The GCC’s beauty industry is undergoing a fundamental shift from being a market that international brands sell into to becoming a market that increasingly influences what the global beauty industry sells, according to a new report from BeautyMatter.
Published August 30, the report, Progress Report on the World’s Most Misread Beauty Market, argues that the Gulf has evolved into a “global beauty innovation hub,” attracting international buyers, brands and investment while producing beauty brands that are increasingly finding audiences outside the region.
The shift is particularly visible at Beautyworld Dubai. While international brands once dominated the flow into the region, buyers from the US and UK entered the event’s top-ten visitor markets for the first time in 2025. Their presence, the report argues, reflects a reversal in the traditional direction of the beauty trade.
“The world didn’t just discover this market. It started following it,” Ravi Ramchandani, Event Director of Beautyworld Dubai, is quoted as saying.
The report points to fragrance as one of the clearest examples of the GCC’s growing global influence. The UAE is now among the world’s top 10 perfume exporters by value, with fragrance exports having increased nearly seven-fold over the past decade, according to UN trade data cited in the report. Seven of the world’s top 10 traded Middle Eastern fragrance brands also exhibit at Beautyworld Dubai.
That growth is creating space for a new tier of niche, artisanal and founder-led fragrance companies. The report notes that contract manufacturing has lowered barriers to entry, making “narrative, not scale” an increasingly important differentiator for emerging brands.
The category’s growth has also prompted the creation of a new platform. Beautyworld Dubai’s Quintessence niche zone grew from around 15 brands when it launched a decade ago to 100 brands in 2025.
“It became clear the category had outgrown the room we’d given it,” Ramchandani said. “It was structurally important enough to need its own event.”
The response is Notes Dubai, a global niche fragrance platform scheduled to launch in January 2027 at Dubai Mall Exhibition Centre.
Saudi shifts from market to operating base
Saudi Arabia represents another major change in the regional beauty equation. With more than three times the UAE’s population and the region’s largest economy, the Kingdom is increasingly being treated not as a market to enter remotely but as one in which brands need to establish a physical and organizational presence.
“The brands getting it right have stopped treating Saudi as a market they sell into and started treating it as a market they build inside,” Ramchandani said. “That means a Saudi-based team in Riyadh, not a regional manager who flies in from Dubai once a quarter and calls it coverage.”
The report says Saudi Arabia’s per-capita beauty spending has reached $164.90, while international companies are increasing their investments in local talent and infrastructure. L’Oréal, for example, opened its fifth professional hairdressing academy in the Kingdom in May 2026 and said it would double its Saudi workforce by the end of the year.
At the same time, local brands are gaining greater visibility. Nahdi, Saudi Arabia’s largest pharmacy chain, has introduced dedicated “Made in Saudi” shelves in partnership with the Saudi Exports Development Authority, supporting homegrown brands and their potential expansion into export markets.
For international marketers, however, localization cannot simply mean distribution. “When a brand is flat in Saudi while growing elsewhere in the region, the cause is almost always organizational, not market-driven,” Ramchandani said.
Creators amplify an established trade machine
The region’s digital beauty economy is also changing the way demand is generated. TikTok Shop has accelerated beauty sales, but Ramchandani argues that the infrastructure behind many of those successes was built long before social commerce took off.
“The brands winning on TikTok today spent a decade at Beautyworld, building US supply chains, securing distributor partnerships, getting onto Amazon,” he said. “TikTok sells the volume. The decade of trade-show work built the machine behind it.”
Creators are therefore becoming an additional layer in the traditional route from brand to distributor to retailer to consumer rather than replacing it.
“Creators haven’t replaced distributors,” Ramchandani said. “They’ve made the distributor’s job easier.”
Wellness moves beyond the ‘clean’ beauty conversation
Wellness and longevity are another area in which the GCC is positioning itself as a global growth market. The report cites Global Wellness Institute data ranking the UAE and Saudi Arabia first and second globally for wellness-market growth over the past five years.
Dubai’s establishment of the Dubai Longevity Authority in June 2026 further underlines the shift.
“When a city legislates longevity, it stops being a trend and becomes infrastructure,” the report says.
For beauty marketers, the development is creating new retail opportunities across pharmacies and wellness channels. At the same time, consumers are becoming more demanding about efficacy and evidence.
“When your customer is already tracking their biomarkers, they can tell whether a product works,” Ramchandani said. “The ones that win here are the ones that can show their work, efficacy data, clinical backing, measurable results.”
That is also changing the meaning of “clean” beauty. With Clean at Sephora covering thousands of products screened against more than 50 banned ingredients, the report argues that clean credentials are increasingly a baseline rather than a differentiator.
“Clean is the floor now, not the ceiling,” Ramchandani said.
From imported brands to regional exports
The report also highlights the growing international footprint of GCC-born brands. UAE fragrance companies including Lattafa, Armaf, Rasasi, Riffs and Afnan are competing with Western brands on Amazon and in US retail, while Huda Beauty continues to serve as a defining example of an Emirati beauty brand with global reach.
Kayali, founded by Mona Kattan, was the top trending fragrance brand at Sephora US in 2025, while Saudi beauty brand Moonglaze entered Selfridges London in 2024 and Sephora Middle East in 2026.
Investment is beginning to follow that export potential. Saudi and UAE startups raised $3.13 billion in venture capital in 2025, with Dubai-based AÏZA becoming the first consumer seed investment in the region for Peak XV Partners and reaching $2 million in annualized revenue within three months of launch.
The supply chain is evolving alongside the brands. The UAE now has an estimated 800 perfume manufacturing units, while Jebel Ali Port connects the country to more than 150 ports worldwide.
“The UAE has built a finished fragrance ecosystem at a scale and quality the market underestimates,” Ramchandani said. “Bottling, blending, filling, packaging, certification, export.”
His conclusion captures the report’s central argument: “In 2024, the question for international brands was: How do we enter the GCC? In 2026, the more useful question is: What do we do when the GCC starts entering us?”
“Dubai isn’t a market anymore. It’s a node.”
