The Vietnam cosmetics market in 2026: what the figures show, and what a foreign beauty brand has to settle

Most entry decks for a beauty brand open with the size of the Vietnamese market, and the figure on the slide is usually a little under USD 3 billion. It is worth checking against a second number before it goes to the board. In 2025, beauty sales on four online marketplaces alone came to about USD 2.83 billion. If both figures were totals of the same thing, Vietnamese consumers would have bought almost no cosmetics in a pharmacy, a supermarket or a beauty chain all year.

They did, of course. The two figures count different things, and neither says which part of the market a newcomer can actually reach. That is the more useful question, and the published data answers more of it than the headline suggests: where beauty is bought, which way prices are moving, which brands are winning, and what the rules require before a single advert runs.

This piece sets out what the figures say, who a foreign brand is competing with, what Vietnamese beauty buyers check before paying, the regulatory steps that set the launch date, and how to size one segment from the channel up.

Two figures that cannot both be the total

Three things stand out. The same provider appears three times with three different figures, because different editions and market definitions get quoted at different times. The forecast growth rates, 3.3% and 8.3% a year, sit far below the 29.5% that marketplace beauty sales actually grew in 2025. And the online figure for 2025 is larger than both estimates of the whole market for the same year.

Neither source sets out its method in the material quoted, so the gap cannot be settled from outside. Several things plausibly sit in one figure and not in the other: what counts as beauty as against personal care, retail value as against a modelled estimate, cross-border and unofficial sellers, and the timing of each edition. What the gap does show is enough for a business case. A national total that is smaller than one of its own channels is not a number to multiply by a target share.

The same problem, and a general way around it, is covered in the guide to Vietnam’s e-commerce market size. For beauty, the way around it starts with the channel that publishes the most detail.

Where beauty is bought, and where the category can be read

Beauty is the largest category on Vietnamese marketplaces. In Metric’s figures it accounted for 74.4 of the 429.7 trillion dong sold on the four largest platforms in 2025, about 17%, and in the first half of 2026 it was again the largest category, at about USD 1.88 billion of USD 11.08 billion, again roughly 17%.

Offline, beauty is sold through pharmacies, beauty and personal care chains, supermarkets, salons and clinics, and the traditional shops that carry everyday personal care. None of these publishes anything comparable to marketplace data. That is why most of what can be known about the category in public comes from online listings: prices actually paid, units sold, reviews, and which sellers carry which brands.

Two consequences follow for an entry plan. Online data is the best public read of the category, and a brand should use it heavily before buying anything. But online share is not market share. A brand whose products are chosen with a pharmacist’s advice, or bought mainly in modern trade, will find its market under-represented in marketplace figures, and the plan has to say how large that unseen part is likely to be, and on what evidence.

Value up, units down, and official stores pulling ahead

Metric’s figures for the last quarter of 2025 describe a category that is growing through price and trust rather than volume.

Read together, the rows say that buyers are spending more per item, moving to official brand stores, and buying from fewer sellers. The two average prices are not a like-for-like comparison, since official stores and other sellers carry different products, but the direction is clear enough: the official store has become the reference point for what a brand costs and whether it is genuine.

For a foreign brand this cuts both ways. An official store is where the category’s growth is going, and it is the place a buyer goes to check authenticity. It is also where the brand’s own price is most visible, next to resellers and hand-carried imports of the same products. Who runs that store, who sets its prices and vouchers, and who keeps its customer and review data are commercial decisions, not marketing details.

Who a foreign beauty brand is competing with

Entry plans often frame Vietnam as a contest between Korean and Japanese brands. The marketplace data is less tidy. Among the brands Metric highlighted for growth in 2025 were Colorkey, a Chinese make-up brand, up 175.5%; Cocoon, a Vietnamese vegan brand, up 141.3%; and L’Oréal Paris, up 113.7%. A local brand, a Chinese brand and a global brand, all growing fast in the same year.

The supply side is crowded too. Three beauty trade fairs in July 2026, Vietbeauty, Cosmobeauté Vietnam and Beautycare Plus, together showed more than 3,000 brands from 600 companies and over 24 countries and territories, according to Tuổi Trẻ.

Country of origin still matters, but it matters by category and by age, not as a general advantage. In a Q&Me survey reported in June 2026, Japanese products drew the strongest positive views, while views of Chinese products were far more positive among respondents in their twenties than among those in their forties. NIQ found in 2025 that 85% of Vietnamese consumers say they support local brands. What that means for a premium price is set out in do Vietnamese consumers trust foreign brands. For beauty, the practical point is narrower: in a single search on a marketplace, a foreign skincare brand appears next to a local brand selling a familiar ingredient story and a Chinese brand selling trend and price. The positioning has to say which of the two it is choosing to beat, and in which price band.

What a beauty buyer checks before paying

Three things carry more weight than the brand’s own advertising.

What is in it. Q&Me’s Skincare Industry Report 2026, as reported in March 2026, found that 84% of users prioritise clear, transparent ingredients, and 82% look for long-term effectiveness over quick results. Ingredient lists, concentrations and the reason a formula suits a hot, humid climate belong on the listing and in every piece of creator content, not only on the brand website.

