Menopause Day on Sunday 18th October. For Gen X woman, this is the one week of the year when the beauty industry looks you in the eye, and it mainly wants to talk about your hot flushes.

To be fair, the conversation was overdue and 59% of UK women over 50 do want beauty to talk more openly about menopause (IM Associates). But the irritation comes when the week ends and our Gen X-er goes back to being invisible - until the next one.

Two dimensions, one woman

Look at how the 45-plus woman is actually sold to and you find only two settings: menopause and anti-ageing. The latter is spreading from skincare into make-up through firming, lifting, blurring and “correcting”. Both treat her face and body as a problem to be managed. Neither has much to say about her taste, her money, her sense of humour or the fact that she has been buying lipstick (No 17’s Twilight Teaser and Sweet Sizzle, since you ask) since Smash Hits was on the newsagent’s shelf.

Gen X have noticed. A third of over-50s in Great Britain say brands focus too much on anti-ageing (YouGov, March 2026) while NIQ finds 82% of Gen X say anti-ageing benefits matter but only 19% say most brands meet those needs.

So the industry manages to talk about little else while still failing to deliver it, which takes a certain talent.

“It all has to come from the age cohort you are serving.

It is VERY obvious when this is not the case”

Alexandra Scolding, Beauty Buying Director

No wonder she feels unseen

If those are the only two ways women are spoken to, the rest of the data follows. Only 14% of UK women over 50 feel like the target consumer for beauty brands, and 45% say the industry has not supported them as they have aged (IM Associates). 72% say they don’t often see people who look like them in adverts. Asked who make-up is aimed at, 8% said women their age and 82% said the under-50s.

Alexandra Scolding, a leading UK beauty buying director, told us where she believes the adverts go wrong: “Brands must invest in the full gamut of ingredients needed to make a product or campaign relevant: the make-up artist, the creative, the director, the model, the story, the clothes, the look, the researcher, the developers, the scientists - it all has to come from the age cohort you are serving. It is VERY obvious when this is not the case.”

This is a mainstream complaint, too:

69% of UK women aged 45 to 60 feel invisible to retail brands (The Behaviours Agency, 2023)
More than half of over-50s told YouGov that brands understand people their age not very well or not at all
Meanwhile, Kantar puts women over 55 at nearly half of all beauty sales in Great Britain, France and Spain.

The industry’s most valuable customer is also the one it seems least able to picture.

The CoverGirl U-turn

In July this year, one mass-market brand admitted as much in public. CoverGirl, which spent recent years chasing Gen Z with celebrity-led campaigns, said it would centre its marketing on women aged 45 to 55 (Global Cosmetics News, reporting Bloomberg).

Owner Coty linked the shift to years of declining market share and relevance, and now calls Gen X a significant and underserved market, which is the corporate way of admitting it had been looking in the wrong direction.

“Treat the customer intelligently and don’t think that an age cohort has to be ‘marketed’ to or patronised”

Alexandra Scolding, Beauty Buying Director

The brands that never needed a U-turn

Some brands got there first, and none of them led with a deficit. Trinny London launched in 2017 for women over 35 who felt ignored by beauty, and it grew sales by 25% in 2025 to more than $93m, with counters from Liberty to John Lewis and a Trinny Tribe of more than 91,000 (Glossy; CosmeticsDesign-Europe).

Gen X bring in half of Jones Road’s roughly $150m revenue (AlixPartners, citing The Business of Fashion), with founder Bobbi Brown stating she wants women to look, “their age, but the very best version of themselves” (Fast Company).

Laura Geller has turned mature-skin make-up into TikTok content women actually want to watch, spending much of 2025 at number two in TikTok Shop’s make-up category, with women over 40 making up most of its audience there (BeautyMatter, June 2026).

At Sephora, the retailer’s first Gen X-specific line Sarah Creal is now one of its fastest-growing new brands, according to its founder (ELLE, April 2026).

For Scolding, the winners in this market lead with the product.

“Those brands that are talking about the product first, its uses, its benefits, and that are science or performance led, get it right,” she says. “They treat the customer intelligently and don’t think that an age cohort has to be ‘marketed’ to or patronised.”

What Gen Xers actually want

Ask Gen X why they bother at all and the top answer is to feel good about themselves (NIQ):

More than four in ten over-50s say seeing people their age would make them more likely to buy (YouGov, 2026)
86% of UK women over 50 are interested in trying products made for their age group (CEW UK / 2CV).

That’s an audience leaning in with its card already out, waiting for someone to notice.

So by all means mark World Menopause Day on Sunday. Our Gen X-er will still be there on Monday, with the same spending power and the same interest in a good red lipstick, and she would quite like to be sold to as a whole person.