LOOKFANTASTIC, the UK online beauty retailer owned by THG, published its Autumn/Winter 2026 trend report on 26 August 2026, built from its own site search and sales data. Source: https://retailtimes.co.uk/lookfantastic-reveals-the-beauty-trends-set-to-define-a-w26/.
Worth saying plainly at the outset: this is a retailer publishing data about its own platform, and reports like this are partly commercial documents. They tend to feature the categories the retailer would like to sell more of. That does not make the numbers wrong, and first-party search and sales data is considerably more useful than the survey-based trend content that fills this time of year, but it is a reason to read for pattern rather than to take each headline as a forecast.
The pattern is where the value is.
The comparison the report makes possible
Look at the ingredient numbers as pairs rather than singly.
Searches for PDRN rose 54% quarter on quarter on the retailer's site. On TikTok, the reported growth is 990.91% over three years. Searches for retinal rose 26.2% quarter on quarter on site, against 4,837% growth on TikTok. Ceramide and postbiotic search on TikTok is reported up 419%. Skin Barrier 2.0 terms are up 28.5% on site, with 182% growth over three years.
Different time bases, so these are not like-for-like percentages and should not be quoted as though they were. But the shape holds across every ingredient in the report. Growth on the social platform is dramatically steeper than growth on the retailer's own search bar.
That is not a surprise, and the reason it happens is not complicated. People encounter an unfamiliar ingredient in content, become curious, and search where they saw it. Only later, once they have decided they want to buy something, do they search on a retailer. The platform captures the curiosity. The retailer captures the intent.
Which means the two surfaces are not measuring the same thing at the same moment. They are measuring two points in the same journey, several months apart.
Why that gap is worth managing deliberately
For a brand at £500k to £5m, the practical use is timing.
If an ingredient is growing fast on TikTok and only modestly on retailer search, demand is forming. There is time to develop, to build content authority, to be one of a handful of brands with a credible position when the intent arrives. This is where launches are cheap, because you are not buying attention against twenty competitors.
If an ingredient is growing strongly on both, the demand has arrived. So has everyone else. You can still participate, but you are now competing on execution and spend rather than on being early, and the economics are completely different.
If retailer search is growing and platform search has flattened, you are at the end. That is the point at which a category gets crowded with late entrants and margin gets competed away.
The report's own numbers suggest PDRN and retinal are somewhere in the first category and K-beauty, with sales up 158% year on year and 80% of that in skincare, is well into the second.
The mistake this data invites
There is a wrong way to use a trend report, and it is the most common one: treating the list as a to-do list.
Nine trends, nine opportunities, and a founder comes out of it with a plan to do a bit of each. That is how a range becomes incoherent, and it is also how a brand ends up arriving late to nine things instead of early to one.
The list is not the product. The method is. What you want from a report like this is not the trends, it is the habit of checking two surfaces for the same term and reading the difference.
Making it a routine rather than a one-off
This is a fifteen-minute exercise, repeated.
Pick the three ingredients or formats closest to what you already sell or could credibly make. For each, record two things: how search is trending on a retailer platform, and how it is trending on TikTok. You will not always get clean percentages, and you do not need them. Direction and rough magnitude are enough.
Write the numbers down with the date. Repeat in ninety days.
What you are looking for is the term where the platform number is running hot and the retailer number is only starting to move. That is where a launch, a reformulation, or a serious content push has the best return, because you are entering while the audience is curious and before the shelf is contested.
Doing this four times a year gives you something most brands at this size do not have, which is a view of the cycle rather than a snapshot of it.
The other numbers worth noticing
A few of the report's category figures point at something structural rather than seasonal.
Skin electrical tools up 101.3% and hair loss and growth up 37% both suggest money moving toward outcomes that customers can verify. Wellness up 28% and hair perfume up 71% suggest the boundary of what counts as beauty continues to move outward. Fragrance sets up 13% in the first half is a reminder that gifting is a planning problem you address in September, not November.
None of those is a strategy on its own. Together they say the same thing the ingredient data does: demand is concentrating around things that do something specific, and it is showing up on social surfaces first.
The plain version
The useful output of this report is not nine trends. It is a method you can run yourself.
Two numbers, same ingredient, two surfaces. The distance between them tells you whether you are early, on time, or late, and that is the single most important input into what you launch next.