DIY Skincare Is Growing Fast — Is It Costing You Sales?

DIY Skincare Is Growing Fast — Is It Costing You Sales?

Natural and organic skincare is the fastest-growing segment of the global cosmetics market. Industry analysts have tracked consistent double-digit growth for years, driven by consumer demand for cleaner formulations, transparent ingredient lists, and products that align with broader values around health, sustainability, and ethical sourcing.

For independent health food stores, natural retailers, and co-ops, this should be a tailwind. In many cases, it isn't — and understanding why requires a closer look at exactly who is driving that growth, and what they're doing about it.

The Fastest-Growing Customer Is Also the Most Likely to Stop Buying

The natural and organic skincare consumer is not a casual buyer. She researches ingredients. She reads labels and knows what she's looking at. She cares about where things come from, how they're made, and whether the claims on the front of the package hold up against what's listed on the back.

She is also — increasingly — making her own products at home instead of buying them.

This is not a fringe behaviour. DIY skincare has grown into one of the most active segments of the broader maker movement, with millions of active practitioners sharing formulations, techniques, and sourcing recommendations across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and dedicated forums. What was once a niche practice has become mainstream within exactly the consumer cohort that natural retailers depend on most.

The same values that brought her into your store — ingredient transparency, clean formulation, distrust of marketing claims — are now motivating her to bypass finished products entirely.

Why Customers Are Making Their Own

Several forces have converged to make DIY skincare both accessible and appealing to exactly the customer natural retailers have built their business around.

Ingredient literacy has crossed a threshold. A generation of consumers has learned not just to read labels, but to understand them. They know what an emulsifier does. They know the difference between a fragrance-free product and one that uses "unscented" to mask synthetic compounds. They know which actives are worth paying for and which are present at concentrations too low to matter. Once a consumer reaches this level of knowledge, the value proposition of a finished product becomes harder to justify.

The economics are difficult to ignore. A consumer who understands that a $42 natural face cream contains roughly $4 worth of ingredients — and who can buy those same ingredients for $20 and make six jars — has done math that is hard to un-do. Cost of living pressure has sharpened this calculation considerably. In a tighter household budget, the DIY option isn't just appealing on principle; it makes obvious practical sense.

Social media has solved the knowledge gap. The traditional barrier to DIY formulation was knowing how. That barrier is largely gone. Detailed tutorials — covering emulsification, preservation, texture adjustment, and active incorporation — are freely available and widely watched. A consumer with no prior formulation experience can, in an afternoon, learn enough to make a functional moisturiser, body butter, or facial serum. The community around DIY skincare is active, generous with knowledge, and continually growing.

Trust in "natural" claims is eroding. Greenwashing has consequences. As consumers become more sophisticated, many have concluded that the label "natural" on a finished product is not a reliable signal of what's actually inside it. Making products from scratch — from ingredients they've sourced and chosen themselves — eliminates the uncertainty. It is the most direct form of ingredient transparency available.

Why This Is Particularly Hard for Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

Online retailers and direct-to-consumer brands can respond to the DIY trend relatively easily — by adding raw ingredients to their product mix, creating educational content around formulation, and building community around their sourcing story. Their infrastructure supports it.

Brick-and-mortar natural retailers face a more difficult set of challenges.

Stocking raw ingredients is not straightforward. Finished skincare products come shelf-ready: labelled, packaged, with an established retail category, known turn rates, and supplier relationships. Raw ingredients — shea butter, carrier oils, cosmetic butters — require different buying relationships, different packaging considerations, and in many cases different shelf categorisation. Retailers who haven't stocked them before are starting from scratch.

Turn rates and unit economics are unfamiliar territory. A retailer who understands how to buy and sell finished skincare may not have reliable data on how raw ingredients move at the shelf level, what the optimal pack sizes are for retail versus bulk, or how to price them competitively against online commodity suppliers. The learning curve is real.

The category lacks established retail infrastructure. For finished natural skincare, there are well-established brands, broker relationships, and planogram templates. For raw DIY ingredients at the retail level, that infrastructure is much less developed. Retailers are often building the category from scratch without the usual scaffolding.

Supplier quality varies enormously. Not all raw ingredients sold at retail are appropriate for cosmetic formulation, and quality inconsistency — different colour, texture, or performance batch to batch — erodes customer trust quickly. Sourcing reliable, cosmetic-grade ingredients from suppliers who can provide traceability and consistency documentation is harder than it looks.

Education falls on the retailer. When a customer buys a finished cream, the label does the work. When a customer buys raw shea butter intending to formulate with it, they may need to know its melt point, how it behaves in emulsions, what applications it suits, and how to store it. Retailers who want to serve this customer well need to be able to speak to those questions — and not all are equipped to do so.

The Underlying Challenge

What makes this trend structurally difficult for independent natural retailers is that the DIY skincare customer is not a lost customer in the traditional sense. She hasn't gone to a competitor selling the same finished products at a lower price. She's exited the finished product category altogether.

Competing for her on price or assortment within finished skincare doesn't address the underlying shift. The question facing natural retailers who want to hold onto this customer is whether they're willing and able to follow her into the category she's moved into — and whether they can do so in a way that meets the standards she brings to it.

That's a more fundamental challenge than a typical competitive threat. It requires rethinking what a natural skincare category looks like in a retail environment, and what role raw ingredients play within it.

A Note on Sourcing

For retailers considering whether to move into raw ingredients, sourcing quality matters more than in finished goods — because your customer will notice. The natural and organic skincare consumer who is formulating her own products has strong opinions about ingredient origin, processing method, and ethical supply chains. A commodity ingredient sourced through a broker chain with no traceability won't satisfy her, even if it carries an organic certification.

The ingredients worth stocking are the ones that can stand up to her questions: where it came from, who produced it, how it was processed, and whether the people at the origin of the supply chain were fairly compensated. That level of sourcing transparency is available — but it takes deliberate supplier selection.

If you're a retailer exploring the raw ingredients category and want to talk through sourcing options, Baraka works directly with independent natural retailers across Canada and the US.

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