Sarah Creal Beauty arrives at Space NK: How beauty brands are courting the 40+ consumer

Sarah Creal Beauty, the US skincare and make-up brand built explicitly for women over 40, has launched in the UK through Space NK, its first market outside America. It joins a cluster of brands, from Merit to Laura Geller Beauty, that have found growth by speaking to a consumer the wider industry has often overlooked.

Sarah Creal founded the brand in 2024 after a 30-year career as a product developer behind Prada Beauty, Tom Ford Beauty, Aerin, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and Victoria Beckham Beauty. The proposition centres on luxury, multi-use formulas that undergo clinical testing, with a focus on wear, repair and moisturisation. They are tested exclusively on 40-plus skin and photographed only on women over 40.

Before launching, Creal surveyed 2,000 women and found that 99% believed age-specific formulas and better representation were important - yet both were notably lacking in the market. The brand’s packaging reflects its focus, carrying the tagline: “For Babes 40+”.

Commercially, the bet appears to be paying off. Just three months after launch, the brand had secured listings in 22 Sephora stores, with that figure expected to rise to 102 by the end of 2026. It also generated $10 million in turnover in its first full year, according to the Financial Times, with Creal telling the paper: “You’re telling me that women of 40-plus only deserve two brands when Gen Z gets 20,000? That’s kind of the problem right there.”

Jane Cunningham, beauty journalist and founder of British Beauty Blogger, says the brand has sidestepped the language most associated with its demographic and managed to address ageing without dramatising it.

"Sarah Creal Beauty is built to speak to women 40-plus without making a drama about ageing," she tells TheIndustry.beauty. "In fact, the products are more about age support than anti-ageing, with peptide infusions in lip products, hyaluronic acid and caffeine in concealer and eye cream so that they don't settle or feel dry, and creamy kohls that won't drag delicate skin."

The product names, including The Adults Are Talking Solid Lip Serum, Back of the Cab Mascara and No Further Questions Peptide Lip Gloss, also mean that "40+ consumers aren’t left out of the playful parts of the beauty conversation", Cunningham says. The tone works, she adds, “except for calling us Babes, which I think lands better in the US.”

The range itself is built around concerns Creal says can become more pronounced with age, including creasing, smudging and products settling into fine lines. Hero products include Eyes Up Creamy Kajal Longwear Liner, an evolution of the Satin Kajal she developed for Victoria Beckham Beauty and later adapted for changing eyelids, and Face Flex Concealer & Complexion Enhancer, a high-coverage formula designed to provide complexion coverage without the need for a full face of foundation.

Space NK describes the range as addressing a growing group of women who have been “quiet quitting” their skincare and make-up routines. The brand is now available online and in 22 stores nationwide.

Sarah Creal enters a UK market where a growing number of brands are building businesses around simplicity, mature skin and more representative approaches to ageing.

So why is this consumer coming into focus now? Ruby Hammer, make-up artist and founder of Ruby Hammer Beauty, believes a combination of cultural and economic shifts has created a significant opportunity for the industry.

"Women over 40 are vibrant, powerful and hold immense purchasing power. The real shift happening now is that we are simply refusing to fade into the background or be made to feel invisible," she tells TheIndustry.beauty.

Cunningham adds that the consumer herself has changed, becoming more discerning, informed and critical of the products she buys. “They’re ingredient-focused, critical-thinking consumers when it comes to beauty purchases, and not desperate youth chasers,” she says. “They want easy, good-quality make-up that has a lighter touch but a heavier resonance.”

The brands already in the space

Laura Geller Beauty, founded in 1997 by the New York make-up artist of the same name, has built its proposition around its Italian-made Baked formulas, with a philosophy centred on helping women “feel confident in their skin at every stage of life”. The brand positions beauty as simple, approachable and, above all, confidence-building. Since 2021, it has exclusively featured women over 40 across its campaigns, model imagery and social content.

This week, it opens its first solo UK retail activation: a three-day pop-up at 6 Monmouth Street in Covent Garden, London, running from 18 to 20 September. Styled as an Italian bakery, the space will offer shade matching and appearances from Geller herself. The brand’s UK distribution currently spans LauraGeller.co.uk, Amazon UK, Freemans, JD Williams and QVC UK, with Boots.com set to follow.

