The days of just offering a gift with purchase are long gone. In 2024's competitive industry, there's Ulta's 21 Days of Beauty, Sephora's Saving Event and Amazon Prime Day among others, while a handful of brands are even trying to bring China's Singles' Day to the U.S.

In the case of , its approach to promotions during the holiday season is tailoring to different customers.

"We continue to think about the diverse group of consumers who are shopping with us to ensure we have offerings that fit their needs," said Emeline Berlind, senior vice president, general manager, loyalty at Sephora. "For example, we have our beauty enthusiasts searching for our exclusive holiday gift sets with unbeatable value, and our most engaged Beauty Insider members shopping our Sephora Savings Event, which just wrapped up in November with our biggest year yet. Lastly, our holiday shoppers who are looking for the gifts of the season can feel confident that they will find something perfect at Sephora via surprise and delight moments."

But does all this mean that beauty is more promotional this year?

Not necessarily, say experts, although one trend is crystal clear: Consumers are becoming more trained to wait for a promotion than ever before -- unless they're shopping for fragrance.

"It's such a question on everyone's mind right now, and I think there's a mix," said Cassie Cowman, a cofounder of View From 32, a beauty consultancy that works with both founders and investors, who added that there's also a perception of promotionality.

While she's seen some brands and retailers go earlier than usual with their promotions this holiday season to try to mitigate any risk, she is also seeing others being much louder about their promotions. The latter, though, doesn't mean they are necessarily more promotional than recent years.

"The brands and retailers are promoting the sales like never before," she said "For example, during Prime Day and during the recent Sephora Beauty Insider sale, you could not open social media without a creator promoting the sale. When is it happening? What's the discount? What should you buy? So while the actual days of promotion or discount amount was not necessarily different, there was just this non-stop chatter around the promotion. We just haven't seen that to this level in the past before."

Part of the reason for this is increased competition from the likes of Amazon and TikTok Shop, which have over the past year doubled down on beauty and appear to be on a mission to gain market share. The latter is understood to shoulder some of the discounts of brand sales on its platform. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

Whether there are in fact more promotions across the board this year compared to previous years is hard to decipher, according to Oliver Chen, a retail analyst at TD Cowen, "because the loyalty programs are very healthy ways to offer promotions."

But what can be tracked is what consumers are buying.

While early Black Friday data was not available at press time, Circana has seen an increase in terms of the percentage of units that are sold on promotion across all categories in prestige beauty, with approximately 29 percent of sales sold on promotion in the first nine months of 2024, up from 27 percent during the same period a year earlier.

"All it means is that consumers are purchasing more items on promotion," said Larissa Jensen, senior vice president of beauty and industry adviser, Circana. "What that is indicative of potentially is this consumer searching for value to a degree in these different categories."

The exception has been fragrance, the bright spot of beauty, where Circana is seeing a decline in the percent of units sold on promotion.

"Fragrance is actually growing the fastest of all of the beauty categories right now," Jensen added. "Consumers are not buying as many units on promotion, because they know what they want. If those items aren't on promotion at the time, then they're going to buy those items anyway."

The average promoted discount of the prestige beauty units sold on promotion has dipped from 22 percent to 20 percent over the past five years, according to Circana.

NielsenIQ's third-quarter 2024 data shows that promotional levels are trending up in mass retail too, with 22 percent of all beauty and personal care products sold on promotion, in terms of dollar spend. Average prices have come down in third-quarter 2024 vs second-quarter 2024, though pricing does remain higher than 2023 levels.

"We're starting to see consumers looking for deals, and being more price sensitive," said Anna Mayo, vice president for NielsenIQ's Beauty Vertical. "Consumers are having to make tough choices due to continued inflation. It's disproportionately the younger, lower income and more diverse consumers that are having to make these tradeoffs."

But while this showed consumers were buying more units on sale, promotions by retailers do not always have the desired effect and consumers are sensitive to marketing and how items are displayed.

During Ulta's most recent earnings call, CEO Dave Kimbell told analysts that the retailer has become more promotional amid the normalization of the beauty category from sky-high levels, but incremental promotions layered on top of its Big Summer Beauty Sale and other programs did not deliver the expected sales lift during its second quarter.

"These offers drove strong sales and traffic across our digital platforms, but did not deliver the expected incrementality in stores," he said. "The increased frequency of offers combined with the introduction of new offer structures put pressure on average selling price without activating incremental purchases in stores."

In August, Bath & Body Works former president Julie Rosen said that its semiannual sale "did not perform to our expectations." In particular, she noted that store presentation and marketing did not initially resonate with our customers.

Cowman said that the logic and strategy has always been that incentivizing consumers should come through loyalty programs plus a few meaningful promotions, as well as driving value through things like gift sets.

"Clients are less excited with samples or other tokens and are being more demanding, which is another element putting pressure on promo (i.e. trading loyalty points for discounts). Couple that with macro trends and we are in a slightly precarious position," she said.