What AI Reveals About Beauty’s Everyday Essential: Lip Balm

Trends Agency

Lip balm is one of beauty’s most popular products, purchased frequently and across age groups and geographies. But behind that everyday appeal lies a competitive category where small shifts in price, format, or positioning can determine who captures share.

AI-driven data is starting to give brands a sharper view of this market. By tracking SKU-level performance across retailers, platforms like Daash Intelligence can monitor performance on a weekly cadence, highlighting not just who is winning, but why. For a category as fast-moving as lip balm, that visibility matters.

Take pricing as an example. Across retailers, the sweet spot for lip balms sits between $24 and $26. At Sephora, the category centers around a $26 median, while at Credo, it skews slightly higher with a $27 median. These differences shape where new entrants can position themselves and whether to compete on accessibility or lean into prestige.

Brand performance adds another layer. Summer Fridays’ Lip Butter Balm remains one of the category’s strongest performers, showing the power of a single hero SKU aligned with the right consumer signals.

AI allows teams to go deeper than topline numbers. Category-level analysis shows where performance clusters by retailer and price tier, helping brands see where white space remains in the market. It also reveals which products overperform in one channel but lag in another, guiding smarter distribution and innovation decisions.

That same data has uncovered an emerging opportunity: tinted balms.

AI analysis identified a growing gap for multi-use tinted balms that work across lips, cheeks, and eyes. The strongest demand signals point to universally flattering pink tones, a consistent driver of category growth across retailers. With consumers gravitating toward hybrid formats and multi-purpose products, tinted balms sit at the intersection of skincare and color, a natural evolution of the category.

For instance, Daash data informed the development of GNTL’s Skin Balm, a multipurpose, facial-grade balm that hydrates, seals in moisture, and delivers a soft wash of color. Its hero shade, Universal Flush, a buildable warm rosy-pink with soft berry undertones, is designed to flatter all skin tones. Priced in the $24 to $26 range, it directly aligns with category sweet spots while addressing the white space in performance and positioning.

The lip balm category shows how even established staples can offer valuable lessons for growth and innovation. By mapping category elasticity, ingredient signals, and channel dynamics, AI helps brands anticipate where similar behaviors might emerge in adjacent spaces: from skincare hybrids to seasonal treatments.

With AI, these insights surface faster, helping brands anticipate shifts, refine positioning, and shape the next wave of beauty innovation.

Daash is a new, next generation commerce intelligence platform for the prestige beauty, personal care, and health & wellness industries. Think traditional intelligence tools but without the frustrating limitations. We’re enabling leading brands to track and understand the sales performance of competitor’s products and SKUs within brick & mortar retailers, including exclusive brands and products.