SEATTLE, July 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- One in four consumers purchased beauty or cosmetics during Amazon Prime Day 2026, and most of them compared prices with Walmart. Market Defense's Annual "THE BEAUTY POWER PLAYERS: Amazon Prime Day June 2026 Report" uncovers what drove shoppers to Amazon's earliest Prime Day in five years, and how strategic deal shopping reshaped how beauty brands competed for the cart.

"Prime Day 2026 had a clear message for the beauty industry: shoppers arrive knowing exactly what they want — and increasingly, what they want is prestige. The Power Players this year rewrote the rules — prestige won big, with Armani Beauty claiming the top fragrance spot and Tarte unseating Maybelline in makeup. K-beauty dominated skin care, with medicube commanding nearly 16% share.  This report gives you the power players, the category shifts, and the moves behind the brands that made Prime Day their biggest moment of the year." —Vanessa Kuykendall, Chief Engagement Officer, Market Defense

A record event, with a new rhythm

This year, Prime Day ran June 23 to 26, the earliest start in the event's history and the first June Prime Day since 2021. The numbers tell the story:

• The four days surrounding Prime Day 2026 shattered U.S. e-commerce records, reaching $26.4 billion — surpassing the combined Black Friday and Cyber Monday total of $26.05 billion from November 2025.
• Prime Day posted 9.3% YoY growth in 2026, a significant deceleration from last year's 30.3% surge — a sign the event is maturing. As more retailers run competing sales events during the same window, Amazon's dominance is steady but no longer explosive.
• Beauty ranked 4th in cart share at 26%, up from 25% in 2025.
• Prime Day drove a +71% surge in beauty search volume during the event week, rising from 102.4M to 174.8M searches.
• The Beauty shopper was harder to impress this Prime Day. Search was roughly flat YoY (-4%), click rate dropped from 34.7% to 30.4%, and purchase rate fell from 5.0% to 4.5%.
• Prestige beauty is winning on Amazon. Tarte unseated Maybelline at #1 in makeup brand share of sales for the first time, Armani Beauty claimed #1 in fragrance, and professional brands swept the hair care ranks. Categories that were once dominated by mass brands are now battlegrounds for prestige.

Who shopped? Seasoned consumers showed up with a plan

Prime Day 2026 was a low-ticket, high-volume event, and the shopper had a Walmart tab open.

• Suburban high-income women over 45 made up 51% of all buyers, with the 65+ group alone at 31%, up from 29% last year.
• Deal satisfaction dropped to 59%, down from 68% last year. Shoppers came in with sharper expectations and left with a more critical eye.
• 69% of items sold for under $20, while just 3% were priced above $100.
• Average spend per item: $23.23, down from $24.59 last year. Average household spend: approximately $143, with the average order at roughly $47.
• Shoppers came armed with a price comparison. 41% placed 3 or more separate orders, and 53% compared prices at Walmart and Target before buying on Amazon — while 49-50% cross-shopped Walmart throughout the entire event.

Fierce competition fueled the frenzy

Prime Day was not the only game in town. Nearly every major retailer ran a parallel event, creating the most concentrated deal week in recent retail history:

• Walmart: the weeklong Walmart Deals event (June 22 to 28) pulled roughly half of Prime Day shoppers (49 to 50%) into cross shopping.
• Target: Target Circle Deal Days ran head to head with Prime Day (June 23 to 26) and engaged 32% of Prime Day shoppers.
• TikTok Shop: Deals For You Days stretched June 17 through July 2, its longest summer event yet, with discounts up to 65% on peak days that landed squarely on Prime Day.
• Ulta Beauty: the Big Summer Beauty Sale ran June 19 through July 11 with up to 40% off across makeup, skin care, hair, and fragrance. The beauty retailer cheekily titled their promo code "PrimeTime."

Beauty's winners were built on search

Branded search is gaining ground. One in five estimated beauty purchases on Prime Day 2026 started with a brand name search — up from 17.4% a year earlier. Shoppers increasingly arrive knowing exactly what they want.

For beauty brands, that shift in Search behavior changes everything about how deals are planned, paced, and promoted.

"The single most searched beauty term on Prime Day was the brand name "medicube". Not sunscreen, not mascara, a brand. For as long as I've done this work, generic terms owned the top of search and brands fought for position underneath them. That flipped this year, and I don't believe it flips back. Put that next to growth cooling from 30% to 9% and the message is uncomfortable but clear: Amazon is done growing your business for you. The meaningful growth is now share you take from a competitor, by name, because the shopper typed yours instead of theirs." —Dave Karlsven, SVP, Partnerships & Growth at Market Defense.

