Walmart’s Beauty Aisle Is Pulling In The $150,000 Household

The clearest sign of what is happening in Walmart’s beauty aisle is who is standing in it. The number of Walmart beauty shoppers from households earning more than $150,000 rose 13.6% year over year, and the number of beauty shoppers between 30 and 34 grew 12.9%, according to NielsenIQ. The firm estimates that 76% of U.S. beauty buyers have now purchased from Walmart, and that premium beauty at the retailer is growing at a double-digit clip, with 12% more buyers and 13% more trips than a year ago. For a chain built on the lowest price, the beauty customer is no longer only a value customer.

Walmart has spent the past year widening the assortment that draws those shoppers. It added 72 beauty brands across stores and its marketplace in 2025, and told investors on its first-quarter earnings call that 75% of its beauty growth came from new brands. The pattern is what NielsenIQ’s Jacqueline Flam Stokes described when she said brands “are proving that Walmart can scale premium just as powerfully as it scales mass.” The clearest example arrived in April, when Walmart began carrying L’Oréal’s premium skincare brand La Roche-Posay in more than 1,400 stores, with pharmacists trained to offer skincare consultations, fusing the beauty aisle with the pharmacy counter. Around the assortment, Walmart has built an experience layer: a beauty bar that expanded from a 40-store pilot to hundreds of locations, store redesigns with a fragrance bar and a trending section, and a beauty-adviser program reaching 425 stores by year-end.

Walmart Already Leads Beauty, And The Premium Push Is A Defense

The context the makeover headlines skip is that Walmart is not chasing the beauty category. It leads it. Walmart holds roughly 20% of an estimated $107 billion U.S. beauty market, according to Circana, and by TD Cowen’s reckoning it is the category’s largest retailer. The pressure is coming from underneath. TD Cowen projects Amazon’s beauty share rising to 15% by 2030 from 10% in 2024, second only to Walmart, with TikTok Shop climbing as well, which together could edge down the combined share held by Walmart and Target. The specialty players, Sephora and Ulta, hold the prestige lane Walmart is now reaching toward. Set against that, the premium push reads less as a makeover than as a move to hold the lead by winning the higher-income shopper before Amazon and the prestige chains do.

The Two Doors Into Walmart Beauty Look Different For 1P And 3P

For suppliers, how a brand enters depends on what kind of brand it is. For 1P established and prestige brands, the path is the elevated shelf and the premium program, where partnerships like La Roche-Posay arrive with in-store service and placement Walmart controls directly. For 3P and emerging brands, the door is the marketplace, which Walmart has used to introduce labels such as COSRX, T3, and Beachwaver, paired with Walmart Start, an accelerator the retailer launched in 2022 to bring first-time brands onto its shelves. That online-to-shelf path is a real on-ramp: the period-care brand Scarlet by RedDrop, direct-to-consumer since 2019, launched in 476 Walmart stores in 2026 with a tween-focused assortment for the retailer. The two doors converge on the same destination, a brand that started online or on the marketplace and earns its way onto the shelf, but the entry point and the requirements differ by segment, and a 3P seller treating the shelf as the starting line will misjudge the path.

Getting In Is Half The Job. Walmart Connect Is The Other Half.

Entry is where the work starts, not where it ends. Brands that matriculate into Walmart beauty are then expected to build a paid media package through Walmart Connect, the retailer’s advertising arm, spanning connected TV, social, search, onsite display, and in-store experiential. The implication for beauty suppliers, 1P and 3P alike, is that shelf placement is the cost of entry and the Connect budget is the cost of moving product once it is there. A brand that wins distribution without funding visibility is buying a slot, not a business. This is the same retail-media reality reshaping every Walmart category, and beauty, with its higher margins and discovery-driven shopper, is among the categories where it bites hardest.

The forward signal for suppliers is in the shopper Walmart is pursuing. The high-value beauty buyer it is after skews 71% women, and runs disproportionately younger, digitally engaged, and higher-income. Walmart reached that shopper through 150 million weekly customers and a marketplace it can use to test a brand before committing shelf space, and it is spending to keep her. The brands still planning for the Walmart beauty aisle of five years ago, a wall of value basics, are planning for a shelf the retailer is deliberately rebuilding around the higher-income shopper its price reputation once sent elsewhere.

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