What other buyers say. In Q&Me research published in September 2026, 74% of respondents said a product needs at least 50 reviews before they trust it, more respondents trusted ordinary users than influencers, and TikTok and Facebook led as sources for cosmetics and fashion. A new listing starts with none of that evidence, and building it is a cost the launch plan has to carry.

Whether it is genuine. The shift to official stores is the clearest sign that authenticity decides where a beauty purchase happens. A foreign brand gains most from it if buyers can see which stores and sellers are official, and loses most if its own distributor’s price is undercut by resellers carrying the same products.

None of these is answered by awareness spend. All three are answered by the listing, the reviews and the people talking about the product, which is why creator programmes carry so much weight in this category, and why their cost and terms deserve the scrutiny set out in influencer marketing in Vietnam.

The rules that set the launch date

Four sets of rules shape a beauty launch. They are summarised here for planning, not as legal advice, and should be confirmed with counsel for each product.

The first row carries a commercial question that marketing plans often miss. For an imported brand, the notifications usually sit with the importer, who also holds the product information file. Whose name the notifications are in, and what happens to them if the distribution agreement ends, decides how easily the brand can change partner later. It belongs in the agreement, not in a handover note.

The third row is a change worth understanding properly. Removing advance approval does not loosen the rules on what can be claimed. It moves the checking from a government office to the brand. A claims list, reviewed once against the product’s notification and the advertising rules and then given to every agency and creator, does that job before anything is published.

A worked example: sizing one segment from the marketplace up

The figures below are invented for the example, except where a source is named. A Japanese sun care brand plans to enter through an official store on the marketplaces, priced in the 200,000–500,000 dong band, and wants a year-two sales figure the board can hold it to.

At the rate implied by The Investor’s dollar conversion of Metric’s figure, about 26,300 dong to the dollar, 22.9 billion dong is about USD 870,000 of online sales a year. At the 235,000 dong average item price Metric reports for official stores, it is about 97,000 units a year, or roughly 8,100 a month. That monthly figure is the one to test: it can be set against the sales counters on the leading sun care listings in the same price band today, and a brand that would need to outsell most of them in its second year has a target problem, not a marketing one.

Compare the usual top-down line in an entry deck: 1% of a USD 2.8 billion market, or USD 28 million. That is about 32 times the bottom-up figure, built on a total that is smaller than its own online channel. The bottom-up version is less flattering and far easier to defend, and each of its invented inputs can be replaced by a measured one from a category data purchase or a few weeks of reading listings.

Five things to settle before the launch

• The notifications. Which organisation files them, in whose name, how long they take for each product, and what happens to them if the distribution agreement ends.
• The official store. Who runs it, who sets prices and vouchers, and who keeps the customer and review data.
• The price gap. Your official store’s price against resellers, hand-carried imports and the same products in neighbouring markets, on the best-selling items.
• The claims list. Every benefit claim checked once against the notification and the advertising rules, and shared with agencies and creators before the first brief.
• The segment size. One price band and one channel, sized from the marketplace up, with every assumption labelled as measured or estimated.

Where the figures in this article come from

Metric: 2025 beauty sales and growth, and brands highlighted for growth, from Metric’s market research article of 6 February 2026; fourth-quarter 2025 figures on sales, units, prices, official stores and sellers, from its 2025 online retail report as reported by CafeF on 19 March 2026 and The Investor on 20 March 2026, which also give the dollar conversion and the Statista forecast cited by Metric; Metric’s full-year 2025 total for the four marketplaces as reported by the Vietnamese business press, and its first-half 2026 category sales as reported by VietnamNet on 27 July 2026. Statista Market Insights, as cited by Công Thương on 10 July 2026 and Tuổi Trẻ on 23 July 2026; the trade fair figures are from the same Tuổi Trẻ article. Q&Me: Skincare Industry Report 2026, as reported by CafeF and The Investor in March 2026; “How Vietnamese consumers trust online reviews”, September 2026, 200 respondents aged 20 to 49 in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi; the country-of-origin survey as reported by The Investor on 15 June 2026. NIQ, “Vocal for Local”, October 2025. Regulation: Circular 34/2025/TT-BYT as summarised by Tilleke & Gibbins on 8 July 2025; Circular 03/2026/TT-BYT as published by the Ho Chi Minh City press information portal on 9 March 2026; Law 75/2025/QH15 amending the Advertising Law.

Marketplace figures cover the platforms Metric tracks and are not a total of the beauty market. The worked example uses invented numbers except where a source is named.

Where this work stops

MWY does not import, distribute or retail cosmetics, file product notifications or give legal advice, and takes no commission from distributors, platforms, agencies or creators. What we do is read the category toward the decision it has to support.

Vietnam Market Research is six weeks on one product line: the segment sized from the channel up, the price band that holds against local and imported competitors, how buyers in that category check and compare, and a written answer on whether Vietnam deserves a budget, with what could not be established marked as such. Brands already selling consumer goods here will find how MWY works with them on the consumer goods and retail page.