This Year's Beauty Power Players:

• Medicube held the #1 overall beauty spot for the second consecutive Prime Day, growing share from 9.3% in 2025 to 13.23% in 2026.
• Medicube is also the #1 branded search term in skincare YTD at 1.99 million monthly searches, up 47.6% from last year.
• K-beauty is no longer a niche win, it's a search-wide movement. Korean beauty brands captured 10.5% of all beauty search during Prime Day 2026, up from 6.5% in 2025, and drove nearly 19% of the entire Prime Day beauty search lift.
• Two ingredient-led skincare brands broke into the overall top 10 best-selling beauty brands for the first time at Prime Day 2026: Anua and The Ordinary.
• Value beauty found an opening in hair care. Native Coconut & Vanilla Shampoo and Conditioner Set claimed the #1 spot, displacing Olaplex, which held the position last year.
• Men's hair health is now a dominant search story. Minoxidil for men was the #1 branded search term in hair care during Prime Day 2026, pulling 1.21 million monthly Amazon searches YTD, up 23.5% from last year.
• Eyes led makeup this Prime Day. Six of the top 10 best-selling makeup products were eye products, with mascara the #1 non-branded search term and lash clusters the #2, pulling 1.4 million and 1.79 million monthly Amazon searches respectively.
• Tarte Cosmetics placed two mascaras in the overall beauty top 10 and a concealer in the makeup top 10 — three products across two top 10s in two different formats, the broadest single-brand product presence of any makeup brand this Prime Day.
• Sol de Janeiro's Cheirosa 62 claimed the #1 best-selling fragrance on Amazon for the third consecutive Prime Day, placing two products in both the fragrance and overall beauty top 10 simultaneously.
• Men's fragrance owned the Prime Day leaderboard. Nautica, Afnan, and RASASI claimed 3 of the top 10 fragrance best sellers, up from just 1 in 2025, a shift that tracks a global category growing nearly 9% annually, with 62% of men aged 25-40 now calling fragrance a daily essential.

Why did some brands win while others watched?

Prime Day 2026 was harvest time, not planting time. The winners planted in the weeks and months before the event, building demand off Amazon and investing in search visibility, then harvested on day one when traffic peaked.

• Bidding wars got brutal: some category cost per click rates hit $60 during the event.
• AI-referred traffic jumped 89% YoY and converted 40% better than email or paid search.
• Brands that waited for traffic to come to them watched it go somewhere else.

"Prime Day 2026 reinforced that the cost of growth on Amazon continues to rise. With U.S. e-commerce sales surpassing $26 billion during the event, brands faced higher advertising costs, greater promotional intensity, and increased pressure on margins. The opportunity for the rest of 2026 isn't simply to spend more, it's to spend smarter, allocating capital toward highest-return products and operating Amazon as an integrated business rather than a collection of disconnected functions. Efficiency has become one of the most durable competitive advantages in today's marketplace." —Karan Raturi, Chief Operating Officer at Market Defense

Some brands already found that balance during Prime Day 2026.

"A big takeaway from this Prime Day was that momentum compounds — brands that came into June having built consistent growth through Spring translated that baseline into something remarkable: doubling or even tripling their pre-event growth rate.  That kind of amplification doesn't happen by accident.  What separated the winning brands was how they prioritized the event, focused discounts on hero skus at the same depth or deeper than last year — at a minimum of 25% off -- and leveraged an omni-channel approach prior and during the event.  At Market Defense, we worked with our brands on TikTok shop, influencer and affiliate marketing programs that delivered 7-10X ROAS, email, social and PR tactics that drive discovery and demand in the run up to and during Prime Day.  60% of our entire portfolio activated some form of off-Amazon marketing for the event.  Building the right omni-channel strategy is the right foundation for our ads team to build upon – delivering a boost in ad sales, more efficiently, without overbidding and keeping TACOS in check on par with last year." — Amy Rudgard, SVP, Client Strategy at Market Defense

The full findings, category by category, are available now in Market Defense's complete "THE BEAUTY POWER PLAYERS: Amazon Prime Day June 2026 Report": Amazon Prime Day June 2026 Report"

About Market Defense

Market Defense is a leading digital commerce platform and commerce media agency, helping the world's most ambitious consumer brands accelerate growth across today's most important marketplaces and digital commerce channels. As a strategic growth partner, the company delivers seamlessly connected marketplace operations, retail media, paid media, social commerce, influencer marketing, and full-funnel growth solutions across Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart, Google, Meta, and other leading commerce platforms. With a global operating model spanning every major commerce region, Market Defense enables brands to launch, scale, and optimize their marketplace businesses through a single, integrated partner.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Seattle, Market Defense and its subsidiaries partner with over 100 of the industry's most recognized and fastest-growing brands, including SLIP, Guthy-Renker, Davines, Lattafa, Phlur, Neal's Yard Remedies, Donnamax, Warner Bros., Grown Alchemist, and Viking Culinary. By combining deep marketplace expertise, proprietary technology, and data-driven execution, Market Defense enables brands to unlock sustainable, profitable growth while delivering a seamless consumer experience across every stage of the digital commerce journey.

Commerce, seamlessly connected.

For more information about Market Defense and its suite of services, visit https://marketdefense.com/

Media Contact: Kayla Clayton
Director, Enterprise Marketing
Kayla.Clayton@marketdefense.com

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SOURCE Market Defense LLC