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Beauty is no longer simply a category. It has become a strategic cornerstone for department stores, as the category is booming but is also highly challenged. Department stores used to be the primary channel for beauty discovery, but e-commerce and social media have eroded their historical authority. As an example, only 24% of US shoppers now visit a department store to learn about new products. Instead, 71% turn to Sephora or Ulta Beauty, according to a PowerReviews survey. In parallel, department store revenues are declining across much of the sector, and apparel and luxury are facing structural headwinds. Under such circumstances, the relevance of the beauty offer across all its dimensions becomes critical. Galeries Lafayette Haussmann has recently unveiled its new beauty department, the perfect occasion to gain perspective on the current state of beauty in department stores and to address a pressing question: is it possible to evolve the category model?

Floors reborn: department stores bet big on beauty reinvention

Nordstrom: beauty takes centre stage in NYC

The picture is not completely bleak for department stores. As a replenishable category, beauty is structurally resilient. From that perspective, many department stores accelerated their in-store investments to create beauty destinations in an attempt to counter competition from speciality retailers. In August 2025, Nordstrom unveiled its new beauty floor at its NYC flagship store, turning what had been a fragmented experience into a unified beauty destination. Positioned at the main entrance, the rationale is simple: beauty should be the first thing customers see when they walk in.

The new space is organised into distinct but connected zones.

• A large make-up zone at the store entrance with brands like Charlotte Tilbury, MAC and Westman Atelier. The Beauty Bar, a communal space where customers can test products from different brands, attend makeup classes or experiment on their own terms, is a new feature. A dedicated area for emerging brands completes the section.
• Then, the space flows into a luxury and designer zone housing names like La Mer, La Prairie and Dior, each with their full store concept.
• The fragrance area has been doubled in size, featuring a floor-to-ceiling floral installation and an exclusive new technology called “AirParfum,” developed with Puig, which allows customers to discover up to 60 scents without overwhelming the senses.
• Finally, a section oriented towards beauty rituals offers a more open, self-discovery format covering skincare, haircare, body and wellness, with heritage brands like Estée Lauder and newer labels like Tata Harper and 111Skin.

Beyond the products, Nordstrom is investing heavily in service and community with a team of around 100 sales associates, a full-time beauty concierge team for agnostic advisory and a packed event calendar. There is also a medi-spa in addition to 250 free or paid services, ranging from nail and brow services to blowouts. The beauty department now spans 1,670 sqm, more than doubling the previous layout, signalling that the retailer is not just selling beauty products but building a destination.

Macy’s Herald Square classic beauty overhaul

In November 2025, Macy's completed the first phase of a major renovation of its beauty floor at the NYC Herald Square flagship store, the first significant update in over a decade. Interestingly, around 70-75% of the store's beauty customers are locals rather than tourists, making the investment relevant far beyond passing visitors. Once fully finished, the space will span 5,000 sqm and have more than 20 new brand shops.

Right from the entrance, customers are welcomed by big names like Chanel and Dior, as is often the case on beauty floors. The customer journey moves from fashion-house shop-in-shops at the front, through niche brands and luxury skincare, to a trendier multi-brand discovery space at the back. With the current category boom, fragrance remains a key driver, with over 200 references across 65 brands, and Macy's continues to hold the largest share of fragrance sales in the country.

Also, following the beauty trend book, Macy’s adds technology and services to the experience, with AI-powered skin diagnostic tools from Shiseido, an augmented reality headset from Parfums de Marly, and five relaxation rooms. A new space is planned for events such as brand masterclasses and pop-up stores.

Selfridges goes niche: the fragrance hall reimagined

Selfridges has completed a major refresh of its fragrance hall at its London store in February 2026, marking the final phase of a two-year renovation of the entire beauty floor. Fragrance has become Selfridges' fastest-growing category, and the store has decided to lean into that momentum. Placed right at the main entrance, the hall aims to become a world-leading fragrance destination. The selection spans nearly 50 brands, with 75% of the offering dedicated to niche or limited-distribution brands, grouped into three distinct themes: established, contemporary and emerging. More than 30 exclusives are on offer, including names like Discothèque.

Niche houses such as Maison Crivelli, Marc-Antoine Barrois, Initio and Matière Première sit alongside heritage names, giving the space a sense of discovery. Rather than leaving customers to navigate scents on their own, Selfridges has placed knowledgeable sales associates throughout the hall to guide and advise.

