Every month, various beauty industry analysts from The NPD Group write blogs about the latest trends being seen in beauty, based on the firm’s market information and insights. Through a partnership, Beauty Insider will publish NPD’s blog the day it’s posted to keep you in-the-know. Please see NPD’s latest post on holiday beauty sales.

While this holiday season has been somewhat of a disappointment for several industries thus far (including apparel, technology, sports and, yes, even the proverbial toy industry), beauty has stood out as a clear winner over the past few Holiday weeks.

In fact, weekly sales of makeup, skincare, and fragrance in the U.S. have been consistently strong since NPD began tracking the 2017 holiday season in early November. While the first week of November started out slow, with a 3 percent gain for beauty, Week Two experienced a 15 percent increase and Weeks Three and Four have seen beauty sales really take off, posting the strongest gains of all the industries NPD is tracking this holiday.

Digging deeper into the weeks, Week Two performance was driven by fragrance, specifically gift sets. Week Three was strong for makeup and skincare sets. Fragrance overall was soft in performance Week Three, but fragrance sets featuring home scents experienced a surge in sales. This is likely due to how these types of fragrance sets (typically candle and reed diffuser sets) are often merchandised and promoted in stores as popular hostess gifts as we head into the holiday party season. Speaking of holiday parties, lip gloss and false eyelashes – two beauty staples when glamming it up – were standout performers in Week Three as well. In Week Four, which included Black Friday, beauty grew a staggering 17 percent, led by makeup, followed by skincare, and then fragrance.

It’s clear to see how this new beauty holiday pecking order has established itself. Makeup has proven itself to be a fun and relatively low cost, highly giftable category over the past few holiday seasons with 2017 being no exception. And with skincare increasingly front and center during holiday as well, it remains to be seen how fragrance will fare with the other beauty categories competing so strongly for its critical holiday dollars.

Regardless of how the remainder of the holiday season pans out for each of the individual categories (don’t count fragrance out yet!), it’s safe to say that beauty has been a standout industry in 2017 – for holiday and throughout the entire year.

*Edited from the original version featured on NPD.com