Reddit is best known as a forum for discussing how to retire in your thirties, trade conspiracy theories about medical school being a psyop, and gossip about which influencer is taking a GLP-1 but not admitting it. It is, in other words, not just a place for the extremely online to gather, but has earned a reputation for being a safe space for toxic thoughts to flourish.
But this morning the platform waded into the bright world of beauty by releasing The People’s Beauty Index, a survey conducted over two years (from July 2024 to June 2026) that used their AI-based Community Intelligence insights tool to identify posting patterns and analyze conversations on the platform. Reddit has over 1,000 beauty-based communities—the obvious sub-Reddits such as r/MakeupAddiction, r/Makeup, r/Perfumes are hugely popular, as are more niche communities, including r/ProjectPan, r/ShortyNails, r/AsianBeauty, r/RandomActsofMakeup, and r/bald. Perhaps you’re wondering, why beauty? What Reddit is trying to get across is not just that talk of lipstick, cheek filler, and curly-hair routines occur in microcommunities on their site, but rather, that their study reveals a great deal about the beauty industry, which generated about $440 billion in global spending in 2024. (Advance Publications is a major shareholder of Reddit and owns Condé Nast, Vanity Fair’s parent company.)
At a time when the internet has become a parade of AI-slop recommendations, and influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack are being paid to push the same products and trends, it feels increasingly difficult to know what is worth buying and whose taste to trust. With this study, Reddit is essentially arguing they’re the future of nuanced recommendations and niche communities, because the company’s DNA is rooted in people sharing products and procedures they’ve actually tried. Beyond the trends the platform quantifies—for example, r/AsianBeauty reaching almost 1 million views of conversations about sunscreen alone; surgery-related searches being down 40% in r/HoodedEyes; r/bald community experiencing a 467% increase year over year—Reddit wants to pinpoint the larger cultural forces driving these trends. The story that The People’s Beauty Index tells about the industry is that diversity is foundational, hyperlocal recommendations are necessary, and Reddit users see themselves as guides, not aspirational avatars or marketers.
Another core insight is that users want to feel they can be creative and not pressured to get the makeup-artist look perfect. Conversations about experimental looks and playing around (think fanciful and Euphoria-inspired) increased close to 400%, while those about the “no-makeup makeup” look (à la Hailey Bieber or Gwyneth Paltrow) declined 81% year over year. The trend cycle in beauty is rapid, but there’s not one identifiable aesthetic dominating the present moment.
This survey might not be a simple act of benevolence from Reddit. They are subtly positing that their platform is one of the last places on the internet where money isn’t really changing hands. As a company, they are betting big on that. “They are doing this because they’re trying to become an insights company. Because of the ease of buying beauty online, everyone wants to get into beauty insights and data,” says Lily Twelftree, who is a beauty consultant and founder of Barefaced Media. Beauty is a crowded market, and companies are highly competitive because customer loyalty is hard to command. One of the joys of shopping for lipstick, for example, is that there are countless offerings and new launches to add to one’s collection. That doesn’t always encourage repeat purchases. So beauty conglomerates and retailers need to refine their offerings. There are consulting and data companies that publish on consumer beauty trends and charge for it. But Reddit’s conversations are open to anyone.