Beyond capitals: John Lewis sets a blueprint for beauty in the regions

In August 2025, John Lewis unveiled a major transformation of its Liverpool beauty hall, showing beauty is also a priority in secondary city stores. The department has been expanded by almost 40% to 1,500 sqm. Interactive zones replace some of the traditional counters. The hall now houses 132 premium brands, including 23 new or expanded counters, and introduces exclusive brands such as Fenty Beauty, Trinny London, Byredo and Maison Francis Kurkdjian to Liverpool for the first time. This renovation emphasises service and social shopping to create a seamless integration between in-store atmosphere and online convenience. The transformation is a part of John Lewis's £800 million brand investment and reflects the retailer's success in the beauty category, where sales have grown by more than 40% over the past five years. The Liverpool concept will serve as a blueprint for five additional beauty hall transformations planned in the coming months.

The renovations undertaken by these department stores show that scale matters. Whether it is Nordstrom doubling its beauty footprint, Macy's committing to 5,000 sqm, or Selfridges offering 50 perfume brands, the strategy is clearly to compete with Sephora's depth and curation and the endless discovery possibilities offered by social media. Also, with Nordstrom's concierge team and Selfridges’ fragrance experts, it seems retailers are betting on people to deliver a differentiating, more agnostic beauty experience. In a world where any product can be purchased with a click, expertise and experience are the true differentiators.

Beyond the brand counter: the beauty business model at a crossroads

The Sephora effect: the rise of brand-agnostic beauty spaces

Transforming the traditional brand counters beauty model into more open, experiential spaces is a growing concern on the department store beauty floors. Customers are now accustomed to browsing at Sephora or Space NK and tend to reject the conventional model with brand counters and their staff attached. Instead, they are increasingly expecting retailers to offer them the possibility to explore a range of brands and products with agnostic sales advisors who can guide them across all options. For department stores so far, the question has been more about how to best adapt to this trend than about transforming the brand counter business model. Complementing rather than replacing brand counters, many department stores are developing multi-brand areas. These spaces allow customers to browse freely and touch products. However, they usually offer a limited number of brands, as is the case at the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann store’s space dedicated to emerging and niche brands positioned at the centre of the Wellness Galerie. Dedicated Galeries Lafayette staff help shoppers in their decision. Display tables serve as small pop-up spaces, allowing for brand rotation and product novelty. The space is not big, though it gives a true sense of choice and is successful. Galeries Lafayette recently took a further step toward agnostic shopping by opening a second multi-brand area. In March 2026, they unveiled a 250 sqm “French pharmacy” space (also known as dermo-cosmetics). This time, using a different business model, it is operated by an external partner (Carré Opéra Pharmabest) on a concession basis with staff attached to the partner. Answering locals and tourists’ appetite for French pharmacy with 200 brands (such as La Roche-Posay, Bioderma, SVR, Caudalie, Nuxe, Melvita, Vichy, etc.) and 6,000 references, the launch has been successful with customers filling their baskets with several products at the same time.

A few years ago, Manor also onboarded external partners: L’Oréal for dermo-cosmetics spaces (including brands like La Roche Posay or CeraVe) and Sephora to offer Gen Z customers trendy colour cosmetics brands as well as the Sephora Collection private label. More recently, Manor has moved forward in developing multi-brand areas, with the Green Beauty Lab. The space includes brands such as Glowery, Melvita, Erborian, Weleda and Avril in addition to the dermo-cosmetics brands, organised under four distinct areas: clean, botanical, wellness and sustainable. This concept will be rolled out in ten stores with local adaptations. These examples show attempts to step back, at least in part, from the brand-counter-only model. It offers customers a more agnostic shopping experience and, in the case of Sephora, allows Manor to also carry additional brands which may have been difficult to attract otherwise.

Falabella’s Glow Bar is also a recent example of a multi-brand space. The first 80 sqm pink space gathers 55 brands in skincare, makeup, fragrances, hair care, accessories, dermo-cosmetics and a prominent K-beauty section. Inspired by international benchmarks in beauty speciality retail, the company aims to offer a curated, experiential format focused on trend discovery, including Fenty Beauty arriving in the country for the first time. This launch clearly caters to consumers seeking experience, novelty, expert advice and, most important of all, the freedom to browse and try before you buy.

