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How would you plan Holiday 2026 differently if you knew exactly what your peers did in 2025?
That is the question this report is built to answer. Across 13 weeks of Q4 2025, ShopVision tracked every promotional move 25 of the most-watched beauty brands made: when they launched, how deep they went, which products they discounted, and the gift, loyalty, and email plays they used to pull the shopper in.
What follows is a peer-informed playbook. Not a set of prescriptions, but a clear picture of what the market actually did, so you can make sharper decisions about what you want to do next.
What's inside.
Executive Summary (p. 2). What 25 of the most-watched beauty brands actually did across Q4 2025, and what it means for your 2026 planning.
01: Black Friday timing (p. 3). One brand opened a full three weeks early. Another ran no sitewide discount at all. See who moved first, where the launch cluster really landed, and how long brands teased before going live.
02: Discount mechanics (p. 6). The market converged on one number, and no one went past it. See the rate more than half the set landed on, why the "up to 80%" headlines were not what they seemed, and whether members got a better price or just an earlier one.
03: Gift-with-purchase (p. 9). Beauty refused to choose between a discount and a gift. See how nearly the whole set stacked both on a single order, why most ran a rotating sequence rather than one gift, and the three jobs the gift was quietly doing.
04: Email cadence (p. 15). One brand sent 46 emails in two weeks, some barely three hours apart. See who flooded the inbox, who barely showed up, and how the busiest senders ran up to three campaigns in a single day.
05: Post-Christmas wave (p. 18). After Christmas, almost no one went dark. See the clearance depths that ran well past November's ceiling, the brands that used the week to launch new product instead, and why the last week of the year now rivals BFCM.