La Roche-Posay and Rhode have been revealed as the fastest growing beauty brands across Instagram and TikTok in May.
The L’Oréal-owned dermatologist-led skin care and e.l.f. Beauty-owned cosmetics brand, founded by Hailey Bieber in 2022, hit big across social media through a combination of organic posting and targeted influencer seeding while taking contrasting approaches, according to social-first marketing agency Socially Powerful’s first edition of its Beauty Brand Global Social Index.
The monthly report tracks 50 of the world's leading beauty brands, including Elemis, NARS Cosmetics and Rare Beauty, across Instagram and TikTok, scoring each out of 100 across four criteria: brand presence, partnership power, partnership effectiveness, and earned love.
“Rhode and La Roche-Posay’s growth in May 2026 appears to have been driven by two very different strategies: Rhode converted cultural relevance and community affinity into engagement, while La Roche-Posay scaled trust and education through creator partnerships,” James Hacking, founder of Socially Powerful, told Cosmetics Business.
“Both brands benefited from creator ecosystems, but the role creators played was fundamentally different.
“Rhode's growth was overwhelmingly organic.
“Only about 10% of the brand’s creator posts were paid; the rest were unpaid, seeded content from a long tail of several hundred mostly micro and mid-sized creators.
“The brand’s own account stayed lean but highly viral.
“One of the brand’s biggest moments was an unpaid TikTok from creator @cloeweaks with just 25,000 followers that drew over 400,000 engagements.
“Earned advocacy at scale, not spend, did the heavy lifting.”
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As for La Roche-Posay, Hacking explained how the brand “ran an always-on, majority paid creator engine, with around 60 to 65% of its creator posts sponsored, weighted toward dermatology-focused content.
“The brand ran a broad creator programme, leaning heavily on mi
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