Galeries Lafayette's three-floor beauty vision

The recent beauty rehaul at the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann store offers more than a French pharmacy space. In fact, the beauty department now spans three floors, a deliberate vertical journey as stated by CEO Arthur Lemoine:

• The -1 floor offers a renewed version of the Wellness Galerie opened in 2022, oriented towards care brands (see more below).
• The ground floor centres on fragrance and makeup. The integration of new hot brands such as Victoria Beckham and Louis Vuitton makeup offerings increased the ground floor appeal. In parallel, they introduced a section of 13 niche fragrance brands, including Bottega Veneta and Creed.
• Creating a destination within the luxury RTW floor, the +1 floor proposes a convergence between luxury fashion, jewellery and beauty with high perfumery spaces for Loewe, Guerlain, Dior, Chanel, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Officine Universelle Buly 1803 and, from June, Saint Laurent's first-ever beauty-accessories fusion concept.

This overhaul aims to differentiate Galeries Lafayette from competitors by providing an experience that blends luxury and beauty, for a lifestyle feeling and a customer journey that encourages cross-category discovery and higher conversion rates. Now accounting for about 10% of the store’s annual volume, beauty has posted double-digit growth, continuing into 2026. The refurbishment has expanded the beauty selling space to 3,700 sqm, an increase of 500 sqm and brought the total brand count to 440.

The normalisation of wellness

Harrods' closed-door wellness: when retail meets the clinic

Shifts in customer behaviour towards self-care, the relentless need for retailers to diversify into new categories and to add a revenue stream by taking a share of a business McKinsey estimated at around $1.5 trillion in 2020… these are all reasons why retailers have explored wellness. What was initially a blurry category encompassing fitness, nutrition, overall physical and mental health and appearance, is now normalised, with a key question at its core: services as a way to evolve the business model.

First on the trend, Harrods made a bold move in 2017 by opening a closed-door, appointment-only Wellness Clinic on the fourth floor in Knightsbridge, a significant shift in how luxury department stores were beginning to think about beauty and wellbeing. Spanning almost 1,000 sqm, the space was never intended to be a traditional spa or beauty salon. Instead, Harrods’ very own take on wellness was conceived as a high-end, results-driven clinic offering a curated selection of treatments.

The space was designed to feel clinical without being cold, and luxurious without being indulgent. The goal was not pampering but rather treatments with measurable results. The range was unusually wide for a department store. Harrods assembled a multidisciplinary team covering everything from injectables and body contouring to cryotherapy, DNA-based personalised skincare, IV vitamin infusions, and more. A dedicated partnership with a wellness expert brought daily personal training and nutritional coaching on site, with a bespoke programme created exclusively for Harrods clients. The Wellness Clinic also offers dental services, osteopathy, podiatry and physiotherapy. More than simply a new service, the Wellness Clinic, which is still running to this day, was an early and clear signal that brick-and-mortar retail needed to reinvent its purpose, and that experience, expertise and personalisation were the most important reasons to visit a department store. However, it didn’t reinvent beauty in department stores, just evolving and developing beauty services to a scale never seen before

From ambition to pragmatism: Galeries Lafayette’s reality check

Galeries Lafayette also made headlines in 2022 when the Wellness Galerie opened on a whopping 3,000 sqm surface spanning the whole -1 floor of the Haussmann flagship store. It was a step forward in terms of space and share allocated to services compared to products, with an impressive 60%-40% ratio. Galeries Lafayette had an ambitious goal: becoming the destination for well-being in Paris, with a gym studio, a healthy restaurant, a full catalogue of services such as osteopathy, cryotherapy, hyperbaric chamber, meditation, muscle strengthening, yoga and Pilates, infrared saunas, anti-ageing and silhouette-enhancing treatments, nutritional coaching, physiotherapist, nails and brow services and more. The brands embedded in the space were oriented towards care, as exemplified by the multi-brand area (see above) and traditional brand counters such as Barbara Stürm, Augustinus Bader, Clinique and The Ordinary, to name a few.

In March 2026, they unveiled an updated version of the Wellness Galerie. Department store floors are obviously in constant evolution, but this rehaul probably demonstrates how challenging it is to convey the wellness message to customers to maximise service profitability. Maintaining some of the previous services such as massages, anti-ageing treatments, brow and nail salons and the gym, the revamp emphasises a “care” message over the wellness word and adopts a more classic approach to services. Their overall number has decreased, but the most important difference lies in the addition of brands’ three-walls shop-in-shops, large enough to accommodate beauty cabins, doubling the number of treatment rooms to 20 (with Clarins, La Mer, Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, EviDenS, for example).

