The War on Wrinkles

Walk into a Sephora cosmetics store anywhere, and you'll be bombarded with slickly packaged products promising to make you look radiant, smell good and feel gorgeous. Yet almost hidden among those glamorous potions is a plain medicinal box--labeled with the unsexy pitch INTENSIVE CONCENTRATE FOR EXISTING STRETCH MARKS (STRIAE DISTENSAE)--that just happens to be one of the chain's Top 10--selling items. No, stretch marks haven't suddenly become big business. But thanks in part to aggressive ads that proclaim it "Better than Botox?," the scientific-sounding StriVectin-SD has become the hottest thing in the war on wrinkles--a booming industry that's generating billions of dollars for dermatologists, cosmetics firms and, yes, retailers like Sephora. "[StriVectin] is driving traffic in our stores," says Sephora vice president Rod McFadden, "and it's having a spillover effect: our entire skin-care business has benefited."

The fight against old age has long been good business, and it's only getting better. Global retail sales of antiaging skin-care products--up 71% since 2000--are rising faster than any other segment of the skin-care market, according to Euromonitor, a market researcher, hitting $9.9 billion last year. More than 2 million Americans got Botox injections and about 1.6 million got chemical peels or microdermabrasions in 2003 (the most recent year for which stats exist). Says Carol Hamilton, president of L'Oréal Paris: "Now you have a whole generation who basically believes that they never have to see a wrinkle. This is a powerful movement in the beauty industry."

StriVectin is either the latest fad in that movement or an antiaging silver bullet, depending on whom you ask. But in either case, it is clearly one of the most talked about new products in the industry, roiling competitors, realigning expectations and even prompting lawsuits--from Botox maker Allergan, which disputes StriVectin's advertising claims, and from StriVectin itself, against alleged copycat marketers pushing similarly named knock-offs. Priced at a hefty $135 per 6-oz. tube, StriVectin, made by privately held Klein-Becker, a division of Salt Lake City, Utah-- based weight-loss-supplement maker Basic Research, last year tallied an estimated $60 million in sales, almost double the sales that a new skin-care product typically generates in its first year in U.S. department stores, according to NPD, a market-research firm. Clearly, for every vain soul who has undergone a dermatological procedure, there are thousands more as concerned about wrinkles but squeamish about needles. As Klein-Becker's marketing director Gina Gay puts it, "There are people who don't want injections."

In the past year, nearly every beauty brand, upscale and downmarket, has introduced a new antiaging skin cream--Estée Lauder's Perfectionist (CP+), Olay's Regenerist Perfecting Cream and Avon's Anew Clinical Line and Wrinkle Corrector, to name a few. "We've been on the antiaging track for a long time, even before StriVectin came along," says Estée Lauder's Peter Lichtenthal, the brand's senior marketing vice president. "But its success has provided further proof of how hungry the public is for these types of products."