The Future Of Skincare Is More Than Skin Deep

Dr Milan Shah at work. A physician working across aesthetics and regenerative medicine, Shah has also played an integral role in Obagi Medical’s ALOHA real-world evaluation programme, giving him a valuable clinical perspective on the convergence of skin health, aesthetics and longevity.

Next Health

For decades, skincare has understandably concentrated on what we can see. Yet some of the most interesting developments in the category now start much further beneath the surface, as beauty, aesthetics, preventative health and longevity begin to overlap in ways that could fundamentally change what consumers expect from skincare and where they expect to find it.

There is often a disconnect between the linear way businesses are structured and the far less linear way consumers actually live and shop. Categories, departments, and specialisms may make perfect operational sense, but customers rarely think within those boundaries; they think about the outcome they want.

In beauty, that increasingly reaches beyond looking younger or addressing a specific concern towards how people feel, function and age, with skin becoming part of a much wider picture. It is a shift I have seen play out across many retail and consumer sectors, and one that becomes particularly interesting when long-established category lines start to blur.

The recent partnership between Obagi Medical and Next Health is a good example of what happens when those lines start to move. Around the launch of Obagi’s NU-GEN Cellular Renewal Serum, the two businesses brought skincare together with Next Health’s wider approach to longevity, including 3D skin scanning and personalised routines through a series of Southern California activations.

The partnership is interesting because neither business has had to abandon its expertise and traction to make it work. Instead, skincare becomes an entry point into a broader health conversation, while longevity becomes relevant to a consumer who may have arrived through beauty.

Self-Care Investment

Dr Milan Shah has been working across aesthetics and regenerative medicine long before the convergence of beauty, health and longevity became such a prominent conversation. He leads the regenerative aesthetic medicine division at Next Health, a longevity and wellness platform that combines wellness, longevity and aesthetic treatments under one clinical model. His practice focuses on regenerative approaches to skin health, treatments aimed at supporting the skin’s own repair mechanisms rather than solely masking signs of aging.

Dr Shah is seeing that evolution in the questions patients are asking. “How do I look younger?” is increasingly giving way to a broader consideration: “how do I function, feel and age better?”

Covid accelerated an already developing focus on health and prevention, but the more lasting change can be seen in how consumers connect the different parts of their wellbeing. Beauty increasingly sits alongside fitness, nutrition and preventative health rather than apart from them, with looking well and feeling well becoming much more closely connected in both behaviour and spend.

Dr Shah sees the same change clinically, with patients increasingly combining skin health, metabolic and cellular support and more traditional aesthetic treatments into longer-term programmes rather than arriving for an occasional correction.

As he explains: “Over the next five years, I think we’ll stop asking patients ‘what do you want to fix’ and start asking ‘how do you want to age,’ and the treatment plan that follows will pull from both worlds at once, because it always should have.”

There is an important business implication here too. A customer who previously appeared for a product or occasional treatment may have many more relevant touchpoints across the year when skincare, aesthetics and health are considered together.

And done well, that can create a deeper relationship and potentially greater lifetime value, but the emphasis has to remain firmly on the results More interventions are not automatically better interventions, particularly where health is concerned.

The Search for Longevity

The word longevity can conjure up a rather predictable customer: older, affluent and determined to hold back time. The emerging consumer is much more interesting than that.

McKinsey’s wellness research found that Gen Z and millennials account for 36% of the US adult population but 41% of annual wellness spending, while younger consumers are also more likely than older generations to say they are increasing the priority they give to wellness. Appearance now sits among Gen Z’s leading wellness priorities alongside health and sleep.

Younger consumers have grown up with skincare routines, fitness tracking, nutrition, wearables, sleep scores and a language of optimisation that previous generations largely encountered later in life. Prevention therefore doesn’t necessarily feel like something to begin at 50; it can be part of how they think about themselves at 25.

Dr Shah has a great analogy for regenerative aesthetics, describing it rather like a 401(k): something you start earlier in the hope that the investment compounds over time. It captures the change rather neatly because the aspiration is no longer necessarily to reverse something visible; increasingly, it is to protect what you already have.

For beauty businesses, that potentially changes the length of the customer relationship considerably. It also raises the bar around responsibility because if we invite younger consumers to invest earlier and for longer, the evidence behind what they are buying has to deserve that commitment.

Excitement needs evidence

As the category expands, so does its vocabulary. Regenerative aesthetics, cellular health, NAD+, NMN and mitochondrial function are increasingly entering beauty conversations, and this is where I think curiosity and scrutiny need to travel together.

Beauty consumers have become remarkably knowledgeable, and as the industry moves closer to medicine and preventative health, their expectations around proof are only going to increase. Brands should welcome that. Trust is far more valuable over a decade than a spectacular claim is for a season.

The wider backdrop to will be brought to life at Next Health’s upcoming Longevity Summit in Nashville (September 12) where conversations across preventative health, diagnostics, performance, aesthetics and longer-term wellbeing will take place featuring leading experts.

Future Gazing

Retail has already been moving into services and diagnostics; beauty brands are developing closer relationships with clinicians; aesthetics businesses are thinking much more about skin quality; and longevity providers are recognising that how someone looks can be part of how they think about their wider wellbeing.

Dr Shah describes the future as treating “the person as one integrated system: skin, cells, and health, working together, not treated as three different appointments.”

Skincare will, of course, continue to be about brilliant formulations, routines and treatments. But its next chapter looks broader than the bathroom shelf, and the businesses that understand that skin can be part of a much bigger conversation about health, confidence and how we age may find that the future of skincare really is much more than skin deep.