Perfect brows, intense colour and natural beauty are key for 2021

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jan 26, 2021

Make-up may have been a weak beauty category last year but it could be stronger in 2021. That’s according to The Body Shop, which has analysed Google search data and said colour is set to be a big trend this year.

But colour isn’t just about make-up. Searches for pastel eyeliner and neon eyeliner have been rising, but so too have searches for colourful hair dyes, perhaps as people seek some bright spots following a dull year.

The beauty giant’s Top 3 Beauty Predictions for 2021 include colourful liner and hair, snatched brows as consumers seek perfect, prominent eyebrows, and natural beauty across hair, skin and make-up.

Not that the colour trend is unique to this year. The neon eyeliner trend has actually seen a 1,014% increase in searches since 2016, while pastel eyeliner grew 896% between 2016 and 2020 with “huge spikes” over the last year alone.

Pink, green and blue hair dye searches have also increased more than 200% since 2019.

As the snatched brow trend shows, eyebrows are a key focus and the retailer said that the biggest increase in searches in the last year has been for brow lamination (which perms and corrects brows) with growth of 1,495%, while the term soap brows (using soap instead of eyebrow gel) has seen a rise of 381%.

As for the natural trend, ‘fake freckles make-up’ has seen an increase of 180% in the last year and there were 34,800 searches for how to get wavy hair as people embraced more natural hair styles. There were also significant search numbers for ‘eye make-up natural’ and for ‘natural make-up looks’ in the UK.

It’s also interesting that  short hairstyles is the most Googled beauty trend around the world, and the UK searches for this term the most.

Short hairstyles sees average monthly search volume in Britain of 165,000, with microblading and eyelash extensions next on 60,500 each. Lip filler is fourth with 33,100 searches.

Next on the list are bob haircut, eyebrow tinting, boycut hairstyle, botox, HD eyebrows and eyebrow microblading. As we can see, brows figure heavily on the list.

In make-up specifically, consumers are also searching for bronzer, how to contour, natural make-up looks, lip plumper gloss, red lipstick, winged eyeliner, cream blusher, make-up for men, pink lipstick and eye make-up natural.