Walk into a Sephora cosmetics store anywhere, and you'll be bombarded with slickly packaged products promising to make you look radiant, smell good and feel gorgeous.
No, stretch marks haven't suddenly become big business.
But thanks in part to aggressive ads that proclaim it "Better than Botox?," the scientific-sounding StriVectin-SD has become the hottest thing in the war on wrinkles--a booming industry that's generating billions of dollars for dermatologists, cosmetics firms and, yes, retailers like Sephora.
Global retail sales of antiaging skin-care products--up 71% since 2000--are rising faster than any other segment of the skin-care market, according to Euromonitor, a market researcher, hitting $9.9 billion last year.
StriVectin is either the latest fad in that movement or an antiaging silver bullet, depending on whom you ask.
Clearly, for every vain soul who has undergone a dermatological procedure, there are thousands more as concerned about wrinkles but squeamish about needles.
In the past year, nearly every beauty brand, upscale and downmarket, has introduced a new antiaging skin cream--Estée Lauder's Perfectionist (CP+), Olay's Regenerist Perfecting Cream and Avon's Anew Clinical Line and Wrinkle Corrector, to name a few.
"We've been on the antiaging track for a long time, even before StriVectin came along," says Estée Lauder's Peter Lichtenthal, the brand's senior marketing vice president.
Klein-Becker stumbled on StriVectin's effect on fine facial lines by accident back in 2002, when the company started testing its new stretch-mark cream.
Louis Rinaldi, head of Klein-Becker's new product acquisitions, counters that StriVectin's particular concentration of those compounds and the inclusion of a certain botanical extract make it more effective.
There is competition from alleged knock-off brands, which so far has prompted the firm to file 16 trademark-infringement suits in federal court.
At the same time, other cosmetics competitors have jumped on the opportunity to compare themselves to Botox.