For decades, much of India’s beauty market was built around a singular aspiration: lighter skin. Nicole Tan, Asia Pacific president and chief executive of Japan’s Shiseido, is arriving at a different moment – one with 28 states, countless skin tones and an increasingly confident consumer unwilling to fit a single definition of beauty.“Diversity is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of India. This is the highest level of diversity I’ve seen across any of our markets,” she said.For Shiseido, India’s opportunity lies precisely in the fact that the market has moved beyond one beauty ideal, where fairness and whitening products dominated consumer conversations for decades.“Right now, women feel more comfortable and more confident to embrace their diversity, their individuality, their self-expression, and that is a goldmine to tap into the Indian consumer,” she told ET in an exclusive interview. “I’m very happy to see the market growing this way because there is no one homogeneous view of what constitutes beauty.”D2C reshape beautyThe shift comes as India is becoming an increasingly important market for global beauty companies, even as a fast-growing crop of digital-first direct-to-consumer, or D2C, brands change the way consumers discover, evaluate and buy products.Social media and e-commerce have helped create a more ingredient-conscious consumer, while D2C brands have built businesses around formulations and ingredients at price points often well below those of international prestige labels.Tan said this growing awareness was creating a more demanding consumer, but that did not necessarily undermine the case for premium beauty.“There’s formulations, there’s innovation, and there’s safety,” she said. “When you put A and B together and you cook it in the lab, you yield different results depending on the process, depending on the innovation and the science that goes behind it, as well as the rigorous testing that comes through it.”For Shiseido, the challenge is building a business across what Tan describes as “28 different Indias”, spanning different cultures, climates, consumer behaviours and skin tones.“So that diversity and that richness really stands out for India,” Tan said, adding that diversity also makes localisation necessary, even for global brands selling internationally standardised products.Long-term India potentialShiseido, which entered India in 2001, has stepped up its presence in recent years, launching makeup brand Nars in October 2023, and now introducing sunscreen brand Anessa. Tan said the prestige end of India’s beauty market was expanding faster than the broader beauty and personal-care sector.“It’s definitely coming off a lower base, but growing at a very fast rate,” she said.India’s vast geography and evolving organised retail infrastructure have also made e-commerce particularly important.“India is probably one of the markets that index very highly on e-commerce overall,” Tan said. “It’s because the geography is extremely vast, right? Number two is that organized retail has still been evolving in this market, right?”The company currently imports all the products it sells in India and has no immediate or medium-term plans to set up manufacturing in the country.Rivals including Beiersdorf, Unilever, L’Oréal SA and Estee Lauder, among the world’s largest cosmetics companies, have also identified India as a key growth driver, citing the country’s population and growing affinity for beauty products.“We do believe that India is not a short-term play, with its diversity and its complexity, and the market still emerging and developing,” Tan said. “So, it is about how do we continue building a strategy for the mid and long term, and to grow as the market evolves.”In hindsight, she said, the company could have accelerated localisation earlier. Shiseido signed actor Tamannaah Bhatia as a local spokesperson, an exception to the brand’s approach in several markets.“If I had an option, I would probably do this a little bit earlier to bring that relevance and that communication to consumers.”