> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://components.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Avocado today, moonlight flower tomorrow - URL: https://components.news/avocado-today-moonlight-flower-tomorrow/ - Published: 2026-09-25T15:14:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-25T15:33:19.000Z - Description: Eye creams as trends, not developments - Author: Chris Good - Tags: Being Beautiful ## Summary - Across Sephora, skincare categories are more concentrated (with fewer winners per category) and more corporate-owned, while makeup is less concentrated and more independent, according to a Components analysis. - Eye cream is a notable exception that behaves far more similarly to perfume than exfoliator. None of the 87 brands competing in eye cream at Sephora holds more than a tenth of the category. - Where shoppers cannot converge on an answer, capital cannot converge on an answer; eye creams and other adjacent products therefore follow the dynamics of contingency, not the developments of technology. This structures the balance of demand between independent and corporate portfolios in skincare and makeup. --- The Ordinary accompanied the launch of its Lacto-PDRN 4% + B9 Eye Cream with the command that we "Reimagine What an Eye Cream Can Do." What an eye cream can't do is more obvious. Even if you concede that mortality and viscoelastic creep are a package deal, the under-eye region is fiendishly particular: your dark rings are not my crow's feet; tear trough deformity is a mess of causes and effects. And if a given unguent *does* depuff or hydrate or brighten or otherwise fix your periorbital region, then it seems that it will function identically anywhere else on the body (and vice versa): unlike the benzoyl peroxide that wards off breakouts or the SPF30 that prevents photodamage, dermatologists and skintellectuals disagree not only on the relative merits of competing eye cream ingredients, but on whether they offer any advantage over CeraVe or retinol in the first place. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/09/image.png) A 2024 *International Journal of Women' s Dermatology* [review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11175953/?ref=components.news) of "retinoids, vitamins C and E, peptides, ceramides, hyaluronic acid, caffeine, and niacinamidein” concluded that “most trials demonstrate the molecular improvements of topical ingredients to facial skin, rather than the changes explicitly observed in the periorbital region.” Other dermatologists have been less coy: Fayne L. Frey has [referred](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cosmetics-industry-investigating-safety-and-cost-of-products/?ref=components.news) to eye creams as “moisturizers that are put in little tubes that cost a lot,” while Andrea Suarez opens her “Ultimate Guide To Eye Creams 2025” [by stressing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9l1VZtzvQ&ref=components.news) “that you do not need an eye cream.” So, short of fillers and facial lifts, the solutions for the eye area are either the same as they are for the rest of the face, or offer area-specific benefits that are fleeting. This makes the eye area A) a site of incredible aesthetic significance that consumers feel the need to do *something* about, with B) equally incredible per-ounce price markups, but C) where there is no technical consensus on what is to be done. What this leads to is a category that is impossible to win and impossible to predict. Another way to say this is that eye cream is situated not as a development, but as a trend. First, a primer: [In June](https://components.news/biology-knows-no-prestige/), we looked at the relationship between price and demand on Sephora. This led us to a framework for understanding value propositions as leaning towards the technological or the contingent. In the broadest terms: goods like skincare are evaluated astechnologicalmeans to fixed ends, on systems you have no say over, while fragrance and makeup skew towards contingent space, where means and ends are subjective, relational, or unstable. Power tools, penicillin and SPF are technological; the building made with the tools, the clothes worn by the patient, and the makeup that goes on the sun-protected skin are contingent. A straightforward way to think of this spectrum is that *technological goods have right answers and contingent goods do not.* Or, as we put it previously: Whether Santal 33 works at all is up to you; no one decides if zinc oxide works but God. Last time, we looked at this axis from consensus to dissensus from the perspective of an individual shopper. To explain what it means for skincare, makeup and fragrance brands at scale, we'll return to Sephora. