Trend Fatigue: Why Local Beauty Brands Need to Stop Chasing and Start Listening

Disclaimer: Opinions represented here are personal and do not represent those of ParagonCorp

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Something interesting is happening in the Indonesian beauty scene. Local brands, many of them less than a decade old, are sitting at the same shelves as L'Oréal, Unilever, K-Beauty and J-Beauty products. Additionally, an incoming wave of aggressive C-beauty labels all competing for the same shelf space and fighting for the same type of consumers. Which makes it a strange time to be cutting corners on understanding consumers.

Trend-Chasing Is Not a Strategy

Indonesian, and many other local beauty brands in Southeast Asia are gaining traction. Not only because they outmarketed the multinationals, but because consumers are genuinely seeking alternative products that feel closer to their lives. Products are developed on real consumer conditions: formulations made for humid tropical skin, ingredients based on  local wisdom and traditions (e.g., the Papuan red fruit, centella, turmeric, ginseng, etc). These factors carry a kind of cultural authenticity that some global players find difficult to replicate.

However, local brands tend to forget having that advantage by doing what everyone else is doing: watching what's blowing up on social media and moving fast to put something out. The most long-lasting glossy lipstick formula. Glass skin. Barrier repair. SPF everything. PDRN everything. Velvet Matte. Dewy. Satin. New ingredients, new routines, new vocabulary, the cycle refreshes faster than most brands can keep up.

The ultimate problem I see as a product researcher is that trend-chasing is a game that local brands will almost always lose. Multinational companies have bigger R&D pipelines, faster manufacturing turnarounds, and huge marketing budgets that can make a trend feel like it belongs to them even when it didn't originate from them. When a local brand competes on trend speed alone, it's playing on the wrong field. What local brands have, and what no multinational can easily buy, is proximity. Proximity to the consumer's actual life, her actual skin, her actual rituals. That's the competitive advantage worth protecting. And it requires a different kind of attention than a social listening dashboard can provide.

Beauty Decisions Are More Complicated than They Look

Part of what gets lost in the trend-chasing cycle is an honest reckoning with how complex beauty decisions actually are. Kalindi Mehta, who leads Consumer Foresight at Estée Lauder Companies, describes in a podcast with Greenbook, that modern beauty consumers as a skintellectual, someone who is "not just autopilot shopping every month" but actively researching, comparing, and forming opinions across multiple platforms. "The level of granularity and specificity is incredible," she says. "Specific not just to that individual, but to their life stage, their lifestyle, their skin type, the season, the time of day."

Spend five minutes in any Indonesian skincare discussions; a review thread on Shopee, anonymous review thread on Threads or X, female communities review thread such as Female Daily or Sociolla, the comments under a local brand's TikTok, and you'll find people who cross-reference ingredient lists, debate formulations, and share unsolicited second opinions on each other's routines. This is not niche behavior anymore. But beneath all that vocabulary and research behavior is something even more important: emotions.

Today's consumers expect performance, purpose, and emotional resonance in equal measure (Beautymatter, 2025). A skincare routine is rarely just functional among women. It can be tied to wisdom and habits; what a woman's mother or grandmother taught her, to the ritual of preparing herself before a long day, to what it means to take care and pamper herself. For example, I found out through a focused group discussion that a cushion isn't just to cover skin imperfections.

For some women, it’s a two minute ritual of reclaiming her power. “I feel good when the complexion on my face gives the perfect finish and my girlfriends compliment it as if I’m not wearing any makeup”. That’s the kind of emotional factor that drives loyalty in ways that a trending ingredient never will. Mehta puts it plainly: beauty is "deeply intertwined with personal aesthetics, with culture, with cultural trends, making them very uniquely personal and emotionally charged."

Proximity Isn’t Enough if You’re Not Paying Close Attention and Listening to Your Consumers

Here's what frustrates me about watching local brands default to trend-led product development as a product researcher. I’ve seen global players spend enormous resources trying to get close to the Indonesian consumers on the ground. Local brands are already there. That gap is the advantage and many aren’t taking advantage of it.

Deepening connection with consumers is what's driving consumer engagement and loyalty among the beauty brands building real staying power right now, not the ones moving fastest on trend. This comes from genuine curiosity about the person on the other side of the product: what she needs, what ritual the product fits into, what emotional territory it occupies in her life.

Here are some best practices worth being practiced:

1. Talk to consumers before formulating, not after. Consumer understanding isn't treated as a validation step at the end of product development. What does she actually struggle with? What does her skin feel like in the dryness and humidity of August versus the January rainy season humidity? What does she already use, and why hasn't it fully worked? These questions shape the product.
2. Go beyond claimed behavior. What consumers say in an interview/FGD and what they actually do are two different data sets. The most useful research in beauty sits in the gap between the two, in observed behavior, in the unprompted comment sections, in what she reaches for first when the tester tray is in front of her.
3. Treat sensory feedback as real data. Texture, scent, finish, and absorption aren't soft impressions to be summarized in a quote. They're functional criteria that drive repurchase, and they deserve structured evaluation early in the development process. A product that scores well on a concept test but feels wrong when applied on the skin will not survive word-of-mouth in a market where consumers talk as much as Indonesian beauty consumers do.
4. Stay curious past the first answer. The most revealing consumer insight rarely comes from the first response to a question, it comes from a series of follow-ups. Why does that matter to you? What would have to be true for you to switch? Who taught you that? Beauty is personal enough that consumers will go deep if you give them room to. Most quantitative surveys don't give them room to tell these stories.

What Leaning into This Looks Like

This isn't an argument against staying culturally current. Trends do matter, but there's a difference between being informed by trends and being driven by them. What truly makes a brand's story remarkable is a constant balancing act between understanding the market, identifying emerging trends, and the shifting needs and behavior of consumers.

BASE is one of the clearest examples of what it looks like when a local Indonesian brand actually does this well. Co-founders Yaumi Fauziah Sugiharta and Ratih Permata Sari didn't start with product formulations and design,  they started with a problem. When they surveyed Indonesian consumers, they found three consistent pain points: too many options for beauty and skincare and no way to decide, products priced out of reach of the average buyer, and formulations that simply didn't address Indonesian skin inclusivity.

That research finding became the building base to develop the product. The result was a personalized, skincare product built around a skin analysis tool that accounts for skin type, lifestyle, UV exposure, even sleep habits, all the variables that matter specifically for Indonesian consumers in a tropical climate. BASE raised $6 million in Series A funding in 2022, delivered products to all 34 provinces across Indonesia, and is expanding into color cosmetics, body care, and fragrance, the kind of growth that traces directly back to starting with consumer understanding. It requires a significant amount of investment, but it works precisely because the founders were willing to sit with the real problem long enough to actually understand it.

Local brands that are winning tend to have a clear point of view about who their consumer is beyond her skin type and her FYP. They know and can understand something specific and true about her life, and they let that shape not just the product but how they talk about it, what rituals they associate it with, what emotional territory they claim.

That kind of depth requires sitting with consumers longer, listening past the first answer, following the emotional thread of why a product becomes part of someone's daily life rather than just a trial purchase. It's slower work. But in a market where consumer scrutiny of perceived value is the biggest theme shaping the industry, it's the kind of work that actually builds brands (Mckinsey, 2025). Indonesian beauty consumers are ready for brands that take them seriously at that level. The question is whether local brands will slow down enough to meet them there.