Top 10 Beauty Trends for 2008

Happy New Year!  Gone is 2007, welcome to 2008.  I remember when this seemed sooooooooooo far away, but time just keeps ticking on by, doesn’t it?  Days gone by are amazing – we learn important lessons and we spark great ideas for the future. It is always tons of fun to look ahead and guess what ideas sparked in the past are going to emerge as trends in the future. Here is what is on my mind as we move into 2008:

1. More home spa treatments – with the advent of home laser treatments for aging skin and acne prone skin, these will only get better, more available and less expensive.

2. More technology in the hair care arena – the past year has shown us great implementation of new technology in the hair styling department. I would have never dreamed 3 years ago that we could really have advancement in this area – but we have – now I wonder what they are working on next!

3. Interactive online beauty services. You can virtually try on new hairstyles, eyeglasses and clothes, but the technology is still lacking at best. I predict that in 2008 we will have an advent of more and better abilities to upload pictures and measurements and have improved services to greatly personalize our shopping experiences.

4. Beauty by DNA. Personalized skin care targeted to your very own DNA – its already here, and you will see more and more of it. Is it BS? Maybe.

5. Organic beauty – This market grew tremendously in 2007, with no signs of slowing down. Perhaps some regulation coming in 2008?

6. Small cosmetics companies – the internet makes available to us a world of products that we would have never heard of otherwise. Some of these are not so great and are cheap imitations of the good stuff, but others are diamonds in the rough. Small companies making the most of the viral nature of the internet will emerge like never before.

7. Tougher times for traditional companies – there are still a few big beauty companies that haven’t embraced the internet, and are still relying on main stream media to get the word out. This isn’t working like it did in days gone by, and you will see more and more companies digging their heels out of the dirt and joining the internet revolution.

8. Tougher times for traditional magazines – Related to the point above, readership is down, more advertising dollars are going to new media, making times tough for all but the top beauty and fashion mags. Will we have a big one fold this year? I think not, but they might be very smart to follow Glamour’s move towards joining the new media revolution.

9. Online beauty/fashion communities – Social networking is still huge, and new places to share and compare your opinions are opening (and closing!) every day. While several of them are very appealing to me, none of them really engage me that much because I like to write my reviews and opinion on my own web sites. I don’t have the time or the inclination to rewrite everything elsewhere. While I know that not everyone has a blog, boy do lots of people, and a whole lot of people that like to write about beauty do, and I suspect they share my same feelings about it, making these user-generated content based sites a little bit redundant. I think that one of the several Digg-style sites will really emerge as a beauty and fashion leader for the same reason that Digg has attracted so many users – it is easy to use, extremely current (and we all know we love to be current!), and just a little bit fun, with minimal effort (we like that too).

10. Video-beauty-blogging – I have long talked up video blogging to my cohorts here at b5media’s Beauty & Style channel, and I still think this is something that is up and coming and will see a big boom in 2008. More interesting than the podcast and more visual than the traditional blogging (gee, has blogging been around long enough to have traditions?), videoblogging is here to stay. Barriers to entry are reduced more and more every day and blog readers love to get to know blog writers, and with video a blogger can get even closer to their blog communities. Good stuff.

I can’t wait to see what happens this year with my two greatest passions – beauty and tech! I hope you will be with me throughout the year to find out! Have a most Happy New Year (and don’t forget to eat your blackeyed peas)!