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/09/chart-2.png) Each dot is a category. A category on the far right is a category dominated by a small handful of brands. A category on the far left is not dominated by any players at all. The higher a category sits, the more it is made up of brands that are corporate subsidiaries of L’Oreal, Shiseido, Coty — and vice versa. The further to the top-right corner something gets, the more it’s a small number of corporate subsidiaries. The further to the bottom-left corner something gets, the more it’s a no-man’s land of indies. If Françoise Bettencourt acquired every last brand selling a toner, and rolled them all together under L'Oréal, then toner would be in the top-right corner. If you and I and everyone we know decided to get into selling our homespun mascara, then mascara would land in the bottom-left corner. What you see on Sephora is that skincare tends toward corporate consolidation, while makeup skews indie and dispersed. Why would this be the case? The readymade answer would be that indies are cool and nimble and better suited to narrowcasting microtrends to niche demographics. But is that right? Perhaps indies *are* more likely to win makeup because they’re “in touch” with today’s twentysomething in a way that Bernard Arnault is not. Even so, why would being in touch matter so greatly in makeup while being meaningless in skincare? The explanation we’d offer is that the advantages of being LVMH or L'Oréal — manufacturing capability, distribution, capital — are advantages at either *making* something work better(R&D), or *buying* something that works better (M&A). When two dermatologists started paying attention to AHAs, Johnson & Johnson ended up writing a check to Neostrata. When some doctor at Duke filed a patent on L-ascorbic acid bioavailability, L'Oréal was there to snap up Skinceuticals. Whether their calculus prioritized efficiency or efficacy, the suits could be confident that their investment would, *because their skin and the skins of others would not be changing all too quickly.* An AHA is an AHA tomorrow, and $0.50/oz cheaper is certainly $0.50/oz cheaper tomorrow. So there are only really two possible conditions under which The Ordinary loses market share: someone figures out topical elastin restoration, or someone figures out how to sell glycolic acid for half the price. This is all to say that in skincare, better is not only possible, but nearly universal. Bodies agree on the benefits of avoiding sunburns or increasing cellular turnover with retinoic acid. What exfoliates well for me will most likely exfoliate well for thee. This means that outcomes are not only stable, but predictable, and that as a result, capital can concentrate on a global optimum, whether through innovations or acquisitions. They not only manage this, but often do so through a single brand or hero product: Paula's Choice functionally *is* Unilever’s position in exfoliation, and holds 42% of demand in its subcategory. The Ordinary (under Estée Lauder via DECIEM) commands 35.2% of demand in peels and 30.5% of demand in serums. In fragrance and makeup, however, better is a function of skin type, complexion, cultural context, taste, and fashion. In other words, “better” is a function of non-FDA regulated contingencies, and therefore not so universal at all. This is why indies sit at parity with corporates in makeup, and why Estée, Unilever, L'Oréal and LVMH must bring a kaleidoscopic range of brands to the market: it is governed by preferences, and those preferences will not stay put. Thus Fenty leads foundation with as little as 10.5% of demand, and Too Faced takes first place in mascara while only managing 11.6%. The longevity of even these meagre leads is not guaranteed: Dior may make a killing with Addict Lip Maximizer today, but we hear nude and matte finishes are already on their way back in. L'Oréal's Urban Decay may have the eyeshadow market cornered right now, but what about tomorrow? If this makes it impossible for holding companies to monopolize a given makeup market through a single flagship brand, then the sole consolation is that their customers operate under the same compulsion. Fashion is never finished! ## Between value and valuation Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. We have made the radical argument that a cheaper or more effective skincare product is, in the eyes of its customers, a better skincare product. If this were the case, then you would expect to see the field dominated by multinational conglomerates with economies of scale or R&D advantages, putting skincare categories in the top-right corner. You do. If makeup were, conversely, an expanded field of self-expression and semaphore without objective answers or cutaneous optima, you would expect to see it mostly in the bottom-left quadrant. You do. All the while, you might expect to see perfume smack in the middle of corporate ownership on the far left of brand concentration, since subsidiaries and indies are equally likely to produce fragrances, and yes, you do. Which raises the question of why eye creams — a category with grave, universal aims and a clinical syntax — adjoin fragrance, which is really subject only to your personal whims and fancies. