This article was originally published in the TikTok Beauty Trend Report. Receive your copy here
TikTok has transformed multiple industries, but when it comes to beauty – the second most popular industry on TikTok, after fashion – its impact has been seismic.
“TikTok has truly become the zeitgeist for virtually every industry, but there is little doubt that beauty is one that is leading the pack,” says Nick Vaus, Partner and Creative Director of brand design agency Free The Birds.
“Innovation is sparked across countless sectors of the industry, with trends ebbing and flowing at a dynamic rate,” he explains.
With over 1 billion monthly active users globally, TikTok has gained immense popularity among consumers.
US adults are currently spending more time on TikTok than any other social platform, according to Emarketer, averaging at 76 minutes a day for 18-24 year-olds, yet TikTok also leads time spent on social among older demographics too.
TikTok has a 31% higher engagement rate than Instagram, and an 18% edge over YouTube, according to Dash Hudson’s Cross-Channel Social Media Benchmark Report.
And as TikTok's popularity has grown, it has changed the trend landscape in beauty, bringing short-lived trends to consumers’ attention, while also driving long term trends that have propelled the beauty industry into new territories.
Whether it’s a video that triggers a product to go viral and sell out overnight, a small business that grows exponentially through a community-driven approach, or a brand that is able to reach a wider audience and bring them down the funnel to conversion, the breadth of TikTok’s impact is extraordinary.
Daniel Reid, Senior Insights Analyst at data analytics and marketing platform Similarweb says: “TikTok plays a significant role for the beauty industry, and this is only increasing.
“The sheer quantity of diverse content available on the platform, from beauty hauls to make-up tutorials and product reviews from ‘real users’, is driving interest in beauty products globally.
“This is even the case in markets where previously interest might not have been as strong, such as Pakistan, which has seen web traffic to beauty sites grow by over 38% in the last 12 months.”
According to TikTok research, 71% of beauty users say that the platform has a direct influence on the products they use in their beauty regime.
A quarter have bought a beauty product they have seen on TikTok, with the majority of these purchases being spontaneous.
The resulting ‘TikTok Made Me Buy It’ phenomenon – described by The Influence Agency as when consumers make a purchase due to giving in to “the magnetic influence of a viral TikTok product that was clearly powerful enough to reel [them] in” – has as much sway in the offline world as it does online.
TikTok Made Them Sell It
The news that Boots added TikTok sensation Made by Mitchell to its beauty line-up – on the back of other brands that have achieved virality on the platform, like Bubble and The Beauty Crop – shows that for high street retailers, the TikTok Made Me Buy It phenomenon has led to a Tik Tok Made Them Sell It strategy.
TikTok’s social commerce feature, TikTok Shop has also emerged as a rising star.
In the UK, over one million shoppers buy beauty through TikTok, representing 4.2% of the population, according to data from Kantar (52w/e 14 April 2024).
“This is a huge number if you think that this has all happened within the last 18 months. TikTok Shop is growing at 200%, making it the top growing online retailer this year,” says Maxwell.
“What’s worrying a lot of manufacturers and retailers is the fact that TikTok Shop has come from nothing to take 4% penetration, and it’s likely to continue to grow as more people engage with the platform.
“It could certainly be within the top retailers in the next year or so.”
The influence of TikTok on the engagement of young consumers in beauty and fragrance has also been significant.
Dana Kreutzer, Project Manager, Beauty and Wellbeing stated during Kline’s Beauty Trend Foresight 2024 and Beyond webinar: “Over 60% of teenagers are active on TikTok, and that’s a really important number.”
Not only are platforms such as TikTok normalising different aesthetic looks, they are also fostering a sense of community through virtual events, and Q&A sessions with industry experts, says Kreutzer.
She adds: “Brands not investing in these platforms are definitely risking missing out on direct consumer influence.”
Trends will be revealed in detail throughout August exclusively to subscribers, so don't miss out and subscribe.
Trend 1: Millionaire makers
Making millions of dollars a day might not be surprising for the likes of Taylor Swift, but when a small beauty business hits over US$1m in 24 hours, it’s extraordinary.
2024 has seen startups in the beauty industry set new records: just yesterday, P Louise became the first UK brand to make £1.5m in 12 hours on TikTok Shop Live.
The new record beats last month's $1m revenue generated by UK brand Made by Mitchell through a single live event, while Canvas Beauty became the first US business respectively to make $1m in one day on a TikTok Shop Live.
This is only the start of a trend that by November 2024 will see sales hike from $1m to $5m during a single live streaming event on TikTok Shop, according to forecasts in FastMoss’s 2024 Mid-Year TikTok Ecosystem Development White Paper.
But behind the success of these live events on TikTok Shop is a wider trend that has seen the whirlwind rise of fledgling start-ups to multi-million dollar beauty empires through the platform.
Trend 2: The top 3 influential TikTok trends on beauty
TikTok trends may move fast, but their influence on the beauty industry, and on consumers, endures.
“The influence of TikTok on beauty spans broad content styles and themes such as #beautytok as well as more specific trends and hacks,” says Camilla Craven, fractional CMO.
“Hacks have found their place on TikTok, with originality, freedom of expression, and trial coming to the forefront. In the make-up category, trends emerge very quickly, and for brands, it’s all about speed to become part of the movement,” she adds.
“While many trends disappear as quickly, some stand the test of time, especially those initiated by experts, such as underpainting by Mary Phillips.”
In this article, Cosmetics Business identifies three TikTok trends that have been the most influential on beauty, with analysis from top trend experts.
Trend 3: The most entertaining brands on TikTok
With 1.93 billion users, TikTok is seen as the home of entertainment and beauty has one of the highest entertainment scores and retention rates on the platform of all industries.
But entertaining content is not just about driving reach and awareness, it can also supercharge sales.
Dash Hudson and NielsenIQ have found a link between entertainment scores, engagement rates and brand sales.
“The brands that scored the highest entertainment scores and engagement rates on TikTok and Instagram experienced an average of 100.1% sales growth,” says Kate Kenner Archibald, CMO of Dash Hudson.
“Brands like Florence by Mills, Laneige US, Tatcha, Tree Hut and Kylie Cosmetics all experienced notable sales increases, indicating that prioritising entertaining content effectively drives ROI.”
This trend reveals which brands rank top as the most entertaining beauty players on TikTok.
Trend 4: 4 new TikTok trends predicted to soar in 2024
Predicting which new beauty trends will blow up on TikTok, and ultimately prove worthy of investing in, is no easy task for brands.
The trends in this article are backed by data intelligence platform Spate as not only demonstrating consistent or recent spikes in growth, their weekly views also indicate significant consumer awareness on TikTok – and high-to-very high levels of engagement among consumers.
From Sabrina Carpenter glam to keychain minis, Cosmetics Business highlights four trends to watch and reveals how brands can capitalise on them.
Trend 5: The future of TikTok
Bite-sized buzzy videos are ideal for captivating the ever-shortening attention spans of today’s audiences, and viewing that comes with striking visuals and trending audio finds its powerhouse platform in TikTok.
Snackable video is being hailed as the future of online marketing, but what if the future of short-form video is also a future without TikTok?
With the US passing legislation that will ban the video app in the country – unless TikTok’s parent company Bytedance divests ownership to another entity – this is a question that now hangs over the beauty industry, leaving brands to consider the impact of a potential ban on their businesses, and how to adjust their strategies in response.
In this article, social media experts predict the future of short-form video in the event of a TikTok ban, and share their advice on what beauty brands should do now.