For years now, second-hand beauty has been positioned as something to watch, and potentially an important part of the vanguard of a new wave of resale that’s already made significant inroads in fashion. Publications have been flagging its potential for more than a decade. In 2015, Refinery29 profiled Glambot, one of the first marketplaces dedicated to the secondary market for makeup. By 2020, Vogue Business was predicting a boom, pointing to activity on eBay and Poshmark as early signals of momentum (with the important caveat that second-hand and used are not interchangeable). In the years since, the story has resurfaced, being repeatedly popularised by TikTok trends, media spotlights of resale platforms, and market forecasts hinting that beauty might be able to trace at least part of fashion’s resale trajectory – projected to grow 126 percent by 2031.
The obstacle however, is fairly obvious: Hygiene. Apparel and footwear resale carries little risk beyond wear and tear, and even if you do buy something that has the olfactory or visible hint of a past life you’d sooner not encounter, the ability to wash or mend the item often erases any worries buyers might have. Makeup and skincare raises more immediate questions about safety. These products expire, they degrade, and experts regularly point to the possibility of bacteria, fungus, or contamination – and those warnings linger in the minds of consumers. Then there’s the possibility of fake products, which are both easier to spot in clothing, where construction is on full display, and less risky. But powder or cream in an already-opened jar? That’s both harder to identify and consequently much scarier to put on your skin.
The economic arguments in favour of resale might be the same between fashion and beauty, which is why consumers in both segments are feeling the pull of value, but so far that need for caution has kept beauty resale firmly in the “niche” category. And where fashion resale has scaled thanks to the strength of platforms alone, beauty’s path forward depends on the addition of a different kind of scaffolding that can build trust not only in payments, buyer protection and so on, but at the fundamental product level..
Vintage stores, for example, have always been a fixture of fashion retail, but it’s technology that allowed a platform like Vinted to become the biggest clothing retailer in a major European market. Beauty has the same need, but more acute, and supplemented by the additional challenge of hygiene. Simply standing up and scaling an equivalent to Vinted or Vestiaire Collective will not, on its own merits, solve the problem.
At the simplest level, platforms have also already started to do that foundational work. Glambot, for instance, takes in pre-owned products, inspects, sanitises, and reseals them before they go back into circulation. Judging from the “How We Clean” section of their website, the process is laborious and unglamorous, but it does provide a much needed baseline for hygiene standards.Yet scale is the problem: doing this one product at a time is manageable for a small platform, but the growth of a secondary market business model requires systems that can process, validate, and guarantee hygiene at speed and volume. That is where more advanced technologies, namely, automation, quality control workflows, even AI-driven inspection, will need to come into play.
Authentication is the second barrier, and it carries the harder edge. Counterfeit beauty is already a multi-billion-dollar trade, and resale only amplifies the risk. Once a product changes hands, provenance gets murky. Anyone can take a branded jar and fill it with something else, and tamper-proof seals will only get us so far.
Digital product passports could, in theory, steady the ground. Batch codes, manufacture dates, ownership history, all logged from day one. That kind of record proves where a product started, and just as important, where it sits in its lifecycle. If the passport shows a moisturiser was made three years ago, the buyer knows it’s out of its safe-use window. But the weakness is obvious. A passport can’t stop someone tampering once the seal is broken. Trust then moves to other checks performed by either third parties (if beauty does end up ceding this market to external players) or dedicated first-party teams. And all their work would need to be technology backed: tamper-proof packaging, image recognition, even lab testing though the economics quickly break down at that point.
As with most corners of the industry, AI has its role to play here too. Quality control feels like an obvious use case, as image recognition tools can flag products that appear damaged or expired, while data models can verify listings against known product information, reducing fraud and error.
At a high level, the opportunity for beauty to make deeper inroads into the secondary market is there, and the pull for consumers is somewhat obvious – even if the upsides for brands seem more than offset by the potential drawbacks. Discontinued products and limited editions generate real demand, with buyers willing to pay premiums for items no longer available. Prestige beauty’s rising prices also make second-hand appealing to cost-conscious shoppers. And the broader resale market is growing so quickly (global second-hand apparel saw a 15% growth in 2024, making up 9% of global apparel spend) that even a fractional share could represent significant value.
Second-hand beauty is unlikely to achieve the same scale as fashion because of its fundamental nature. The barriers are higher, and the risks are different. But technology does have a role to play in making the experience – however large or small it ends up being – feel clean, trackable, and safe.
