Place your beauty predictions

If you haven’t heard of Polymarket or Kalshi, let me explain. These are sites where you can place a bet on real-world outcomes, like an election, a football game, earnings calls, or even Taylor Swift’s next move. When I first heard about them, I was skeptical. Sounds like gambling? Yes, you can win big if you choose correctly, but unlike a casino where the “house” always wins, these platforms stay neutral and generate transaction fees. They act like Wall Street, collecting fees for placing bets on companies. Turns out, more people watch the tickers to see what happens vs. actually placing bets. Some are saying this is a new form of media. It’s emerging and growing fast.

I was curious about whether there were any bets being placed in the beauty space. All that came up on Kalshi: What Ulta will say in its next earnings call, with possible outcomes like “tariff,” “Space NK,” or “luxury.” Seemed like a lame bet to me.

Naturally, I started wondering: Why doesn’t beauty have its own prediction market? We are one of the most trend-driven, gossip-fueled, data-rich industries in the world. The industry is somewhat predictable because almost every category has had a boom and a softening cycle. I know this because I’ve been tracking it for over 20 years. So, since there isn’t a formal beauty prediction market, I thought I’d start one:

All bets aside, I think it’s important that the beauty industry stays on top of the trends in technology, as start-ups like Polymarket and Kalshi demonstrate new ways to capture new markets. Some investors are saying the TAM (total addressable market) is HUGE, and it’s true, if you can bet on anything, it’s infinite.

Silicon Valley has been eating up traditional industries for quite some time: think Amazon for retail, or Google and Meta for Madison Avenue advertising. It’s only a matter of time until legacy beauty gets disrupted by a start-up no one saw coming. If you are Sephora, Ulta, Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, P&G, or Unilever, it’s worth keeping up, because I’m guessing that back in 2007, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Disney weren’t thinking about a nerdy streamer called Netflix.