The contrasting trajectories of Harrods and Galeries Lafayette offer a picture of where wellness stands in department stores, showing the commercial tension at the heart of the “category”: services are expensive to operate, difficult to scale, and require more customer education than products. Harrods' model endures because it never tried to democratise wellness. By keeping its clinic expensive and appointment-only, it defined a niche that aligned with its affluent clientele and price positioning. It did not attempt to reinvent the beauty floor. Galeries Lafayette's original Wellness Galerie was a genuine experiment in rethinking what a beauty floor could be: a rethink of the business model through an extensive catalogue of services. Both a sign of maturity and normalisation of wellness, the 2026 revision also shows how difficult it is to change the business model. As Lemoine describes it, the floor is now capitalising on the right balance between services and products.

The satellite bet: additional commercial models against competition

From anchor to standalone: how Harrods built a scalable off-flagship business

Despite competition from local retailers such as Space NK, The Fragrance Shop and Superdrug, Harrods has long held its position as the UK’s biggest beauty retailer, with a 9.3% share of the national market from a single 8,300 sqm location. In 2019, they announced an ambitious expansion plan with the launch of H Beauty, a new concept of standalone beauty boutiques set to open across the UK. The first store opened in late 2020, swapping Harrods' green signature for a pink aesthetic, deliberately targeting a younger, digitally savvy generation.

The first stores didn’t open in a prestigious city-centre location, but in the suburban shopping centres Intu Lakeside in Essex and Intu in Milton Keynes. The rationale was clear: the flagship in Knightsbridge caters primarily to tourists and an older, wealthier demographic, while H Beauty would be explicitly designed to reach a younger, local consumer base that had shopped previously at competitors. Stores are built around experience and exclusivity, with makeup stations, virtual try-on mirrors and masterclasses, all part of a broader omnichannel vision.

Industry reactions were mixed in 2019: some questioned why Harrods had not chosen a more premium location, while others saw it as a smart and timely move to claim territory before competitors did, aka Sephora (which would enter the market in 2023). What most agreed on was that the success of H Beauty would ultimately depend on the quality of the in-store experience and Harrods' ability to translate its luxury credentials into a format that is accessible to younger customers. In 2026, Harrods operates seven H Beauty stores, demonstrating a successful model that is giving the department store greater control and access over brands.

The limits of the concept: Harvey Nichols' standalone bet failed

Not all department stores were as successful as Harrods. In March 2025, Harvey Nichols announced they would close their only standalone beauty shop, Beauty Bazaar, in Liverpool’s ONE shopping centre. Opened in 2012, the store was originally considered a pioneering concept, as it was the first time a major luxury retailer had created an entirely dedicated beauty and wellbeing space of this kind outside of London. It was supposed to set a new benchmark for what a beauty destination could look like: a single space where luxury retail, social experience and professional treatments could coexist under one roof.

The ground floor brought together established international names and niche and contemporary brands, for depth and discovery. A standout feature was a perfume library designed to let customers explore fragrances freely, with no counter or sales assistant standing between them and the bottles. The +1 floor was more social. A champagne and cocktail bar was surrounded by open treatment areas for pedicures, a hair salon, brow, lashes and nail services. Customers could browse, book treatments, or shop online via iPads, making the floor feel as much like a social venue as a beauty destination. The +2 floor completed the journey with a private spa reminiscent of a five-star hotel.

The department stores’ investments in beauty are striking in their scale and their ambition. The message is consistent: beauty is no longer just a floor, but rather a strategy. Department stores are not simply upgrading a category: with its repeatability and experiential potential, beauty has to stay on-trend, but also becomes an answer when apparel stumbles and luxury fragments and grows increasingly direct-to-consumer.

Away from the brand counter and towards spaces that prioritise the customer's journey, the rise of multi-brand zones points to an industry that has absorbed Sephora's lessons and is acting on them. Partnering with external specialists represents a pragmatic willingness to give away control in exchange for relevance. The wellness chapter offers a more sobering lesson. Galeries Lafayette's Wellness Galerie was visionary. Its recalibration is grounded. Harrods' Wellness Clinic endures, but it is the exception rather than the rule. For most department stores, wellness will remain a layer rather than a foundation. The H Beauty satellite experiments add a final dimension and a possible, yet not universal, growth vehicle to reach demographics that a single store cannot do.

Credits: IADS (Christine Montard)