Still, supplements have been a hard pill for beauty specialty retailers to swallow. Now, Sephora is spitting them out. Last week, The Business of Fashion broke the news that the beauty specialty retailer is sunsetting the supplement category. Currently, Sephora sells supplements from Nutrafol, Vegamour, HigherDose, Moon Juice and The Nue Co. The chain expanded its wellness universe in 2022 to sexual wellness, but it appears to be reversing course there, too, with products from sexual wellness brands Maude and Smilemakers being removed from its website.

Sephora’s latest wellness retraction isn’t the only evidence of the trouble it’s had in the category. In the 2010s, it hopped onto the beauty ingestible train early by bringing on brands such as Hum Nutrition, The Beauty Chef and WelleCo, but those brands later disappeared from its selection. Hum Nutrition shifted to the mass market.

While Sephora is retreating from wellness again, its beauty specialty rival Ulta Beauty is ambitiously pursuing it with the chain-wide expansion of its wellness assortment called The Wellness Shop. Ulta has aggressively onboarded hot supplement brands this year such as Sakara, Armra, Cure Hydration, Ritual, Apothékary and Bird&Be, and made wellness a focus of its online marketplace curation. The retailer is betting it can grab a slice of a global wellness economy the Global Wellness Institute estimates at $6.8 trillion today and nearly $10 trillion by 2029.

So, why is Sephora abandoning the booming category? For the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we asked nine industry insiders, including retail experts, wellness entrepreneurs and investors, about where Sephora’s supplement gambit went astray, what other retailers can learn and why most of them are still bullish about wellness at retail.