Studio10, founded by Grace Fodor, also positions itself as “Pro Age”, claiming to have created the first make-up range specifically designed and formulated for mature skin. Its target consumer spans women from their late 30s through to their 60s and beyond. The brand’s proposition is built around a four-step routine - priming, perfecting, shading and shaping - with complexion products formulated with skincare and anti-pollution ingredients.

Merit, founded by Katherine Power and launched in January 2021, is designed for women aged 30-plus, with millennials and Gen X at its core and a sizeable following among baby boomers.  Its “five-minute morning” proposition, combined with a deliberately slow product cadence of around two launches a year, has helped distinguish the brand from more trend-driven competitors.

The UK was its first market outside North America in 2023, where it doubled its first-year revenue projections, as founding CMO Aila Morin told us in an interview marking the brand’s fifth anniversary earlier this year. Retail sales reportedly reached around $200 million in its fifth year, and the brand continues to attract consumers with its pared-back approach to beauty and focus on easy-to-use, high-quality products.

Other beauty brands appealing to this consumer through propositions centred on time, ease and simplicity include Jones Road Beauty, founded by Bobbi Brown in 2020. Rather than defining its consumer by age, the brand has built its proposition around natural-looking make-up designed for women with busy lives. Its Miracle Balm is among Liberty’s bestselling products.

Meanwhile, Trinny London notes that its new Fearless Skin Tint Drops have been formulated with the 40-plus woman in mind, offering weightless coverage designed to sit lightly on the skin without settling into fine lines, while enhancing its natural luminosity.

Speaking at the launch event last week, founder Trinny Woodall shared that the idea came directly from midlife customers who wanted a foundation that would not settle into fine lines and wrinkles, but instead enhance the skin’s natural radiance. The answer was to create a formula containing niacinamide, hyaluronic acid and evodia extract, which helps to smooth the skin.

While Hammer, who founded Ruby Hammer Beauty in 2019, welcomes the attention on a demographic she belongs to, she questions the premise of an age-gated shelf. She supports the focus on this consumer but does not believe that turning 40 requires a new category of products, with her line instead focused on versatility, performance and products that work across generations and skin types.

"While I absolutely celebrate brands focusing on this demographic, my personal philosophy takes a slightly different angle," Hammer explains. "I don't believe we necessarily need a whole new category of 'specialist products' the minute we hit a certain milestone."

She adds: "Age is not a skin type. You can have dehydrated skin in your twenties or oily skin in your fifties. You don't need a different lipstick or foundation simply because you turned 40... you need products that suit your skin's current condition and features."

Her argument is that application matters more than a formula’s marketing claims. “You can buy a gorgeous foundation formulated to ‘not settle into fine lines’, but if your skin isn’t prepped correctly, if you apply too much, or if you don’t use the right brush to buff it in, it will still sit in those lines. As we mature, it’s our application habits that need to evolve.”

That philosophy underpins her next brand campaign, “Any Face, Any Age”, which launches this week. The brand’s website takes a similarly inclusive approach, with editorial content offering practical advice such as “Makeup Tips for Women Over 40”.

"My ultimate advice is to get to know your face and your unique features. Be guided by technique, the finish you want, and the ingredients that serve your skin – not by the word 'mature'. I want women to stop focusing on the number on their birthday card and simply enjoy the ritual of enhancing who they are today, with absolute confidence," says Hammer.

That tension - between creating products specifically for an ageing consumer and rejecting the idea that women should be defined by their age - is likely to be one of the central questions facing the category as more brands turn their attention to the 40-plus consumer.

What the industry will watch

For Cunningham, Sarah Creal Beauty will be one of the brands to watch as the category evolves. She describes the UK market as “over-saturated” with near-identical cosmetics brands, but sees Sarah Creal Beauty as “a sophisticated, age-appropriate and well-edited arrival into the bloated make-up market”.

“Brands tend to go where the money is, so many will be watching Sarah Creal Beauty to see if downplaying anti-ageing and upselling age-appropriateness is something that will work in the long term,” Cunningham concludes. “The success of this brand will be determined by 40+ women feeling included, heard and relevant - outreach will be important to maintain the age-inclusive message.”