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/09/beauty1-2-1.png) First, eye creams have an extremely low brand concentration because every single skincare brand has an eye cream the way every makeup brand has a lipstick: Whatever the brand’s “philosophy” may be, it takes shape as an eye cream and sells it at the highest markup of any of its catalogue. (At Sephora, the average going rate for eye cream is $4.27/ml against a sitewide baseline of $0.82/ml.) But why should every brand have an eye cream? After all, to restate the obvious: eye cream is supposed to work. It will borrow any clinical claims or ingredients it can to position itself as the latest rational breakthrough in a long chain of technological developments stretching all the way back to Egyptian kohl and Victorian ceruse. But raiding the pharmacopeia for each new formulation has brought us no closer to a clinical or popular consensus that anyeye cream works any better or worse than a standard moisturizer — let alone as a universal solution to wrinkles. This is why Kiehl’s uses avocado, L’Occitane uses Provençal flower, Clarins wields a "Moonlight Flower cryoextract", and Clinique adds vitamin C. It is also why you find 87 brands at Sephora competing in eye cream (with the winner, The INKEY List, holding just 9.5% of demand — the thinnest lead in any skincare subcategory). That is because, as far as topicals are concerned, cosmetologists are about as far along at eliminating crows' feet as neurologists are at solving Parkinson’s. As a result, the shape of demand for eye cream on Sephora is nearly indistinguishable from that of perfume, because when a product making clinical claims evades consensus on its efficacy, it is purchased *as if it were a trend.* And a trend is not the same as a development, because a trend can not be predicted. Any development in technological space is really two things: a claim that something really is a certain way, and a claim on the method of achieving an outcome given those properties. It makes no more sense to call the adoption of the polio vaccine a trend than it would to apply the term to Matrixyl 3000\. The vaccine and the peptide alike follow from information about the world (that exposing the body to an inert pathogen protects it against that very pathogen, and that cellular turnover increases through peptide signaling) and an optimal way to achieve that outcome based on that information (intramuscular exposure to poliovirus, and topical peptides). In both cases, their existence was somewhat forced; information about the way things work got out. The meaning of *why* the polio vaccine and Matrixyl 3000 emerged is not really debated; the desire they were created to fulfill never moved. But we can debate the emergence of frosted lids forever and never settle on a satisfying conclusion. A true trend qua trend — a cultural contagion of uncertain duration — only occurs in contingent space. In this space, everything is an nth-order reverberation from a series of underlying shifts without a bottom. People wanted to be Bella Hadid and bought bronzer and BB cream, and why they wanted to be Bella and not Mother Theresa sits atop a mixture of hyperreality and carnal impulse. This is just how culture works: something happens, then something else happens obliquely connected to the first thing, and it’s up to the critics to figure out what exactly that earlier thing was. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-13-at-7.07.48---PM.png) So developments are biological or technological breakthroughs that result from reason, while trends are wholly relational. What this means — and we’d like every professional trend forecaster and industry analyst of any kind to please pay attention — is that *developments can be predicted, but trends cannot be*. Who doesn’t understand this distinction? To start, the entirety of trend forecasting and analytics, to whom a spike is a spike, be it for cherry cola lips or microneedling. What matters to them is that something, somewhere in the world, activated the circuitry of mimesis and now a line is going up on a dashboard. The very term “trend forecasting” tries to muddy this distinction and assert that trends are like any technical system, that just as we can more or less predict the weather, so can we, with the right intellectual machinery, see the whole cultural horizon. Unfortunately, reality won’t allow it. Da Vinci designed the helicopter 500 years prior to its creation; all of humanity on some level had expected ChatGPT since ELIZA. But not a soul foresaw the emergence of the mob wife aesthetic six months prior. And so if as a general rule, contingency is a space of trends while technology a space of developments — and if you can never predict the former, but you can sometimes predict the latter — then this is our assertion: Amid a lack of consensus, movements within an ostensibly technological category behave with the unpredictability of trends. And what this means is the immediate future of the eye cream category will be very, very hard to predict. This is why such a thing as “fad dieting” can exist. The goal of dieting is basically always the same (extend lifespan, don’t get cancer). Insert the right inputs, get the right output. On paper, it’s made for technology. The problem is we still have basically no idea what those inputs are. And so every year a new diet emerges that offers itself as the last word on the whole issue, as a final development, only to be immediately followed by a new development that it is *not* in fact the final word, until a new prophet with a new final word comes along, and so on, ad infinitum. What ought to be technological developments turn over so frequently that they take on trend-like instability. What will podcasters say we should eat in five years? Your guess is as good as the topical cure for undereye bags.