What 'local' means in the Southeast Asia beauty market

Premium Beauty News called it in 2023: nearly all Indonesian women were already buying local skincare, and a single ceramide moisturizer had cleared a million units on its own. Three years on, the pattern hasn’t faded, it’s hardened into real market share, real foreign capital dressed up as local branding, and a first wave of winners now expanding outward themselves.

Indonesia’s local skincare boom, in numbers

When Premium Beauty News profiled the trend, Indonesia’s local skincare boom still read as a social-media story: 96.8% of Indonesian women reported using at least one local brand in 2022, 19% used nothing else, and digital-native brands like Skintific, Azarine and Scarlett Whitening were riding a single hot ingredient, ceramide, into a shelf full of fast-follow launches. Skintific’s 5x Ceramide Barrier Repair Moisture Gel alone sold over a million units by June that year.

That momentum has since turned into hard numbers. Indonesia’s beauty and personal-care sector generated roughly $7.4 billion in revenue in 2024, and Paragon, the group behind Wardah, now holds around a quarter of the entire market. On Tokopedia’s serum-and-essence category specifically, Skintific (9.6%) and Somethinc (4.3%) between them outsell most multinational lines. Wardah itself has overtaken local brands from Unilever and L’Oréal to become one of the country’s best-selling names, built on halal certification, price and a range designed around Indonesian skin and modesty norms rather than imported Western or Korean beauty codes.

Skintific, and why not every local brand is local

This is the part worth digging into before treating “local” as a proxy for “independent.” Skintific reads as a homegrown Indonesian challenger, but the company behind it is Guangzhou Feimei Network Technology, a Chinese operator that built the brand specifically for the Indonesian market. In its first two years, Skintific’s cumulative Southeast Asia sales passed RMB 800 million, around $114 million, entirely on that local positioning. It’s a variant of the same pattern visible in Korea’s state-backed matchmaking push into Saudi retail: the visible brand and the capital or manufacturing actually behind it aren’t necessarily the same nationality. For anyone screening Southeast Asian brands as partners, confirming who really owns and manufactures a “local” label is a real diligence step now, not a formality.

Paragon and Wardah are expanding beyond Indonesia

The other half of the story is that Indonesia’s real local champions are no longer staying local. In February 2025, Paragon used the Harvard Asia Business Conference to announce a formal international push into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the US and Europe, structured around regional offices and local manufacturing partnerships rather than pure export. The group already runs 14 brands, 43 distribution centers and 14,000 employees across Indonesia and Malaysia, with Wardah alone generating over two-thirds of revenue; its halal positioning rides a global halal cosmetics market projected to top $50 billion in 2025, up from $16 billion in 2015. Paragon backed that ambition with a 40th-anniversary R&D push in January 2026, Beauty Science Tech, built around more than 20 AI technology partners and two dozen AI-driven consumer tools: infrastructure spend that signals a group planning to compete past its home market rather than just defend it.

What Southeast Asian beauty offers a raw material supplier

For an organization mapping Southeast Asia, the useful read isn’t “local brands are rising,” that part is already priced in. It’s that the region now holds two distinct kinds of partnership targets: brands like Wardah that are genuinely rooted, cash-generative and now actively looking for manufacturing and distribution partners abroad, and brands that only look local, where the real counterparty sits with a foreign parent. That’s the same distinction that mattered when sizing up Kenya’s beauty market: scale and capital readiness aren’t proof of local roots, they just mean a group is already structured enough to negotiate with. Southeast Asia’s overall beauty market, forecast to grow at a low-double-digit rate through the early 2030s on the back of Indonesia’s under-30 median age and near-universal smartphone penetration, means both kinds of targets will keep multiplying. Sorting one from the other before signing anything is the part worth doing early.