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Reddit is best known as a forum for discussing how to retire in your thirties<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n But this morning the platform waded into the bright world of beauty by releasing The People\u2019s Beauty Index, a survey conducted over two years (from July 2024 to June 2026) that used their AI-based Community Intelligence insights tool<\/a> to identify posting patterns and analyze conversations on the platform. Reddit has over 1,000 beauty-based communities\u2014the obvious sub-Reddits such as r\/MakeupAddiction<\/a>, r\/Makeup,<\/a> r\/Perfumes<\/a> are hugely popular, as are more niche communities, including r\/ProjectPan,<\/a> r\/ShortyNails<\/a>, r\/AsianBeauty<\/a>, r\/RandomActsofMakeup<\/a>, and r\/bald<\/a>. Perhaps you\u2019re 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<\/a> in global spending in 2024. (Advance Publications is a major shareholder of Reddit and owns Cond\u00e9 Nast, Vanity Fair<\/em>\u2019s parent company.)<\/p>\n 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\u2019re the future of nuanced recommendations and niche communities, because the company\u2019s DNA is rooted in people sharing products and procedures they\u2019ve actually tried. Beyond the trends the platform quantifies\u2014for 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\u00a0467% increase year over year\u2014Reddit wants to pinpoint the larger cultural forces driving these trends. The story that The People\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>-inspired) increased close to 400%, while those about the \u201cno-makeup makeup\u201d look (\u00e0 la Hailey Bieber or Gwyneth Paltrow<\/a>) declined 81% year over year. The trend cycle in beauty is rapid, but there\u2019s not one identifiable aesthetic dominating the present moment.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t really changing hands. As a company, they are betting big on that. \u201cThey are doing this because they\u2019re trying to become an insights company. Because of the ease of buying beauty online, everyone wants to get into beauty insights and data,\u201d 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\u2019s collection. That doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s conversations are open to anyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n