The Rise of Personal Care in Latin America

Latin America is now one of the fastest-growing personal care markets in the world, and the companies that pull ahead over the next decade will be those whose executives can hold a single promise of value, wellbeing, and sustainability together across every channel a consumer touches.

Few corners of consumer goods draw closer attention today, and the figures explain why. NielsenIQ reports value rising 7.3 percent year over year across the global beauty industry, with Latin America at 19.1 percent, second only to Africa and the Middle East. The Business of Fashion and McKinsey put the region near the top globally, with a 9 percent annual rate from 2019 to 2024 and a base-case forecast of 7 percent through 2030, while 62 percent of beauty executives in the same survey call Latin America promising. To understand what sits behind those numbers, and what they ask of the people running these businesses, we spoke with three leaders across the region: Omar Cardenas, who leads Revenue Growth Management for Latin America at L’Oréal; María Andrea Vargas, Country Manager for Natura Colombia; and Luis del Castillo, Talent and Culture Executive Director at Belcorp. 

What Is Driving Growth in Latin America’s Personal Care Market?

Two forces are working at once. Cardenas points to price as the immediate engine. “What’s driving growth most is price,” he says. “Units across Latin America have stalled since last year, and the growth has held through price increases that inflation made possible.” NielsenIQ points the same way at the global level, naming inflation as a major driver of the market’s expansion alongside rising incomes and new consumers entering the category. 

At Natura, Vargas sees the same growth from a different angle. “The growth is coming from the segments with more added value,” she says, “where specialization and a complete experience matter, a hair-care routine that adds treatments and targeted products instead of just the two basics.” 

That sophistication runs alongside a value movement rather than against it. Cardenas describes how an ingredient travels from premium signal to mass staple. “A few years ago hyaluronic acid was a real phenomenon, only a few brands had it and it was their emblem,” he says. “Now every brand has its own, so a consumer who would never have reached those products finds an accessible price and starts using the category.” That pattern shows up in the wider data, where the BoF and McKinsey survey finds 63 percent of consumers believe mass-market products perform just as well as premium ones. 

For premium brands, Cardenas argues, the answer is to keep moving. “The advantage we have as premium brands is innovation,” he says. “We know those brands will try to match us, but innovation is how you differentiate, innovation and education, explaining why one formula is better than another.” 

Underneath the price and the value movement sits a consumer who keeps moving, and del Castillo, watching from the talent side at Belcorp, puts that at the center. The first change he names is “a consumer chasing trends, always evolving, expecting products that fit very specific needs,” one who pulls the rest along, “a whole business and sector that change in step with them, demanding more all the time, as the trends themselves move fast.” 

How Are Consumers in the Region Changing?

Vargas starts with what beauty has come to mean. “Beauty isn’t only about physical appearance anymore,” she says. “The focus is more holistic now, about helping people feel better, keep their wellbeing over the long term, and prevent rather than repair.” That broadening matches what McKinsey describes as consumers widening their idea of beauty to take in wellness and personal care. 

Cardenas sees the regional consumer growing more particular as well as more sophisticated. Skincare routines that were once a single step have become full day and night regimens, and the products themselves are being built for the region. “There is heavy local innovation built for Latin American skin types and hair types, curls for example, that you don’t see in other regions,” he says, “tied to our skin and the environment we live in.” 

For Vargas, sustainability has moved from message to proof. “Consumers reward concrete, tangible actions, removing single-use plastic for instance, because it’s easier for someone to verify that you’ve taken out plastic than to check a claim like a plant-based formula,” she says. Cardenas frames the same pull through L’Oréal’s L’Oréal for the Future program, which pairs product innovation with measurable cuts in environmental impact, the kind of concrete proof a label-reading consumer can check. 

Del Castillo, from Belcorp, places it on a longer timeline. “Sustainability, social impact, how a company lives alongside its stakeholders, we have worked on that for fifteen or twenty years now,” he says. What has changed, in his telling, is the medium rather than the mission. “Social media is changing how those goals get reached, through a different kind of contact with people.” 

Vargas keeps coming back to how much that consumer now knows. “One in two women say they know enough about ingredients,” she says, “so the hyperinformed consumer questions claims and looks for credibility and a professional’s endorsement.” 

Why Does Omnichannel Decide Who Wins in Beauty?

That better-informed consumer does not move in a straight line, and the path to a sale has become long and scattered. “The Colombian consumer visits on average eight different channels to research, interact, and finally buy the same product,” Vargas says, which makes the experience itself, and the sense of being understood, the place where value is created. 

Cardenas sees the channel mix tilting toward digital faster than the region is used to. E-commerce still sits below other markets but grows well above the rest of the trade, and social commerce is early. “Social commerce, buying straight from TikTok, is already a reality in other regions and very strong,” he says. “Here it’s only starting, so it matters to win that ground early and do it right.” NielsenIQ finds social commerce already driving 68 percent of beauty purchases worldwide, a level Latin America has yet to reach. 

What Leadership Does Personal Care Now Demand?

We have traced how the region is growing, how its consumer has grown more informed and more demanding, and how the path to a sale now runs across many channels at once. Each of those pressures reaches the same place in the end, the people running these businesses, and together they are changing the kind of leader the work demands. The three leaders describe the same move, away from fixed expertise and toward range and the habit of relearning. Cardenas has watched it in the profiles companies now seek. Demand has grown for roles that barely existed a few years ago, in revenue management and in digital, and he expects the next change to reach the commercial side, where habits have been slowest to move. “The commercial side will be very important, where the old way of selling has to adapt,” he says. “Commercial has been left to keep doing things the way it always did, and that has to change.” 

