Antiaging skin-care product sales up 71percent since 2000

• 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.