Brands want community credibility, but on Reddit, the communities gaining influence are increasingly built around skepticism toward branded curation.
Reddit’s first beauty report, The People’s Beauty Index, released in August, stated that beauty consumers are prioritizing participation over prescriptive, top-down trends. As consumers shift from polished social feeds to platforms geared toward community-led discovery, Reddit is seeing an influx of people seeking candid advice, ingredient troubleshooting, and value-conscious recommendations. In subreddit communities like r/SkincareAddiction and r/MakeupAddiction, users trade product recommendations, troubleshoot routines, and share firsthand experiences, creating searchable archives of advice that increasingly shape how people interact with beauty.
Anna Haffner, Senior Director of Large Customer Sales at Reddit, believes beauty is personal and shaped by several factors, making one-size-fits-all advice limiting. “Reddit’s highly engaged beauty communities add context: people can see not just whether someone recommends a product, but also why it worked, what didn’t work, what the trade-offs were, and who it might be right for. That lived experience helps people build their own taste and confidence rather than simply follow the next prescribed look,” Haffner told BeautyMatter.
In 2025, Reddit reported a 76% year-over-year (YoY) increase in views on beauty conversations, and brands are responding. Dove built an entire campaign around unedited Reddit reviews of its Intensive Repair Serum Mask. SkinCeuticals hosted a mod-approved “ask me anything” (AMA) open Q&A on r/SkincareAddiction with dermatologist Dr. Scott Paviol. Sephora’s own skincare AMA succeeded specifically because in-house experts answered questions Redditors were already debating, rather than opting for a scripted broadcast.
But the credibility brands seek is hard to protect. A high number of Reddit threads accused Sephora of quietly deleting negative reviews on the r/Sephora subreddit to protect sales—the exact kind of filtering users look to the platform to escape.
With Sephora’s AMA and its review-deletion pattern on Reddit happening at the same time, can brands bank their Reddit credibility, or is it locked in on the platform?
Beauty consumers now flock to Reddit for personalized guidance from people who've already tested or experienced what they’re searching for.
According to Reddit, high-intent shopping discussions have increased 40% YoY, while 84% of its shoppers say they feel more confident in purchase decisions after researching on the platform. Meanwhile, McKinsey data shows that the share of consumers looking to influencers for beauty ideas declined from 33% in 2023 to 25% in 2025 in the US, China, and Europe, pointing to a shift away from creator-led discovery.
Niki McMorrough, co-founder of luxury marketing agency Affluent Audiences, audited more than 2,000 general luxury brands to quantify how discovery, search, and engagement differ across categories, and found that beauty brands are discussed on Reddit three times as much as the average luxury brand. McMorrough also found that “Only about 9% of beauty searches are people typing a brand name, against roughly 26% for other luxury categories. Beauty shoppers search for products, ingredients, and outcomes ("best serum for barrier repair," "vegan skincare," "at-home laser for wrinkles") more than they search for a beauty brand. They know what they want, often before they know who they want it from,” she said.
Now, instead of heading to Instagram to find out where their favorite influencer gets aesthetic touch-ups, people turn to communities like r/NYCBitchesWithTaste, where 8 of the top 10 searched terms were for beauty treatments, including Botox, microneedling, and lymphatic drainage.
And it’s not just beauty. With women accounting for more than 50% of Reddit users in both the US and the UK (where it’s the fastest-growing social media platform), Reddit’s also becoming a trusted source of firsthand information about women’s health. Reddit’s growing popularity is tied to a broader shift: People seek answers institutions fail to provide.
Part of that growth is due to the capitalization of AMA discussions: brands meeting Redditors where they already are.
Beauty brands across all categories now interact directly with consumers on Reddit, creating campaigns and activations that tap into the platform's growing consumer base.
SkinCeuticals’ 2025 AMA in r/SkincareAddiction now serves as an evergreen, searchable resource for shoppers. That same year, MAC asked users which discontinued products it should bring back, generating almost a thousand replies, while its AMA with Global Director of Makeup Artistry Romero Jennings drew more than six million views. Dove took it a step further with its r/eal reviews campaign, sending its Intensive Repair 10-in-1 Serum Hair Mask out to 50 Redditors for their honest take. The result? Over one billion impressions and hour-long queues at the brand’s New York City pop-up.
Emily Barfoot, the Head of Dove Hair & Skin US for Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing, told BeautyMatter that the company has championed real beauty for decades. “r/eal reviews extends that philosophy from representation to product experience, proving that in today's beauty landscape, authenticity isn't just a creative strategy; it's a business imperative,” she said.
“By putting real consumer experiences at the center, rather than polished brand messaging, we demonstrated transparency, reinforced trust in both the process and the product, and showed that credibility is increasingly earned, not declared,” she added.
2026 Attain data also found that Reddit shoppers generated 17% more lifetime value for personal care and beauty brands over the last five years, and spent 12% more on beauty than the average consumer, demonstrating how credibility converts. Yet none of that growth guarantees what happens next.
Reddit is leaning into shopping as consumers reshape how they discover beauty, search, ask, and validate information online.
During Shoptalk’s March 2026 event, Reddit introduced new tools that combine lifestyle imagery with shoppable product tiles to improve the Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) experience on the platform. Yet the experience won’t matter as much if Reddit’s discoverability declines.
As Reddit’s community-driven trust grows, new technological advancements threaten to shift the landscape once again. With LLM discovery becoming the default, brands are shifting their focus from ranking high on Google to being cited by AI. And the shift is making Reddit’s AI visibility volatile. In September 2025, Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations dropped from roughly 60% to 10% before recovering around April of this year. Later in August, it collapsed again to 0.52%. The platform is also gradually losing its share of citations in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.
“The more synthetic the internet feels, the more valuable real [voices] become,” Haffner said. “It’s an opportunity for brands to bring more honest human context into their marketing, whether it’s inviting people to tell them about their experiences with a product, or even bringing that commentary into their ad creative."
Sephora’s AMA on Reddit succeeded for the same reason its review-deletion damaged it: Users can tell the difference between a brand showing up honestly and one managing the narrative. A brand’s success on the open-discussion platform doesn’t inoculate it against future scrutiny.
Trust built on Reddit operates on a different, higher standard than on most social media platforms, where a single viral campaign can carry a reputation for years. Brands should approach participation as an open-ended relationship, not a one-time campaign, because it never stops being tested.
But where and how those conversations take place cannot be controlled. This is Reddit’s value, and its biggest challenge. A brand can enter the chat, but it can’t dictate the discussion. As beauty discovery becomes increasingly shaped by peer-to-peer recommendations, credibility becomes something companies can participate in, yet never fully own.