Vargas names the quality sitting underneath that demand. What once mattered mainly in one function has become a baseline for all of them. “Learnability, the habit of constant learning, used to matter mainly in marketing,” she says. “Now it’s a must across many areas, because what works today goes out of date so quickly.” That short shelf life is why she looks past a single discipline. “We need hybrid profiles that can move between marketing, data, consumer insight, and sales, with a wide analytical view,” she says, “because a leader confined to one specialty falls short.” Skill on its own does not keep these people either. “Purpose has become non-negotiable,” she says. “People don’t stay for the salary or the learning alone, but for the wider impact they can have.” 

At Belcorp, del Castillo frames the same change through talent, and he starts from how fast and how globally it now moves. “It’s happening faster and in a more global way, so it isn’t only the consumer around us anymore,” he says. “Trends now spread through social media, through tools like TikTok and YouTube.” That global reach puts Latin American companies in the same contest as players of every kind and location, for talent as much as for customers, which is what makes the talent question pressing. He sees it landing on three fronts: a digital build already under way that needs people who can develop the expertise; a wave of new technology, AI included, that is transforming existing roles rather than adding them; and a kind of leadership able to draw the most from the people now coming through. “New technologies, AI and everything behind it, are transforming roles more than adding new ones,” he says, reducing the operative part and pushing even entry-level roles toward the ability to question, interpret, and read the whole context rather than complete a task. He is blunt about the capabilities this calls for. “Critical thinking, strategic thinking, and a deep capacity for analysis,” he says, now wanted “from the very start of the organization, not in roles a bit higher up.” 

He is precise about which part of a role the technology takes. “The word I’d use is extinguish, because the role doesn’t disappear,” he says of the analyst. “What’s being extinguished is the operative part.” Ordering data, building a deck, running a process, the tools handle that now, which moves the work to understanding the problem and asking the right questions before anyone reaches a solution, and frees time that has to show up as productivity and faster speed to market. 

What stays, once the operative part is gone, is the capacity to learn, the same quality Vargas named. “What we need, and we talk about a lot at Belcorp, is the agility to learn,” he says. “What I know today won’t be enough for the challenges coming, and they’re not five or ten years away anymore, they’re three or four months.” The uncertainty is the whole point for him. “If we knew what the market will need in two or three years, we would already be doing it today.” Belcorp hires for that from the start, treating experience at the entry level as worth less than a high orientation to learning he calls curiosity, proactivity in self-development, and the ambition to grow. The standard holds all the way up, and asked whether the formula changes for senior roles, his answer was, “Identical, there’s no change.” The BoF and McKinsey survey reads the same way from the top, ranking AI and digital transformation among the themes executives expect to matter most. 

Which Leaders Will Turn the Region’s Growth into Lasting Businesses?

For the companies competing in Latin American personal care, the implication is direct. The market is growing, but it is also more demanding, better informed, and spread across more touchpoints than before, and the edge will sit with organizations that can offer one coherent promise to millions of consumers while still treating each as an individual. Vargas calls that orchestrating coherence at scale. “The real test for a leader in mass consumer goods is orchestrating coherence at scale,” she says, “offering a consistent promise of experience to millions of people while still respecting each one as an individual.” She extends it to culture and to the company’s standing as an employer, since a better-informed market makes an organization more visible and less forgiving of inconsistency. The leaders who can hold that together, pairing analytical range with empathy and a sense of purpose, will be the ones who turn the region’s growth into lasting businesses. Finding and developing them is the real work behind the rise of personal care. 

About the Author

Camila Vargas is a Managing Director at Stanton Chase Colombia and the Regional Sector Leader for Consumer Products and Services across Latin America. She joined the firm in March 2017 and was appointed Managing Director in May 2023, bringing more than 15 years of consulting experience in communication strategies, branding, and human talent across both executive search and executive assessment. Her knowledge of the Colombian executive market spans local and multinational clients in technology, professional services, consumer goods, digital transformation, marketing, and sales, and she leads the Consumer Practice Group for the region with added focus on technology and life sciences and healthcare. Her functional work also covers sustainability and ESG and startups and scale-ups. Camila holds a Master’s degree in Strategic Marketing from CESA, alongside a background in graphic and industrial design, and she completed the Executive Development Program at INALDE. 

Monica Brogeras is a Managing Director at Stanton Chase in Mexico City, focused on leadership and organizational transformation through talent development. With a background in market research and strategic marketing, she helps clients identify forward-thinking leaders who challenge the status quo and deliver results, drawing on earlier work as a market research consultant for national and international brands in the consumer and retail sectors and on marketing and customer experience roles for top-tier financial products at American Express. Across her career she has partnered with clients in industrial and consumer products and services sectors, leading projects spanning sales and marketing, finance, and human resources, across both executive search and executive assessment. Monica holds a Master’s in Business Management from the Universitat Central de Catalunya and a Master’s in International Marketing from EADA Business School, is Hogan-certified for assessment, is certified in coaching by the NeuroLeadership Institute, and currently leads global initiatives to strengthen internal learning and talent development at Stanton Chase.