On 24 August 2026 Beauty Independent published market share figures that complicate a story a lot of founders have been told for two years. Source: https://www.beautyindependent.com/tariffs-american-beauty-manufacturing-overseas-competitors/.
For the 52 weeks ended 13 June, US-made cosmetics and nail products fell to 22% share from 24.5%. US-made beauty and personal care fell to 19.6% from 21.2%. Over the same period Chinese-made cosmetics and nail rose to 19.5% from 18.4%, and Korean-made rose to 2.1% from 1.9%. In beauty and personal care, Chinese-made rose to 5.1% from 4.7%, and Korean-made rose to 1.7% from 1%.
The reporting places this against a tariff regime that included a baseline 10% duty from April 2025, China rates reaching as high as 145%, a Supreme Court ruling against the tariffs in February 2026, and a 12.5% duty on Chinese goods that remains in place.
So the share shifted toward the countries the policy targeted, during the window when the policy was most aggressive.
Why the policy did not do what it was meant to do
The theory behind a reshoring tariff is straightforward. Make imports expensive enough and domestic production becomes the rational choice, so capacity gets built at home.
It works when the only difference between the two options is price. In beauty, that is rarely the difference.
What sits behind a Korean or Chinese contract manufacturer is not just a lower unit cost. It is a dense local ecosystem of component makers, pump and closure suppliers, decorative finishing, raw material houses, testing labs and packaging engineers, generally within a short drive of each other, with a shared working culture around fast iteration. A brand can go from a concept to a shelf-ready sample in a timeframe that is genuinely hard to match, because every input has a specialist nearby who has done it four hundred times.
That is not a cost advantage that a duty can offset. It is a capability advantage, and rebuilding it domestically is a decade-long industrial project rather than a pricing decision. Meanwhile the products that need that capability, which is a great many of them in colour cosmetics and increasingly in skincare formats, keep getting made where the capability is.
What this means for a brand at £500k to £5m
There is a specific decision this data should prompt, and it is not a political one.
Over the last two years a lot of founders moved or considered moving production to domestic manufacturers, and the reason given was usually some version of certainty. Tariffs made overseas costs unpredictable, so bringing production closer felt like buying stability.
That instinct was reasonable. The problem is that it substituted one uncertainty for another. The tariff position has since changed twice, most significantly through a Supreme Court ruling. Anyone who restructured their supply chain around the assumption that duties would stay at their peak made a large operational commitment on a forecast that did not hold.
The lesson is not that reshoring is wrong. Plenty of brands are better served by a domestic manufacturer, particularly in simpler formats, for smaller batch sizes, for speed to a US retailer, or where "made in" genuinely matters to the customer. The lesson is that the decision has to be made on the things that do not move.
The things that do not move
Capability. Can this manufacturer actually make the product you want, to the standard you need, at the volume you can commit to. This is the question that quietly disqualifies most alternatives and it should be asked first, not last.
Minimum order quantities. A domestic manufacturer with a 20,000 unit minimum is not a viable option for a brand selling 6,000 units a year, whatever the duty position.
Total landed cost. Unit price plus duty plus freight plus the cost of holding more stock because the lead time is longer, and plus the cost of the batches you write off when a sample cycle takes three months instead of three weeks.
Lead time, and specifically what it does to your cash. A shorter lead time is worth real money to a small brand because it lets you hold less inventory and reorder closer to demand.
Compare on those four and you get an answer that stays right when the policy changes again, which it will.
The uncomfortable part
There is a version of this conversation that gets moralised, on all sides, and it is worth stepping around.
The data does not say American manufacturing is bad. It says that in this category, during this period, share moved away from it while the policy designed to protect it was at maximum force. Whatever you think should be true, that is what the numbers did.
For a founder, treating that as a political disappointment is a waste of a useful signal. Treating it as information about where capability sits is not.
What to actually do this month
Take your top three SKUs and write down, honestly, why each is made where it is made.
Some answers are strong. The manufacturer holds a formula you commissioned. They are the only one who can do your format at your volume. Their lead time lets you run lean on stock. The customer genuinely cares where it is made and it is part of your positioning.
Some answers are weaker than they look. We moved because of tariffs. We wanted to reduce risk. It seemed safer.
For any SKU in the second group, re-run the comparison properly: capability, minimum order quantity, total landed cost, lead time. You may well conclude you are in the right place, and now you will know why rather than hoping.
What you should not do is make another large structural change on the basis of the next headline. The last two years demonstrated exactly how expensive that is.
The plain version
Tariffs are a price instrument, and price was not the binding constraint in beauty manufacturing. Capability was, and it still is.
Build your sourcing decision on the constraint that is real. It will outlast every version of the policy.