Beauty M&A Hits a Record as Mid-Sized Brands Struggle to Sell

The beauty industry is buying more companies than ever and paying less for each of them. Beauty and personal care M&A reached a record 384 deals in 2025, 8 per cent more than a year earlier, while the median disclosed price fell from 26 million to 22 million US dollars, according to the annual report the consultancy Kearney published on 20 October 2026. Buyers are placing small bets or very large ones, and the brands in between are left waiting.

In brief

The record. Deals under 100 million dollars made up 77 per cent of activity in 2025, and the share of large deals doubled to 6 per cent. Among those large deals were L’Oréal’s acquisitions of Kering Beauté and Medik8 and e.l.f. Beauty’s purchase of Rhode. In the first half of 2026 the number of deals fell by 11 per cent, and 86 per cent of those with a disclosed value were below 100 million dollars.

The missing middle. Brands valued between 100 million and 1 billion dollars have struggled to find buyers. Large groups have also turned away from fast-growing labels: such brands accounted for 30 per cent of corporate acquisitions in 2024 and for 16 per cent in the first half of 2026. For brands seeking a buyer, growth now “needs to be backed by profitability” and a clear fit with the buyer’s business, said Marie Droll, a principal at Kearney.

Europe. European companies were the targets of 47 per cent of all deals in 2025, the highest share in eight years, and Europe held that share in the first half of 2026. North America recovered to 31 per cent after two years of decline, Japan rose from 9 to 12 per cent, and China fell from 10 to 2 per cent. Chinese buyers still made purchases abroad, including the French skincare house Payot in 2025.

The new buyers. The large beauty groups are restructuring their portfolios, which limits their room for new acquisitions, and private equity is filling the gap. Fabian Lux, a partner at Kearney, sees “selective opportunities rather than a broad recovery”. He expects more businesses to come up for sale as the restructuring continues into 2027.

Beauty M&A in 2026Swipe →

Why it matters

Kearney’s figures put numbers on what this year’s deals had already shown. In July, The Estée Lauder Companies ended its attempt to sell Too Faced, Smashbox and Dr.Jart+ without a buyer and kept the three brands. On 20 October, the day the report appeared, Chanel handed control of Capsum, the Marseille laboratory behind some of its skincare, to the Paris firm Motion Equity Partners. The large houses are rearranging what they own, and funds are taking what they let go.

The squeeze on mid-sized companies mirrors a squeeze on products. In luxury beauty, value is moving towards the biology beneath the surface, with laboratory science at one end and natural substance at the other, and the conventional prestige cream is caught between them. The deal market now applies the same logic to the companies themselves: the very small and the very large find owners, while the middle has to prove itself first.

For Europe, the numbers point to an opening. The continent supplies almost half of all targets in a market where most deals are small. As more businesses come up for sale into 2027, the choice of owner, whether a beauty group, a fund or a buyer from Asia, will decide where the knowledge behind beauty sits a decade from now.

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