The Amazon Colour Cosmetics Shelf: 70 Brands, ₹287.5 Crore, and What Happened to SUGAR

A kajal is now the brand

SUGAR Cosmetics and SUGAR POP hold 1.3% of this shelf between them, across 14 listings, and 12,800 of their 13,400 monthly units are kajal and eyeliner. The company ranks 13th.

The lipstick business it was built on does not appear. SUGAR’s own catalogue carries 88 lip products out of 387, and not one of them reaches the top 700 listings on this shelf by revenue. They are still listed and still selling; they sell too little to rank. A brand known for lipstick is earning its Amazon revenue from eye pencils.

That is worth separating from a judgement about the company. This is one shelf, on one platform, on one day. SUGAR sells through Nykaa, Purplle, Myntra, quick commerce, general trade and its own store, and none of that is visible here. What this measures is the position, not the business.

The brand holding that position launched in March 2024

Staze, from Honasa, is already 3.5× the size of SUGAR and SUGAR POP combined — ₹13.4 crore against ₹3.8 crore, from 17 listings against 14. It is two and a half years old. Honasa, which also owns Mamaearth, now holds 6.7% of this shelf across two brands.

So the shelf is not closed to new entrants. It closed on this one. That distinction matters if you are weighing a launch here: the barrier is not incumbency, because the fastest-arriving brand on the shelf is younger than most of the brands it passed.

Who holds the shelf

Multinationals hold 43.5% of this shelf, and Maybelline alone holds 23.6% of it from 108 listings. That is the widest gap between foreign and Indian ownership in any beauty shelf we have measured. On sunscreen, Indian D2C holds 51.5% and multinationals 18.1%; here the ranking is reversed.

Indian D2C still holds a real 33.3% across 25 brands, led by MARS Cosmetics at ₹30.8 crore, which ranks third overall and ahead of every Indian D2C name better known than it. The 25 brands in the “Others” row are sellers we could not confirm as independent or as owned by a larger parent, so they sit in their own row rather than being guessed into one.

The leaderboard

Highlighted rows are Indian D2C brands. GMV is derived: Amazon's published units-per-month multiplied by current selling price, annualised. It is a floor, for the reasons set out in the method section.

The top three take 46.8% between them. That is more concentrated than sunscreen at 22.1%, less than baby skincare at 58.5%, and well short of face serums at 74%.

There is no price per gram on this shelf

Every other beauty shelf we publish carries a ₹/100ml column. This one cannot. We measured a per-unit price on 0 of 700 product pages — a lipstick is 3.5g and a kajal 0.35g, and Amazon normalises neither. So brands here are compared on ticket price, which flatters the larger format and is a genuinely weaker comparison than the one we can run on sunscreen or serums.

Median product price runs from ₹80 (POND’S) to ₹1,500 (Daily Life Forever52), and the median across all 70 brands is ₹333.

Discount posture separates the shelf far more clearly than price does. Insight Cosmetics holds price at a median 5% while Maybelline runs 40%, so the largest brand on the shelf is also among the deepest discounters on it. A brand whose median product is discounted by half is not promoting: that is its price, and the MRP exists to make it look like a saving.

Both names above carry at least five listings. Twenty-three of these 70 brands have exactly one, and a single listing is an anecdote rather than a pricing posture, so the comparison is drawn only across brands with a real presence on the shelf.

Method, and what this is not

This shelf was defined category-first. We took six pinned Amazon searches — lipstick, liquid lipstick, lip gloss, kajal, eyeliner and foundation makeup — three pages each, and harvested 1,978 distinct organic products. The 700 highest-revenue products were then opened individually to verify each brand from Amazon's own "Visit the … Store" link and to read the buy-box price. The pinned query list is the shelf definition: change it and you have measured a different shelf. This list was built from SUGAR’s own catalogue first, because it is lip-led, and a generic “makeup” list would have buried the subject.

Price comes from the buy box, with a stated fallback. A shade is a separate listing, and the search tile publishes one price for a whole parent listing, so the tile is wrong for every shade but one. The product page publishes a buy-box price on 90% of listings and it is correct per shade. Where the buy box was absent — 70 listings — the tile price is used and is a parent-level approximation.

GMV is derived, and it is a floor. Units × current price × 12. Amazon publishes velocity in bands, so "10K+ bought in past month" counts as exactly 10,000, and products with no published figure count as zero. It is GMV, not revenue — what buyers pay before Amazon's commission, fulfilment and returns. No brand receives this number.

This shelf is a deeper floor than a skincare shelf. One lipstick can be twenty rows, one per shade, and velocity publishes on only some of them. Do not set this total against a skincare or apparel shelf, and do not compare it with our brand-first reports on serums and ayurvedic face care, which crawled complete brand catalogues. Both are floors; they are different floors.

Nothing was excluded. We expected the query list to drag in brushes, sponges and organiser bags. None ranked high enough to be verified, so the exclusion list for this shelf is empty — stated because naming the exclusion is part of defining the shelf, and “none” is an answer.

Amazon only. Colour cosmetics sell heavily through Nykaa, Purplle, Myntra, quick commerce and general trade, and through the brands’ own stores. Read this as the Amazon shelf, not as the Indian market.

Ownership is hand-classified, and 25 brands worth 4.1% are marked unverified rather than guessed. Review counts are excluded pending de-duplication across shade variants.

One shelf, one day — 5 September 2026. Every figure is reproducible from the same public pages. If you believe one is wrong, we would genuinely like to know which.

Related measurements

The full report, with the complete brand table and every caveat, is free to download as a PDF. We have measured the same way on sunscreen, where Indian D2C holds 51.5%, on baby skincare, where it holds 9.8%, and on face serums. The full library is at impuls8.com/reports.

This is one category on one platform on one day. The same method runs on any category you name, across Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, Myntra, Meesho, AJIO and quick commerce, and on a cycle so you can see what moved: who cut price, who launched, who quietly withdrew. If you sell in a category and want it measured with your brand and your competitors in it, that is what we do for enterprise clients.